Barnstable History: Cranberry Farming
- attcorin
- Apr 10
- 1 min read
The landscape of Cape Cod was created in large part by the glaciers of many thousands of years ago. Some of the small ponds that were left behind evolved into cranberry bogs. Native Americans harvested wild cranberries and used them for food, medicine and as a fabric dye. European settlers then cultivated local cranberries, but commercial cranberry farming did not start in earnest until the early-mid 1800s.
Cranberries grow from April to November. Cranberry farming was hard work that was initially done by hand. Later, faster and more efficient methods were developed. In the early days, many of the workers were women and children:
In 1677 ten barrels of cranberries are reported to have been sent to King Charles II of England. By 1855, 197 acres of land in Barnstable County were used to grew cranberries. And by 1865, more than 1000 acres of cranberry bogs had been established in Barnstable County alone. At that time Barnstable contributed a third of the country’s cranberry supply!
The decline of the fishing and whaling industries in the mid-late 1800s also contributed to the growth of cranberry farming. Cape Cod fishermen turned their attention to improved methods of cultivating the crop, and switched their trade to farming.
In West Barnstable, the first small cranberry farms were developed on Hinckley Lane. When the industry became profitable, large areas of local swamps around No Bottom, Spruce and Sandy Hill Ponds were also developed into cranberry bogs:
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