Cape Cod Cranberry Culture

We are again staying in Harwich, a charming town on Cape Cod Nantucket Sound. While tourism is the main economic driver now, the cranberry played a vital role in its early economy.

The Monomoyick  and Nauset Native American communities used wild cranberries for food, medicine, and as a dye long before European settlers arrived. The Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how to make Pemmican using crushed wild cranberries mixed with dried meat and melted animal fat to create a high-protein winter survival ration (the original power bar), medicinal poultices to draw poison from arrow wounds, and vibrant red dyes for textiles and rugs.

Cranberries do best in bogs, low shallow bowls of acidic peat soil, where plenty of sand and water are available. The composition of a cranberry bog is unique and consists of four layers, clay, gravel, peat and sand in ascending order. Each performs an important function to the overall ability of the bog to thrive. By the turn of the 19th century, residents had staked out their bogs, or “Cranberry Yards,” and families would typically harvest their supplies of the berries from them.

Eventually, Harwich led the way to introducing the cranberry to the world by producing the first crop for commercial sale. n 1846, Captain Alvin Cahoon is credited with producing the first such crop from a bog near Pleasant Lake. The venture spread quickly, with others in other towns, counties and states planting their own bogs and producing their own crops for the growing markets.

At the turn of the 20th century, North Harwich became home to many Cape Verde people who first worked in the cranberry industry, and then became bog owners and prominent members of the Harwich community. Many Cape Verdeans were fishermen and farmers. As the whaling industry declined in the late 1800’s, the cranberry industry meant economic survival on Cape Cod provided a needed source of income to many families during the economically depressed decades following the Civil War.