By: Rénald Fortier
Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation
“A sea serpent without affidavit, is like roast turkey without cranberry sauce;” Or, how the Larocque family created the first cranberry bog in Québec, part 1
Charles Larocque, manager of Les Producteurs de Québec Limitée picking up cranberries, on the left, and fallen fruits floating in water. Arthur Prévost, « À Lemieux, au Québec, prospère la culture des ‘juteux atacas.’ » Photo-Journal, 23 July 1953, 33.
Now that yours truly has your undivided attention, my understandably puzzled and slightly alarmed reading friend, let me reassure you by stating unequivocally that there is madness, err, method behind the madness, this time at least. The reference to an oceanic ophidian has very little to do with the topic of this week’s issue of our absolutely fabulous blog / bulletin / thingee, in other words with the history of the first cranberry bog / farm / marsh in Québec – in French la première tourbière à pommes de pré / marais à canneberges / marécage à canneberges / atocatière.
This being said (typed?), I was utterly flabbergasted when said reference leapt out of the pages of April and May 1830 issues of several American weekly and bimonthly newspapers. Said articles referred to, you guessed it, the recent sighting of a sea serpent off the coast of South Carolina.
Given your knowledge of the fact that yours truly has had, has and will presumably continue to have a strong affinity toward the unusual, the strange, the odd looking, etc., you will forgive me if I choose to quote one of the brief and identical articles which contained that reference to an oceanic ophidian, the one published in late April 1830 by Roanoke Advocate. Context is always important when telling a story.
You will of course remember, for example, how happy Hannibal Lecter, an anthropophagian forensic psychiatrist we came across, from a safe distance, in a March 2021 issue of our vegan blog / bulletin / thingee, seemed to be at the idea of having an old friend for dinner.
We are likely at last, thank fortune, to have a Sea Serpent of our own, without depending upon Cape Cod. We have long been of the opinion that the ‘article’ might be fabricated as low here, as any where north of the Potomac; though affidavits, a sort of necessary condiment to the cookery, are not easily obtained. – In this particular, our account is somewhat defective. A sea serpent without affidavit, is like roast turkey without cranberry sauce.
And yes, there had been sightings of sea serpents off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in April 1825, June 1826, etc. Would you believe that the, err, rather putrid remains of a huge sea creature (Hello, EG!) were fished out of the water off Cape Cod in May 1828? The ginormous skull of that sea monster was actually put on display in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in the fall of that year. I kid you not.
And no, yours truly does not believe that sea serpents can be found in the oceans of the globe. If you believe that, you probably believe there can be peace on Earth. The skull in question was undoubtedly that of a whale. As far as the sightings were concerned, while fairies and goblins were / are unlikely suspects, whales or whale sharks were / are a possibility, as were / are giant or colossal squids for that matter, but back to our story.
Would you believe that turkey and cranberries met on our dinner plates well before 1830, my foody reading friend? Yes, they did. Meleagris gallopavo, in other words the turkey, and Vaccinium macrocarpon, in other words the large cranberry / American cranberry / bearberry, first met in print in 1796, in American Cooke, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life, the first known cookbook written / published by a North American, an American lady actually, Amelia Simmons.
The European peoples who invaded / exploited / colonised the northeastern part of what are now the United States discovered cranberries during the 17th century, through the good offices of the First Nations, who had been consuming those red berries for thousands of years.
An American by the name of Henry Hall pioneered the commercial cultivation of cranberries in the United States, if not North America as a whole, around 1816. And yes, that retired sea captain lived in the Cape Cod region, in Dennis, Massachusetts, to be more precise. He seemingly set up shop in an area where people had dug up the boggy ground during the 17th century, in search of bog iron nodules they could turn into tools – or weapons. By the 1820s at the latest, Hall was sending cranberries to Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City, New York. As time went by, other people began to cultivate cranberries in the northeastern part of the United States.
