Cranberries grew in a swamp we owned which had been cleared and planted much earlier. It’s now a pond just north of where Little River crosses Route 97. But at that time there were thirty acres of cranberries. Just before frost time we would pick cranberries in there – the whole family picked and we got as high as twenty bushels in a year. We’d spread ‘em out on the floor in a big room upstairs to get color and let ‘em dry out and we’d sort ‘em a little bit and my mother’d take them to Danielson to trade for supplies.

There was a stone dam across the middle of the meadow and in the winter time they closed it up and let the water come over the cranberries just a certain depth about six or eight inches, and then in the spring they’d open it and the cranberries would grow in the sunlight. And the water ran down Little River of course. But that was the way they did it in the beginning. When we had it we didn’t do a thing of that kind – we just left ‘em the way they were and we picked all those cranberries. But the bog’s disappeared until there’s no sign of it.

Arthur Kimball