From the Nov. 26, 1965 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

Magnificent as a roasted turkey is, it would be nothing, possibly the entire day of Thanksgiving would be nothing, without the small, tart, shining red cranberry. The turkey won’t taste right, the sweet potatoes would be wrong, the stuffing would be a miserable flop without that cheerful red berry.

The cranberry starts its life in a bog, which sounds like an unpleasant place except perhaps to a homesick Irishman. To acquaint herself more thoroughly with the life history of the cranberry, this reporter descended on the Island’s only cranberry grower, Manuel S. Duarte of Vineyard Haven.

Mr. Duarte explained that cranberry growing was only a hobby with him. “Some men,” he said “play golf, others go to barrooms. I go to my bogs. I also enjoy watching the ducks and geese around the ponds.” Like all hobbies, Mr. Duarte’s was acquired suddenly and without warning when Eben Bodfish, who felt he was too old to work a bog, decided to sell. Mr. Duarte said that “one day on the spur of the moment I bought it.” This six-acre bog is on the Lambert’s Cove Road. The following year Mr. Duarte bought a twenty-five-acre bog in West Tisbury. That was twenty-five years ago when cranberries were selling at $32 a barrel. Today they sell for $5 a barrel. It would appear from this that the cranberry alone is inflation proof.

Mr. Duarte explained that he had had to rebuild the bogs, which are 150 to 200 years old. The base of a bog is peat topped with a four-inch later of sand, into which the small plant is set. The plants are positioned in neat, even, criss-crossing rows and this growth spreads like hen-and-chickens forming a think ground cover.

The Vineyard once had many operating bogs as it did old farms, but the labor problems on the Island have prevented their continued operation. Nevertheless, the Island is great cranberry country. The largest bog, more than 300 acres, in the world is on Nantucket.

The berries are now picked by a machine which is guided through the bogs in the same direction every year so that the plants are combed only one way. The machine’s fingers comb through the vines, trimming them as it reaps the berries, which are then put in fifty-pound boxes. Mr. Duarte is particularly proud of his three-wheeled truck that tiptoes through the bogs on eight-inch airplane wheels to gather in the boxes. The truck deposits the boxes on the second floor of his small processing shed, where the berries are dumped into a hopper and cascade down to the floor below. Along their route, rather like an obstacle course, are a series of boards, when the berries hit these they either bounce or don’t bounce, depending on their condition. The bruised or dented berried just thud their way right straight to the awaiting box at the bottom, while the healthy hard berries, bouncing like the bubbles in champagne, hop onto two conveyor belts and are transported to a different set of boxes.

The small, or pie, berries don’t bounce as high as the others and they land in a different box, no doubt marked “pie berries.” There’s something very gay and appealing about all those healthy red berries bouncing around like contestants in a pinball machine, and the cranberry never seems to lose this gaiety but carries it all the way to the diningroom table.

Mr. Duarte says that he grows two kinds of berries, one called the “early black,” which is normal sized and darker, and another called the McFarlin, which is larger but tends to be a bit on the hollow side, After the berries have been culled and sorted, they are packed back in their fifty-pound boxes and freighted off to be processed in Onset.

To think of cranberries is to think of Ocean Spray, the people who do things to cranberries that transform them into sauces, juices (dietetic or fattening), jellies, and other turkey necessities. This company is a cooperative business, which a grower must join before he is able to sell to the cooperative.

They are paid for their berries on a quarterly basis and receive part of it in stock, both common and preferred, which pays four per cent. Ocean Spray now has seven plants, the farthest one being located in Wisconsin, where they reap their berries under water, and since their purchase of the Eatmore Company, they have become a monopoly.

Mr. Duarte said that with so much time being used to learn more about farming shellfish to foster year-round industry, it is a shame that the Island’s many bogs are not given a little more attention to put them all back into full operation.

“Besides,” he said, “I’ve had a lot of fun.”

It seems appropriate that Mr. Duarte is having fun with what seem to be happy berries, this reporter began to realize that the gaiety of Thanksgiving and Christmas would lack a great deal without the cherry red of the gay, bouncing little cranberry.

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com