One only needs to mention Abel D. Makepeace. The work he began in Massachusetts in 1854 was still going on in 2023. Would you believe that A.D. Makepeace Company was / is the largest cranberry producer on planet Earth? Now, would I say something that was not true? I am asking you, my reading friend. Would I lie to you?
Mind you, the pioneer of pioneers might have been a famous English botanist / horticulturalist / naturalist. You see, sir Joseph Banks seemingly conducted experiments in his large estate, near London, England, as early as 1813, using seedlings he had picked up during a trip to the United States. The cultivation method he invented was not picked up by his compatriots, however. And yes, that Banks. The one who had taken part in the 1st great voyage of the English naval officer / explorer / cartographer James Cook, a trip around the world no less, between August 1768 and July 1771.
But what about Canada, you ask, my flag waving reading friend? Well, to begin with, First Nations had been consuming cranberries for thousands of years, of course. Indeed, did you know that 2 of the French language words for cranberry, namely atoca / ataca, might, I repeat might, be derived from the First Nation (Iroquoian?) language word atocaor, which means good fruit? Other French language names for that fruit include canneberge, mocauque and pomme de pré / des prés.
In any event, cranberries were first commercially cultivated in Canada in 1872 on a small patch of land on a farm owned by William McNeil of Melvern Square, Nova Scotia. British Columbia’s first cranberry bog came into existence in 1946 when Jack Bell planted his first seedlings on Lulu Island, near Richmond. In Ontario, the pioneering work was done in MacTier, a community in the Georgian Bay area, by George Mollard. His cranberry bog was set up in 1947, I think.
East of British Columbia and Ontario and west of Nova Scotia lied / lies Québec, the province at the heart of this article. Let us therefore put on our seven decade boots in order to travel back in time. Ready, set, go!
The individual around which coalesced the threads of our story came into this world in February 1887, in Roxton Falls, Québec – or Saint-Étienne-de-Bolton, Québec. His name was Jean Baptiste Edgar Larocque.
Born in a typically large francophone family living on a farm which was not all that large, Larocque had barely entered his teenage years when he left school and Québec, like countless other Quebecers actually, to work in the United States. During his stay in that country, the young man spent some time in the… Cape Cod region. Larocque visited several cranberry bogs there and was fascinated by what he saw.
Incidentally, would you believe that school attendance became compulsory in Québec only in May 1943? I kid you not. The upper echelons of Québec’s roman catholic church and many members of the secular elite of that same province defeated at least 5 attempts to introduce compulsory education between 1887 and 1943. Having to deal with farmers and workers who thought for themselves would not have been good. Nay. They might have realised how a small minority living in luxury was keeping them in ignorance and fear to better exploit them.
By comparison, school attendance had been compulsory in Ontario since… 1871.
Larocque eventually returned to Québec and moved to Drummondville, Québec, where he opened a butcher shop. At some later point, he began to sell fruits. Realising that the distributors who were selling him said fruits were making more moolah than he was, Larocque came to agree with the statement made by a supremely peaceful and even tempered great friend of a certain bunny rabbit, you know, Yosemite Sam: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!” Larocque thus became a fruit distributor active in southern Québec.
Although battered by the Great Depression which battered the globe from 1929 onward, Larocque managed to keep his business afloat, thanks in part to the assistance provided by his 3 sons and a son in law. By the mid 1930s, these individuals knew that business inside out. As a result, Larocque began to wonder what he would do from then on. Too young and active to retire, he remembered his visits to the cranberry bogs of the Cape Cod region.
Puzzled by the fact that Quebecers consumed cranberries imported primarily from the United States even though that small fruit grew wild in the province’s wetlands, Larocque began to look into the possibility of cultivating cranberries in Québec to meet at least part of the local demand. Mind you, the fact that he would no longer have to pay transport fees and / or some sort of import tax also sounded good.
Perhaps accompanied by one or more of his sons, and definitely accompanied by experts on at least one occasion, Larocque travelled to the United States, presumably to the Cape Cod region, to learn about cranberry cultivation.
