That’s why the Edaville Railroad stands out. Why it’s a splendid anti-climax to an era of colorful midget railroading. Not so much because it’s the last survivor, as I persist in calling it, as a resurrection—an ideal risen from the ashes of Yesterday.
Here it is: not a synthetical reproduction but those very same engines and cars that made railroad history for three generations, alive and puffing again on Ellis Atwood’s eighteen-hundred acres. A seed from history that now blooms with the cranberries, sprouting in that same sand that perennializes faded shrubs from the Holy Commonwealth, Plymouth Colony, America in the making.
That’s why I had to have an Introduction. All right?
EDAVILLE RAILROAD
The Cranberry Belt
Well, well, well; just look at this—
The Edaville Railroad. Eighteen hundred acres long and only two feet wide!
Let’s look it over. There’s nothing like it anywhere. As if Plymouth County and the town of Carver weren’t famous enough already, not to mention Ellis Atwood’s model cranberry plantation, this little narrow gauge railroad now vies with cranberry crops and Mayflower packets in spectacular “firsts”.
Plymouth, you know, is famous far and wide for being the stern and rockbound coast where the Pilgrims debarked three hundred and twenty-seven years ago. That’s Fourth Grade stuff. Also pretty well known, this historical region is first in world cranberry growing. Yes. Grows more little red berries on its pleasant, frugiferous acres than the rest of the world combined. To top this off Carver boasts first place among the cranberry towns, its 2,800 acres of bog harvesting 100,000 barrels a year—fifteen per cent of the whole world’s crop! No argument about our list of “firsts” so far, is there?
While we’re firsting: ages ago, when Carver was the first iron producing corner of the New World, the very first iron teakettle made in America is said to have been cast here—from Carver iron, Carver smelter, and moulded in Carver sand.