Cranberry
The cranberry is a native North American bog fruit and the red sauce of the Thanksgiving table. The Wampanoag and Narragansett gathered it long before the English came; the first written mention of cranberry sauce, in John Josselyn’s New-England’s Rarities (1672), says “the Indians and English” boiled it with sugar to eat with meat.
Meaning
The American cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpum in the notes to the 1865 edition of Josselyn) is a low trailing plant of acid wetlands with sandy soil and sphagnum moss. John Josselyn describes it growing in salt marshes overgrown with moss, its berries “at first … of a pale yellow Colour, afterwards red, and as big as a Cherry”, sour, and ripe in August and September. He calls it the “Cran Berry, or Bear Berry, because Bears use much to feed upon them.” The Wampanoag name is sasumuneash (Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)); Roger Williams wrote the Narragansett word as sasémineash in 1643, “another excellent sharp cooling Fruit growing in fresh waters all the winter”. Massachusetts made the cranberry its official berry.
Origin and history
The State Library of Massachusetts says the Narragansett and Wampanoag used the berries in pemmican and in nasampe, a corn dish, sweetened them with maple sugar into a sauce, and used them to dye cloth. At the 1621 harvest celebration cranberries were in season, but Plimoth Patuxet Museums says a sweetened sauce was unlikely: a recipe for cranberry sauce or tart would not appear in print for about another fifty years, though an English housewife might have used the berries to sharpen a sauce. For the Wampanoag, the museum says, the cranberry harvest was one of the high points of the year.
That first printed mention is Josselyn’s: “The Indians and English use them much, boyling them with Sugar for Sauce to eat with their Meat; and it is a delicate Sauce, especially for roasted Mutton: Some make Tarts with them as with Goose Berries.” (The State Library dates the book 1671; the 1865 reprint describes the original edition as 1672.)
Cranberries were gathered wild through colonial times. In the early 1800s Henry Hall, a sea captain and Revolutionary War veteran, transplanted vines to his land in North Dennis on Cape Cod; Benjamin Eastwood’s book on cultivation followed in 1860, growers’ associations were founded in 1871 and 1888, and until 1927 Massachusetts children could be let out of school to work the bogs. Most of the crop is now harvested by flooding the bogs so that the berries float.
Cranberry Day in Aquinnah
The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) calls Cranberry Day its most important tribal holiday. Wild cranberries grow on 200 acres of tribal land, which the tribe does not fertilise or spray, out of respect for the land. Long ago the holiday lasted many days, with families camping at Lobsterville by the bogs and shipping the berries by catboat to New Bedford to trade for sugar and molasses. Today, on the second Tuesday in October, Aquinnah Wampanoag children are let out of school for it; elders pick with the young people, tell stories of past Cranberry Days by an open fire at lunch, and in the evening there is a community potluck with singing and dancing to give thanks to the Creator for another year’s harvest.
See also
Turkey, Cornucopia, Pumpkin and pumpkin pie, Flint corn (multicoloured corn), Three Sisters, Pilgrim hat.
Sources
- New-England’s Rarities Discovered, John Josselyn, 1672 (1865 reprint with Edward Tuckerman’s notes), Project Gutenberg
- A Key into the Language of America, Roger Williams, London, 1643; chapter on the earth and its fruits, Project Gutenberg
- Ancient Ways, Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)
- Cranberries: the Berry of Massachusetts, October 2020, State Library of Massachusetts
- What did they eat at the 1621 harvest celebration?, You Are the Historian, Unit 4: 1621 Harvest Celebration, Plimoth Patuxet Museums
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research