Vineland Historical Society screens Seabrook Farms documentary at Landis Theater

Seabrook Farms was one of Cumberland County’s most unlikely company towns, a place where about 4,000 workers passed through at its peak and where roughly 2,500 Japanese Americans, along with Estonian and Latvian refugees, helped feed a booming frozen-food empire. That story was back in focus Sunday when the Vineland Historical & Antiquarian Society screened The Paradox of Seabrook Farms at the Landis Theater in downtown Vineland.

The screening took place at 2 p.m., with doors opening at noon and tickets priced at $15. The setting mattered nearly as much as the film. The Landis Theater at 830 E. Landis Ave. opened in March 1937, is an Art Deco landmark, seats about 750 in a typical theater configuration and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since Nov. 22, 2000. Bringing a documentary about preservation, displacement and community memory into a restored downtown theater gave the event a second layer of local meaning.

Helga Merits directed and produced the 85-minute documentary, which was released in 2024 and first premiered at the Levoy Theatre in Millville to a sold-out crowd of about 700 people. A later Levoy screening drew another audience of roughly 650, underscoring how deeply Seabrook’s history still resonates in South Jersey. Merits led the panel discussion after the film.

Public listings for the event also named Masaru Nakawatase, Gloria Kates and Helle-Mai Pärt Gawrylewski among the panel participants. John Seabrook, grandson of C.F. Seabrook and author of The Spinach King, was listed to attend and sign copies of his book. The mix of names tied the documentary not just to the Seabrook family, but to the people who have spent years preserving the site’s memory in Cumberland County and beyond.

That preservation work continues at the Seabrook Educational & Cultural Center in Upper Deerfield Township, where artifacts, oral histories and exhibits document the village’s unusual history. Rutgers exhibits and Densho scholarship have also helped place Seabrook Farms in the wider American story of wartime incarceration, labor recruitment and refugee resettlement. Sunday’s screening linked that past to a downtown landmark still fighting for recognition of its own.