The Dennis Plaque That Credits a Sand Drift With an Industry

One sentence on Whig Street starts Cape Cod's cranberry business with a winter wind. Up the road, a grower says she farms the very ground.

The plaque stands on the grounds of the Josiah Dennis Manse at 61 Whig Street, the saltbox built for the minister the town is named after. You could read it in the time it takes to find a parking spot. It's one sentence long.

That sentence says cranberry cultivation "had its beginning on Cape Cod when in 1816, Henry Hall, a Dennis village citizen, discovered that wild cranberry plants covered by winter's wind blown sand produced bigger and more plentiful berries."

So by the town's own account, the Cape's cranberry business begins with a sand drift. Nobody planted it. It blew in over a winter, and the berries came up better.

Anyone who has spent a July sweeping sand out of a car knows the Cape treats sand as the enemy. Why would a bog want more of it? And what happened to the ground where it landed?

Start with the man. The Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association describes Hall as a Revolutionary War veteran who noticed that the wild cranberries in his bogs grew better when sand blew over them. He started transplanting vines and spreading sand on purpose. "When others heard of Hall's technique," the growers' history says, "it was quickly copied."

The fuller version gets told on Scarsdale Road. According to Annie's Crannies, Hall cut down a stand of trees north of his bog for firewood. With nothing left to break the wind, a northern storm drove the exposed sand across his vines, and Hall assumed the crop was finished. The next harvest came in bigger.

He burned a woodlot to get through the winter and got a better bog out of the bargain.

Take all of that as the retold origin, not an eyewitness report. No one recorded the wind in 1816. Not every account even includes the sand: a 2016 Cape Cod Life history credits Hall with fencing a wild patch against animals and moving the plants into what he called his "cranberry yards."

The accounts agree on the town and the name, and most agree on the year. By 1820, Cape Cod Life reports, Hall was shipping 30 barrels to New York. By 1885 the growers' association counts 2,408 acres under cultivation in Barnstable County.

Dennis kept tinkering. Annie's Crannies credits Luther Hall, Henry's grandson, with co-patenting a cranberry picker in 1876, and says the Howes variety was developed on Scargo Lake in 1843.

The sand part holds up. The UMass Cranberry Production Guide treats sanding as a standard practice: a thin layer, half an inch to two inches, laid down every two to five years. The sand buries the leaf litter on the bog floor, promotes new growth, and can help hold down disease, weeds and insects. Growers have several ways to put it down, including over a winter flood.

So a standard cranberry practice still resembles the effect Hall noticed. He had a north wind. Growers today have a schedule.

Which brings us back to the ground.

Annie Walker grows cranberries at 36 Scarsdale Road, off Whig Street. She says her bog is "Molly's Pasture," the same ground Henry Hall moved to after the sand. That's her published account, not a deed we've seen.

In her family history, her grandfather Benjamin Walker was a Dennis lobsterman who also picked "the old Luther Hall bog in Nobscussett (formerly belonging to Henry Hall)." In 1912, working a hand rocker scoop, Ben took 19 barrels off it in a six-hour day. That came to 238 measures at six cents each, or $14.28. She notes it was more than many men earned in a week.

Then the cranberry market collapsed in the 1930s. Ben sold his bogs one at a time, and the last went in the 1950s.

In 1994, Annie Walker left her job as a Broadway wardrobe supervisor, came home to Dennis and bought her grandfather's bog back. When she got the plot plan, she writes, two names were still labeled on it: "Ben's Bog and Molly's Pasture."

She dry-picks her Howes berries, so don't come looking for a red, flooded bog on Scarsdale Road. More than 90 percent of the state's crop is harvested wet, and Annie's isn't part of it. Visitors can run their own berries through the antique screening machine and buy honey from the bees that work the bog in bloom.

The Dennis Historical Society opens the Manse this Saturday, Sept. 26, at 1 p.m. for Autumn at the Manse, with a tour, the one-room West Schoolhouse and the last of the summer vegetables. Admission is free.

In August we wrote about the corn coming in without the rain. The berries keep their own calendar. The growers' association puts the Cape harvest between mid-September and early November, and Annie's Crannies says its shop opens Columbus Day weekend, Oct. 10–12. The site also says fresh fruit is "governed by mother nature." Come early.

Most people on Saturday will walk past the plaque on the way in. Stop and read the sentence twice.

Henry Hall's name is on it. The sand did the work. All it cost him was a winter's firewood.

Josiah Dennis Manse Museum & Cranberry Cultivation Plaque | 61 Whig Street, Dennis Village
Autumn at the Manse: Saturday, Sept. 26, 1 p.m. · Manse open Saturdays in September, 1–4 p.m. · Free, donations welcome · dennishistoricalsociety.org
Tip: the West Schoolhouse on the same grounds is included.

Annie's Crannies | 36 Scarsdale Road, Dennis
Gift shop and bog open about five weekends a year, starting Columbus Day weekend (Oct. 10–12), 9 a.m.–5 p.m. per the website · 508-385-5517 · anniescrannies.com
Tip: come early in the day; fresh fruit runs out.

Sources: Dennis Historical Society: Cranberry Cultivation Plaque · Dennis Historical Society: Autumn at the Manse · Dennis Historical Society: Josiah Dennis Manse · Cape Cod Cranberry Growers' Association: History · CCCGA: Fall harvest · UMass Cranberry Production Guide · Cape Cod Life: A brief history of the cranberry (2016) · Annie's Crannies · Annie's Crannies: History · Annie's Crannies: My Story · Celebrate Mid Cape: The Corn Is In. The Rain Isn't.