When I read old books, I’m always on the lookout for
references to other old books, or to topics that were relevant when the book was
written, but that may not be well known now.
These sometimes lead in new and surprising directions. There were several things in Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty, the book that
launched the back-to-the-land movement in 1907, that seemed to deserve more
investigation. The thing that really
jumped out at me, though, was a passing remark he made about blueberries.
In spite of being a hardy native plant that the Indians had
harvested from time immemorial, Hall says “with our present knowledge of the
blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated
crop.” This surprised me, since one of
my family’s favorite activities when we lived out East was picking blueberries
at a big berry farm in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.
Apparently, Hall wrote those words just about as late as he
could have. Commercial blueberry
production began in Maine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but
the source of the berries were native plants that propagated themselves and
spread as they had always done. The only
change was that growers removed the surrounding trees to give the blueberries
more room and light. However, in 1911 a
New Jersey woman named Elizabeth Coleman White (1871-1954) read a USDA Bulletin
about experiments in blueberry propagation.
She invited the bulletin’s author, botanist Frederick Colville, to the
New Jersey pine barrens, where blueberries grew wild as they did in Maine. White and Colville got the locals, who picked
the wild berries regularly, to tag the bushes where they found the largest
fruits. They asked the local pickers
questions about taste, time of ripening, plant vigor, and disease resistance,
and brought the best plants back to the family’s farm in Whitesbog. By 1916, White and Colville had created the
“Tru-Blu-Berry,” America’s first commercial blueberry. In 1927, White helped organize the New Jersey
Blueberry Cooperative Association, which still exists today.
I’ve only scratched the surface of this story – there’s a
lot that could be done with a topic like this! – but the thing I like most
about it is that White and Colville were smart enough to use the expertise and
local wisdom of the poor folk, the “pineys,” who went out into the barrens to
pick wild fruit. The Progressive Era is
remembered as a time when top-down, expert-driven solutions became all the
rage. Often these scientific innovations
were imposed on rural people without consultation, much less consent. And often these changes were much less
valuable and lasting than the experts promised.
So it’s great to find a story where the innovation came from a
cooperative process, and led to a tangible and lasting improvement. I’ll think of this next summer, when I pick
the fruit from the eighteen blueberry plants of half a dozen varieties I
planted this fall.
____________
Sources:
Distinguished
Women of Past and Present: http://www.distinguishedwomen.
USDA Technical Bulletin #275, 1932: http://organicroots.nal.usda.
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4 comments:
antique natural history books are really very famous now a days because everybody wants to know their past and history, so this is really helpful blog for us for that type of books. Really thankful to you.
Visitors to southern New Jersey are encouraged to visit Whitesbog Village and tour Elizabeth White's home (www.whitesbog.org). Another aspect to this story is that White was a woman in an overwhelmingly male farming culture.
N.b., the berries found on Monadnock and elsewhere in northern New England are of the lowbush variety (Vaccinium angustifolium) and are chiefly an industrial crop (think frozen blueberry waffles). The highbush variety cultivated by White is V. corymbosum and is the table berry found in the supermarket.
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This just highlights for me that the turn of the past century was a really important moment in US agriculture. Wasn't that when the boll weevil was tearing up the South? And what about George Washington Carver?
How can I possibly know so little about this?
The whole blueberry thing is fascinating, not least because it's a big and growing industry in Maine. And yet, I think it's still run much like what you suggest here. Once again, though, not really sure!
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