For nearly a century, the Henry Fish Seed Company packinghouse stood on this site after being built in 1910 to replace a smaller facility, handling the yearly shipment of thousands of tons of lima beans, the crop that became the mainstay of Carpinteria Valley agriculture for more than seventy years. Carpinteria Valley was the first place in the United States to grow lima beans commercially. The bean, native to Guatemala, was little known in this country before 1865, but in the late 1860s Robert McAlister brought ten pounds of beans from a ship that had called at Callao in Peru, planted them in his garden, and produced such a successful yield that ranchers across the valley began sowing them as well. Henry Lewis later developed an improved strain marketed as the Lewis Common Lima, and Jefferson Crane helped introduce the bean to eastern markets after planting 160 acres in 1874 and enduring early financial losses while the new product slowly gained acceptance. By 1880, fifteen hundred tons of limas were being shipped from the valley by steamer from the wharf at Serena. The crop thrived in the valley's rich soil and foggy summers, which kept the beans from becoming too dry and cracking during threshing. Henry Fish, a local farmer and horticulturist, helped build the seed bean business after being commissioned to ship two hundred bushels, the beginning of the Henry Fish Seed Company. In 1903 his son, Henry Berrien Fish, discovered in one of the fields a bush-form plant with larger, finer pods, excellent flavor, and pods held high off the ground, making them less susceptible to mildew. In 1908 the W. Atlee Burpee Company bought the new bean and named it Fordhook, after Fordhook Farms in Pennsylvania. The popularity of this variety led to construction of the new packinghouse, where during harvest a well-organized workforce, including twenty or thirty women picking beans by hand from a moving conveyor belt after screening and blowing, ensured that only viable seed beans were kept. Lima beans remained one of the valley's main crops through the 1950s, serving seed, drying, and later green-bean production, and the fresh frozen Fordhook limas sold today are identified as the same bean Henry Fish perfected in the early twentieth century in Carpinteria.