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Photo courtesy Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum
Cranberry box label. In the 1920s cranberries were shipped to stores in boxes. Growers used labels on the boxes to distinguish their product and establish a reputation for quality. The labels became obsolete by the 1950s when cranberries began to be marketed as processed products and sold in small consumer-sized bags. Today these box labels are collectible. |
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Cranberry picking — a 100-year fall tradition on Cape Cod
The first chill winds of fall blew in last week and brought with them thoughts of picking wild cranberries in the damp valleys between the dunes. For over a hundred years picking cranberries has been a fall tradition on Cape Cod. Picking spots are closely guarded secrets, and if you wait too late in the season you may arrive to find someone else has harvested all the berries in your favorite spot.
Cranberries were an important part of early settlers diets because of their high vitamin C content. Cape Cod vessels carried cranberries all over the world since they stayed fresh on long trips and prevented scurvy. This and the limited production of wild plants made the berry a valuable commodity. So much so that in 1773 Provincetown passed a law regulating the harvesting of wild berries, “Any person ... found getting cranberrys before ye twentieth of September exceeding one quart should be liable to pay one dollar and have the berys taken away.”
When commercial cultivation began during the early 19th century, cranberries quickly became the most important agricultural product on Cape Cod. The industry produced money from what was once considered useless land.
There were a few commercial bogs in Provincetown, but the growing of cranberries never was as important here as in other towns on Cape Cod. Cranberry cultivation began in the 1840s in Provincetown, according to Cranberry Harvest, a history of cranberry growing in Massachusetts edited by Joseph Thomas for Spinner Publications, “Thomas Lothrop began cultivation in Provincetown about 1847. In 1855 he proposed to build a 70 acre bog at Shank Painter Pond, at a time when such large-scale thinking was unheard of. Lothrop never completely realized his goal, but he did arouse a great interest in cranberry cultivation on the lower Cape.
In Lothrop’s time, bogs filled almost every hollow between the dunes in Provincetown, but not a single acre of cultivated bog remained by 1950. With no brooks or streams to dam and unstable, shifting sand dunes, cranberry growing gave way to more lucrative livelihoods.” The remnants of some of these commercial bogs still produce berries today.
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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Oct 6th, 2005