“SWAMP YANKEES” AND THEIR CRANBERRIES
BY DON DOUCETTE
We can expect our first frost of the season very soon as thoughts of cranberry harvest prevail.
A news report this past week concerning the area cranberry harvest that the quality of cranberries this season are questionable i.e. possible rot and water damage due to a higher than usual water table during this past summer.
Our own Ten Mile River Watershed once supported small cottage industry cranberry bogs – modest damming along smaller farm streams afforded local farmsteads an option to the variety of farm products produced.
Our local “swamp yankee” farmers took advantage of every opportunity to keep the farm productive including swamp timbering during the freeze months and including ice cutting and storage along with sap sugaring. These pursuits augmented the usual varieties of vegetable-fruit production and animal husbandry. And including, specialized cottage industry trades.
Some local farmers during the early portion of our Industrial Revolution took to wood lathes during short days with cottage industry production of loom spindles made from iron-hard dogwood.
My own grandfather told stories of wagon loads of firewood rattling into New Bedford years ago from local outlying farms to help supply the energy needs of that famous seacoast city.
My grandmother was a home herbalist and natural healer – she was a midwife locally. She often dispatched my grandfather with instructions to pick certain plants at certain times all found in the woodlands, meadows and wetlands bordering Thurber Farm Brook and Twin Village Brook here in Attleboro.
Taunton, Berkely and Dighton, as examples, were modest seaports along the Taunton River as area farm products were collectively traded via coastal schooners to our active seaport cities aligned along the coast.
Life lessons personally observed here in Attleboro, a good “swamp yankee” was always innovative, resourceful and imaginative and…by all means, thrifty.
Life itself depended on these attributes.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”
Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook
Citizens of the Narragansett Basin