‘Proud of the heritage’: At Whitesbog, more than 150 years of cranberry farming

Standing before land that was once a cranberry bog, Allison Pierson paused under a blue September sky and looked at the expanse of water, moss and dirt road before her at the Whitesbog Historic Village and Farm in Browns Mills.  

The history of this space and the land and water surrounding it, explained Pierson, the executive director of the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, is the story of more than a century and a half of cranberry farming on the Whitesbog farm in New Jersey’s Pinelands, a national reserve that spans more than one million acres of farms, forests and wetlands.

Where once there were hundreds of people picking cranberries by hand each fall in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of them immigrants from Italy, there’s now public land that’s part of the Brendan T. Byrne State Forest and is cared for by Pierson’s organization. For the last 43 years, the preservation trust has worked to educate the public about the history of the site, which was once part of a cranberry farm that James Fenwick started in 1857. The farm eventually grew to be a 3,000-acre farming operation and company town that was home to hundreds of cranberry harvesters by the 1920s. 

“They had up to 600 workers who would come out every fall,” Pierson said. “Early cranberry harvest was handpicking, so you needed a lot of hands to pick all those cranberries. So it was the whole family would come out — grandma through babies from South Philadelphia.” 

Pierson’s group maintains a portion of what was once the company town, including buildings that were home to a general store, workers’ cottages, a boarding house for school teachers who worked at the farm during their summer vacations, a cranberry research substation, and more.

There are far fewer workers these days, and farm employees no longer live on-site, but a cranberry farm remains on the land that was once the 3,000-acre operation. Today’s farm, about 200 acres, is owned by Joseph J. White Inc. and run by Joe Darlington, Fenwick’s great-great grandson, and Darlington’s wife, Brenda Conner, who also comes from a long line of cranberry farmers.

Through the 1970s, people lived and worked on the farm, harvesting cranberries and, beginning in 1916, blueberries as well. Elizabeth Coleman White, Fenwick’s granddaughter, and Frederick Coville, a U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist, teamed up to develop the country’s first commercial blueberry crops at the farm that local residents often referred to as Whitesbog after Fenwick’s son-in-law, J.J. White, took over the farm following Fenwick’s death. Cranberries grow in freshwater wetlands known as bogs.

Now, up to about 20 people work on Darlington’s farm during the cranberry harvest season, which runs from September through November, one reason why cranberries are so often associated with Thanksgiving dinner. Workers harvest around 6 million or 7 million pounds annually, most of which goes to Ocean Spray, a cooperative of approximately 700 farmers, Darlington said. Darlington and Conner also save some of the harvested fruit for their company Pine Barrens Native Fruits, which sells such products as jams, jellies and salsas. 

“I’m proud of the heritage, glad to have had the opportunity to grow cranberries for my career,” Darlington said.

New Jersey is one of the top cranberry-producing states in the country, behind Wisconsin and Massachusetts, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Garden State farmers harvested about 580,000 barrels of cranberries, at a total value of $20 million, in 2023, the most recent year for which there is New Jersey cranberry data. In total, 8.1 million barrels of cranberries were produced in the United States that same year. 

Darlington’s farm is one of a dwindling number of cranberry operations in New Jersey, and many of the area’s nearby housing developments with lakes were once cranberry farms, Pierson explained. Both Pierson and Darlington said they’re worried about the future of cranberry farming in the Garden State. Pierson said that climate change is making it increasingly difficult to harvest cranberries as farmers are dealing with more extreme weather. Last year, for example, New Jersey faced a severe drought that resulted in an invasive pest and a delayed cranberry harvest, said Kate Tallon, the education director at the Whitesbog Preservation Trust. 

“Frighteningly, we’re at the southernmost point, basically, of cranberry viability because they need those cold overwinter temperatures,” said Pierson, who added that cranberries may no longer be able to be grown in the Pinelands in a matter of three to five decades.

Darlington cited challenges with the falling cost of cranberries due in part to overproduction globally: “What I see for the coming future, the next five years or so, is a continuing of small growers going out of business and big growers holding on.” 

“When I started out, cranberries were in strong demand, and I was very happy building new cranberry bogs and increasing what we were doing,” Darlington continued. “The first 20 years I got to do that, and the last 25 years have been kind of holding on, trying to make things better, trying to continue to farm in a successful fashion, finding new technologies and new markets and so forth. And that’s a story that is true of really all agricultural products and a lot of manufacturing products as well. So it’s how the world goes.”

Still, Darlington expects his farm will be able to persevere. His son and daughter are both working at the farm now, making them the family’s sixth generation to do so. 

For now, Darlington and his family hope to find a new market for their cranberries in addition to Ocean Spray.

“We’re struggling as industries,” he said. “That’s why we started Pine Barrens Native Fruits, and are trying to focus on the health benefits of cranberries.”

As for Pierson and the rest of the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, they say they will continue to tell the story of cranberry farming in New Jersey — even if, someday, the berries can no longer be grown in the Pinelands. Turning to groups like the New Jersey Historical Commission and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities for grants, the trust is able to collect oral histories from those who remember the Whitesbog farm as it was years ago, from local residents to farmers. 

“We’ve done lots of oral histories here,” Pierson said. “We have a lot of oral histories from the ’80s through now.”

That history, Pierson said as she stood by one of the season’s earliest cranberries growing at the Whitesbog Historic Village and Farm, will live on.