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- Feb 5, 2017
I just learned this from the New England Historical Society, Summer 2020. I didn't realize there was a Southern market for sardines. We learn something new everyday here on CWT.
Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1862, "We do not realize how rich our country is in berries."
"Wild blueberries are unique to eastern Maine with its rocky acidic soil and cold climate. Wild blueberry fields earned the name "barrens" because they grew "nothing other than blueberries, sweet fern, scrub birch, and willows."
The wild blueberry is smaller and sweeter than its cousin, the high-bush blueberry. Mainers have no truck with high-bush blueberries, viewing them as "just wrong."
New Englanders ate wild blueberries and sold them commercially, but few knew of them outside the region. Then came the Civil War. Sardine canneries lost their Southern markets, so they switched to selling canned blueberries to Union troops. The soldiers developed a taste for the sweet wild berry and took it home with them after the war.
In 1874, Jasper Wyman started a seafood canning company in Milbridge, Maine. Twenty-five years later, he shifted to canning wild blueberries. For the next hundred years, the Wyman family bought thousands of acres of fields and blueberry barrens. The family now has 10,000 acres of blueberry barrens and freezes instead of canning blueberries. Wyman's today is one of six companies that process and freeze wild Maine blueberries."
Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1862, "We do not realize how rich our country is in berries."
"Wild blueberries are unique to eastern Maine with its rocky acidic soil and cold climate. Wild blueberry fields earned the name "barrens" because they grew "nothing other than blueberries, sweet fern, scrub birch, and willows."
The wild blueberry is smaller and sweeter than its cousin, the high-bush blueberry. Mainers have no truck with high-bush blueberries, viewing them as "just wrong."
New Englanders ate wild blueberries and sold them commercially, but few knew of them outside the region. Then came the Civil War. Sardine canneries lost their Southern markets, so they switched to selling canned blueberries to Union troops. The soldiers developed a taste for the sweet wild berry and took it home with them after the war.
In 1874, Jasper Wyman started a seafood canning company in Milbridge, Maine. Twenty-five years later, he shifted to canning wild blueberries. For the next hundred years, the Wyman family bought thousands of acres of fields and blueberry barrens. The family now has 10,000 acres of blueberry barrens and freezes instead of canning blueberries. Wyman's today is one of six companies that process and freeze wild Maine blueberries."
