Sandwiches and such: The story of Cragg’s Box Lunch

Just in Time local history series

It’s a crisp February day in Lindsay more than 70 years ago. Train No. 93, Belleville-bound, waits in the Canadian National Railway’s Durham Street yards while passengers keep warm in the adjacent station. Across the way, at Cragg’s Box Lunch, the clock strikes noon as three denim-clad men stroll through the front door and take their places on stools by the lunch counter. They are veteran railroaders, all of them, and have been regulars at Cragg’s ever since it opened a few years back. Each of them orders a mini-meat pie and a cup of piping-hot coffee; one of them asks Mrs. Cragg when she will again be making her famous cake doughnuts.

As they eat, the railroad men talk among themselves about their collective wish for better benefits and higher wages. They agree that a strike is inevitable. While strained relations between management and employees on the CNR have left a bad taste in their mouths, Mary Cragg’s desserts and home-cooked meals have been nothing short of mouth watering and are eagerly anticipated before each shift. The CNR men aren’t the only ones who relish a meal at Cragg’s; travelling salesmen and individuals employed by Lindsay’s public works department are also frequent customers.

Not long after the Second World War (probably in 1946 or 1947), Earl and Mary Cragg purchased a small store on the northeast corner of Durham and William Streets from Mr. Noel Rivers for $7,000 and renovated it upstairs and down. Thus, was born Cragg’s Box Lunch, which for over a quarter of a century thereafter grew to become one of Lindsay’s culinary institutions.

Born in Cambray in 1904, Earl Cragg had a background in retail and was anxious to get back into that line of work after spending the war years in Toronto. Mary, seven years younger, originally hailed from Glenarm. While Earl operated a small grocery store on the premises, Mary dreamt of operating a catering business and lunch counter. The building opposite the railway station offered space for both, and business boomed through the 1950s and 1960s. (The eatery’s proximity to the CNR property was fortuitous, and Earl Cragg had a contract with the railway that had him providing food to emergency work train crews when they were called out on an unpredictable schedule.)

Cragg’s offered a variety of food services. Best remembered by railroaders like Ernie Rainbow, Wes Swinson, and Harvey Wallace, who frequented the restaurant, was the lunch counter. In addition to the aforementioned cake doughnuts and meat pies, the lunch counter also offered a smattering of sandwiches, pies, tarts, and milkshakes. “Each sandwich was cut diagonal, stacked, and wrapped in wax paper, prepackaged each morning and stored in the cooler, ready for sale,” recalls John Cragg, who as a young adult helped his parents with a multitude of tasks.

Among those tasks was handling the variety of take-out options offered by Mary Cragg. Due to space restrictions and municipal licensing rules, there was limited seating available inside Cragg’s Box Lunch, which made take-out a lucrative part of the business – and something much appreciated by hungry patrons passing through town by train. “I often took a large wicker basket full of food items to the station and walked through the passenger cars selling it – mostly the noon hour trains, but quite often the suppertime arrivals as well,” Cragg remembers.

On top of the take-out and in-house offerings, Cragg’s was famous for its catering. John Cragg remembers his mother providing a roast beef supper at the Victoria Park Armoury for up to 600 members of the Lindsay Kiwanis Club, and box lunches to some 200 Ministry of Lands & Forests personnel assembled at the provincial government building on Kent Street West. According to Cragg, these consisted of two sandwiches, a piece of pie, an apple or orange, and a small paper cup of coleslaw or pickles – all packed together with plastic utensils and a paper napkin in a cardboard container slightly smaller than a shoe box. Other catering contracts involved providing lunch or supper to local politicians and executives representing major Lindsay-area industrial concerns.

Whether a banquet fit for a king or something smaller and more intimate in Premier Leslie Frost’s dining room, all catering jobs involved a great deal of logistical planning. “Everything was prepared in the store’s small kitchen, then transported in our Pontiac station wagon, set up, served, cleaned up, reloaded in the car, and returned to the store for washing – which was usually my job,” says John Cragg.

Jean Green, Mary Cragg’s niece, remembers that the catering preparations were very much an all hands-on-deck affair. “My job would be buttering bread and passing it on to maybe Dad or my sister to add the filling,” she says. “I must add that, even when preparing for a large event, the sandwiches needed for the boxed lunches or over the counter sales also had to be prepared.”

Cragg’s Box Lunch closed in 1971, a year after Earl Cragg died of a heart attack. His widow, Mary, eventually retired to Edmonton and died there in 2001. The building once occupied by Cragg’s later became home to the much-loved Durham Café, carrying on a storied tradition of offering food and fellowship to locals and visitors alike.