Cranberries are among the true natives of Cape Cod. The plant, Vaccinium macrocarpon, is a low evergreen shrub of the heath family that grows in bogs. Legend has it that the plant originally was named craneberry because its small, bell-shaped, pink flowers look like the neck and head of a crane, or heron, that stalks marshes and bogs. The deep red, nearly round, acidic berry is almost a half-inch in diameter. Indians called cranberries sassamanesh. They used this fruit as food and medicine; they mixed ripe berries with dried venison to make pemmican and placed roasted unripe berries on wounds. They also taught Pilgrims to use wild cranberries in their foods, and the colonists shipped 10 barrels of them to Charles II, but he found them too tart. Cranberries remained popular on the Cape, however, and by 1773 anyone caught picking more than a quart in Provincetown before September 20 would be fined a dollar—and would have to surrender the berries. Sailing ships served cranberries to their crews to prevent or cure scurvy. In 1813 Henry Hall of North Dennis made a discovery that led to commercial production: the berries became invigorated when sand drifted on the plants.
Soon other Cape Codders were purposely sanding their bogs, and production was rising. By 1855 Cape Cod was a major Massachusetts producer with 2,408 acres in cranberries. Today about 1,250 acres are in production, 10 percent of the state’s total. Besides needing bogs with good peat bottoms, growers must have a water supply for sprinklers or enough water to flood their bogs through a series of ditches. Between November and March, and occasionally at other times, bogs are flooded to prevent frost from killing the vines. Ice up to 8 inches thick is allowed to form and the water below it is drained off. To sand the bogs, the ice is covered every 3 to 5 years with up to an inch of sand, which sinks to the bottom when the ice melts. In April the meltwater is drained off. Harvesting starts in September and continues through October. In this old postcard (below), pickers armed with wooden-toothed scoops move across a bog harvesting the berries. Today the process has been mechanized. More than 100 cranberry varieties have been developed, but the Early Black and Howes are direct descendants of the wild ones growing on the Cape. Processors now produce sauces, juices, and relishes that have become as closely associated with Thanksgiving as the Pilgrims and turkeys.
Marconi’s Wireless Station
In these days of instant worldwide communications via satellites, it is difficult to imagine the excitement that came with the advent of wireless telegraphy and radio. In the 1890s, the idea of transmitting long-distance messages via electromagnetic waves captured the imagination of Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian. In 1899 Marconi succeeded in sending a radio message across the English Channel, and, he went to work on developing a transatlantic system. Two communications cables already had been laid on the bottom of the ocean between France and Cape Cod. Marconi, too, selected a site for a station on the Cape, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean in South Wellfleet. He built others at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and at Poldhu in Great Britain. At first the antennas at South Wellfleet and Poldhu consisted of huge rings of masts, but these were destroyed by gales before any messages could be transmitted. They were replaced at each place by 4 towers 210 feet high. In December 1901, at an experimental site in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Marconi received the first transatlantic signal, 3 dots for the letter “S,” from Britain. In December 1902 his Glace Bay station received a complete message from Poldhu. On the night of January 18, 1903, he transmitted from South Wellfleet this message, in Morse code, from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and to all the people of the British Empire.” The king replied in a similar vein, making this the first 2-way wireless communication between Europe and America. Soon newspapers and others were transmitting messages across the Atlantic, and the wireless became the common way of communicating with ships. For 15 years telegraphers sent out messages on the South Wellfleet spark-gap transmitter. But in 1917 the Navy closed the station. It was dismantled in 1920 and scrapped. Its successor, WCC in Chatham, operated until 1993.
Guglielmo Marconi displays his wireless telegraphy equipment in England in 1896. The Leyden jar capacitor and boxlike transformer (below) represent an application of Marconi’s invention in World War I for national defense, maritime safety, and commercial communications.
At South Wellfleet Marconi first built a circular antenna consisting of 20 ship masts 200 feet high about 165 feet back from the edge of the ridge overlooking the Atlantic. The masts were blown down in a storm November 25, 1901.
This ironstone plate commemorates the first wireless message, received from President Theodore Roosevelt by King Edward VII on January 19, 1903, and shows the 4 towers that replaced the 20 masts.