Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 282, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1910 — Cranberries for Thanksgiving [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Cranberries for Thanksgiving

reported and cranberry growers have been so increasing their productive areas that despite the increase In demand, due to the country’s increase in population and other Influences, there continues to be year by year a pretty lavish supply of the crimson berries, and most seasons And them available at very reasonable Cranberries, like so many of the other good things of life, are distinctively American delicacies. To be sure, cranberries grow wild in some other quarters of the globe—for Instance In Europe, but It is only in- the United States that they have been cultivated as an article of food. Even here the growing of cranberries is confined largely to three states —Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin. How important an industry it Is may be surmised, however,

from the fact that the Cape Cod district in Massachusetts, the greatest cranberry region on the globe, sends to market as many as one-third of a million barrels of cranberries in a single season. The average person is wont to term all berry areas “patches,” but cranberries do not grow in patches but in bogs and. as may be sur-

od, much as raspberries o r strawberries are picked, and most Of the cranberry picking was done by women and children. The “Cranberry King” used to hire as many as 1,100 pickers on his great bogs on Cape Cod and the pickers, many of whom journeyed long distances, “camped out” on the bogs during the picking season. The past few

years, however, has witnessed a revolution. Now almost all cranberries are picked by the aid of machines, and because It is tiresome work manipulating these machines It has come About that most of the women and children have been forced out of the industry and the task is largely In the hands of men, the more skillful of whom receive from $3 to $5 per day. The picking machine most extensively used has the appearance of a huge wooden scoop, the bottom of which Is made up of a row of metal bars, tipped with sharp prongs and set close together. In operation this scoop is shoved with some considerable force Into the tangle of cranberry vines and their Is drawn upward and backward with the result that the vines which have been caught slip between the metal bars but leave the berries, which are too large to pass through the openings, as do the vines, and In consequence are stripped from

their stems and remain tn the scoop, whence they are transferred to the tray which each picker has close at hand. An expert picker with a machine will do the work of from half a dozen to a dozen hand pickers. The cranberries as picked on the bogs are placed in huge wooden boxes and transferred to a nearby frame building, where they are passed through a machine known as a “separator,” which takes out all the leaves, twigs and other foreign matter. Then they are sorted for the elimination of any bad or worm-eatep berries and finally are placed In barrels, which are hauled away to railroad yards to be loaded into cars to the tune of from 220_jp 240 barrels to the car, refrigerator cars being used exclusively. Up to the present time cranberries have oeen sold In bulk, but this year sees an Innovation in the appearance of evaporated cranberries, for which are claimed all the advantages of evaporated peaches or apples, and In the introduction of cranberries put up in pasteboard cartons. Bearing cranberry bogs of the most desirable kind cost from S6OO to $1,200 per acre, but in a bumper year a grower may get his money back the first year, and during the worst year the Industry has known in a decade most of the growers made from 10 to 15 per cent, on their Investment, and that, too, in spite of the fact that cranberries were so plentiful that they brought only $2 a barrel, whereas $5 to $7 a barrel is accounted an average price, and there have been years when a famine of cranberries sent the price up to $lO per barrel.