Blueberries

Domestication in living memory

The blueberry has become ubiquitous across the world; its small, firm berries are enjoyed by young and old. The story of the blueberry, one of several vaccinium fruits, is far from simple, however. Vaccinium has a circumboreal distribution— meaning that it occupies the same space to the north pole across the planet (northern North America, Europe, Asia) but also has a handful of named species in the South Pacific Islands, South America, and Africa. Other vacciniums include huckleberries, cranberries, lingonberries, bilberries, and more. It was only in the past 100 years that blueberries weren’t just a small, seedy fruit relished by homesteaders and foragers but something available on shelves across the globe in a highly domesticated form.

Evidence of blueberry management in North America is over 10,000 years old, from indigenous people near Newberry Lake in central Oregon to eastern Massachusetts around the Pine Barrens of Cape Cod.¹ Pollen analysis highlights that several fruits, including chokecherry, thimbleberry, raspberry, blackberry, and huckleberry were present and likely managed by native people as far back as 9,000 B.C across central Oregon.²

Historically, harvesting season was a communal effort. Harvest gatherings were times of celebration, sharing stories and passing on legends.³ They used special combs of wood or fish backbones to strip the berries off the bushes, which our modern blueberry rakes are fashioned off.⁴ In the Pacific Northwest, women or their families often “owned” the berry grounds, and the fields were often named after the trails connecting them. The berries were so honored that special people were selected for the first gathering of berries based on skill and knowledge of the plant, to the extent that it became a point of contention with early missionaries. It’s also worth noting that on the West Coast, the blueberry is also known as the huckleberry, which can be confusing, given that huckleberries (“True Huckleberries”) on the East Coast are not blueberries at all. References to ‘huckleberries’ from here forward are recognizing the traditional name for the blueberry on the west coast.

In 1615, Samuel de Champlain, the founder of French-occupied Quebec, was the first to record the Indigenous use of blueberries, observing Algonquin women as they dried “blues”, as he called them, in the sun. He noted that they prepared a bread of sifted cornmeal, boiled, mashed beans, and dried blueberries. The blueberries also provided “manna in winter” and Pemmican, a concoction of lean meat, fat, and blueberries or other fruit, a practice seen across much of northern North America. Roger Williams also noted the same, stating that:

Sautaash are these currants [blueberries or whortleberries] dried by the Natives, and so preserved all the year, which they beat to powder and mingle it with their parched meal, and make a delicious dish which they call Sautauthig, which is as sweet to them as plum or spice cake is to the English.⁵

Gabrial Sagard, a Franciscan friar, visited the Hurons in 1624 and wrote that:

There is so great a quantity of bluës, which the hurgon call Ohentaqué… that the savages regularly dry them for the winter, as we do prunes in the sun, and that services them for the comfits for the sick.

John Bartram also documented an Iroquois woman drying blueberries in 1743, stating that:

This was done by setting four forked sticks in the ground about three or four feet high then others across. Over them, the stalks of Centurea jacea [probably misidentified] or Saratula. On these lie the berries… Underneath she had kindled a smoky fire that her children were tending.⁶

Henry Thoreau took a special interest in blueberries, writing extensively, including an unpublished manuscript entitled “Wild Fruits”, which also contained more than twenty written citations on the Indigenous use of blueberries, where he concluded that:

…from time immemorial down to the present day, all over the northern part of America, (the Indigenous) have made far more extensive use of the whortleberry [blueberry] at all seasons and in various ways than we, and that they were far more important to them than to us.

Thoreau was so infatuated with blueberries that many of our sources today of Indigenous use are cited first in his unpublished manuscript.

While the Indigenous dried the fruits to enjoy throughout the year, colonists found canning to be an effective method for preserving the fruit, and by the end of the 19th century, picking would change both as a social practice and as a social meaning. Canning as a practice expanded extensively during the Civil War, and by 1875, industry improvements allowed the meatpacking industry to scale and expand its products west. While canned goods were difficult to transport and buy, the commercial canning industry allowed rural households to preserve what they could produce on-site. In 1888, the Ball Brothers Corporation upended the market by producing a fully automatic machine for making canning jars, cutting the price and making canning far more accessible for homesteaders.⁷

The Wild Blueberry Industry

Across Maine, the lush carpets of blue that cross the barrens had been harvested on burn cycles by residents since settlers had arrived, and the Indigenous for generations prior. Before the modern canning industry erupted, tin canning from the Civil War era had made blueberries easy to ship due to their proximity to bigger cities. By the 1860s, men were making “a snug fortune… from the product of these plains,” wrote a journalist at the Portland Daily Press.⁸

In 1870, William Freeman sued William Underwood, owner of a canning factory near his 70,000 acres, which he claimed covered nearly all the blueberry land in the region, for the theft of the blueberries from his fields. He argued that the harvesting destroyed his property and the prescribed burns removed any potential for timber harvesting and that the canners were liable for the taking of Freeman’s possession. The court sided with Freeman, which began a new system of leasing and payments that became the foundation of Maine’s blueberry industry.⁹

Landowners squeezed profits from canneries, and suddenly other industries wanted their share of the pie. The Maine state government canceled permits that allowed blueberry picking on public lands where other permit holders held timber or grass rights. Penalties were placed on trespassers of “improved blueberry ground”, marking a shift in foraging rights across the east coast.

In the 1880s, the blueberry rake was adopted. It was a modification of the cranberry rake, which increased production from— 1 to 3 bushels— without increasing wages. Despite the stories from newspapers of the profits made from a few day’s work of harvesting, the reality was much more grim.

On the West Coast, the story of the wild blueberry played out very differently. Not only were homesteaders canning fruit for their own consumption, but they were also spending weeks in the mountains to take berry-picking “working vacations”, particularly from 1900 through 1925. While homesteaders quickly filled up their buckets with sweet treats, Indigenous folks also continued to arrive at the fields to harvest berries as well.

By the early 1920s, commercial sales had begun in eastern Montana, where conveniently, two canneries had been built in the region to process apples and cherries. Wild huckleberries were an additional product they could process between the window of apple and cherry season, allowing for additional revenue, if they could find a market.¹⁰ They were a freely available fruit, grown and picked under the Forest Service’s free-use policy instead of on orchards. They preserved well and only required sugar for canning. In short, they were cheap, easy to work with, and ready to scale.