Loading a train at 14-Acre Bog. Here’s a season when freight trains come before the passenger specials.
Ball Park? Yes; or more correctly, the Atwood Athletic Field. He built a baseball ground, picnic spot, and a few buildings there. Plenty active all summer, too. We’ll be up there shortly now.
Incidentally, it’s when we leave the Ball Park that the track swings east and south again to go down the opposite side of this reservoir, where the work train is now. It passes Sunset Vista, winds along the lower end of the reservoir, and finally enters Edaville yard where I pointed it out to you.
I guess we’re off again. Can you make it?
Isn’t Fourteen Acre a neat looking bog? Not all growers keep their bogs as neat and trim as Mr. Atwood does. Sure, it costs. There’s something satisfying in owning the finest cranberry plantation in the world. When the railroad’s completed and there’s some time to spare he intends to erect signs around the bogs and at different points of interest, explaining about cranberry culture, history, production, and how bogs are built and cared for. Like a self-conducted tour your ride’ll be then.
(Moody Photo)
A passenger train smokes across the dike and along the shores of the big 300-acre reservoir. 60-pound rail from a White Mountain logging road, supported by ex-New Haven ties, makes a wonderful track.
We’re crossing a corner of undeveloped swamp now: just plain mud and bushes. Potential bog land, though. Clear that jungle off, dig out some of the mud and dump in clean sand, set out the cranberry vines—as you’d plant strawberries or rosebushes—and presto! A new bog.
New bogs cost close to three thousand dollars an acre. You must wait four years before the berries come, too. In the end, though, it pays off: a well built, properly kept bog, like these around here, should be good for pretty nearly five hundred dollars an acre every year. Yes, there’s gold in them swamps, but you and me needn’t conjure up dreams of owning any. It’s a complicated and expensive proposition. Takes years to learn. More men have gone broke in the swamps than ever got rich out of ’em.