To use an expression used since the 1890s, he soon learned the importance of the words location, location, location. Yes, yes, the 1890s. Baron Samuel of Wych Cross, an English real estate tycoon born Harold Samuel, did not invent that world famous expression around 1944-45, perhaps, but I digress.
A cranberry bog / farm / marsh… Err, you have a question, my intellectually curious reading friend? The identity of the aforementioned experts who went to the United States with Larocque? They were
- Louis-Charles Roy, superintendent for Eastern Canada of the Agriculture Service of Canadian National Railway Company,
- Joseph-Henri Lavoie, head of the Service d’horticulture of the ministère de l’Agriculture of Québec,
- Malcolm Bancroft Davis, chief horticulturist at the Central Experimental Farm of Ottawa, Ontario (Hello, WK and MM!), and
- Frederick S. “Fred” Browne, head of the experimental substation of Sainte-Clotilde-de-Chateauguay, Québec, a site which was part of the Dominion experimental farm system headquartered in Ottawa.
Mind you, Browne, a plant pathologist who knew a thing or three about cranberries, might have been stationed at the Central Experimental Farm at the time. Sainte-Clotilde-de-Chateauguay or Ottawa, in between my heart swings / entre les deux mon cœur balance.
And yes, Canadian National Railway, a crown corporation, was mentioned several / many times in our astonishing blog / bulletin / thingee since April 2018, but back to our story.
A cranberry bog will not be productive if does not have the proper soil and an abundance of water. As a result, Larocque eventually set up shop near Lemieux, Québec, in what was then the Bois-Francs region, in the spring of 1938, in a corner of the country where the production of cereals or vegetables was often difficult, if not all but impossible, because of the improper soil, both sandy and acidic, and an (over)abundance of water. Indeed, Lemieux was a colonisation centre which had become a parish only in 1921. And yes, land was cheap in that corner of Québec.
Mind you, the dark peaty soil on the piece of land acquired by Larocque was a tad too fertile for cranberry cultivation, in that it gave a chance to weeds to invade said piece of land.
By the way, that piece of land was until then the property of Joseph Leclair / Leclerc, a gentleman who became Larocque’s longtime foreman.
Interestingly, Larocque may not have found that piece of land all by his lonesome. Nay. Experts hailing from the Service d’horticulture of the ministère de l’Agriculture had seemingly been of great help. One of these gentlemen might, I repeat might, have been Louis Baribeau, an agronomist well known in the region. And yes, the aforementioned Roy, Lavoie, Davis and Browne might also have been of great help.
The particular piece of land Larocque acquired for his cranberry bog was levelled to make it as horizontal as possible. Before that levelling could be done, however, 50 or so men living near Lemieux had to toil for months on 18 or so hectares (45 or so acres) of land, clearing shrubs, chopping up trees and removing their stumps. There were tractors and horses galore. All in all, the team took out no less than 6 500 or so cubic metres (1 800 or so chords) of firewood later used by local farmers.
Hundreds of tonnes (tons) of sand were then poured on the site of the cranberry bog, and carefully levelled. Low walls were later erected around each field, using the excess dirt. Once that work was done, water channels were dug inside each wall, all around each field.
In order to supply the H2O needed to flood the fields prior to harvesting, the waters of a small lake and two streams had to be channelled using a network of dams and dikes of various size, and…
Yes, yes, flooded. I will not tell you why right now though. You will actually have to come back to this website in a week to check out the second part of this article. Bwa ha ha. Sorry, and back to our story.
And if the work described in the previous paragraphs looked like a lot of work, well, it was. Indeed, one could argue that the amount of work needed to set up a cranberry bog, and the cost thereof, might explain why no one in Québec had done it before Larocque, le roi des atocas, in English the cranberry king, as he was sometimes called, as early as 1940, took the plunge and did it.
Setting up a single hectare of land, for example, seemingly cost $ 7 400, a sum which corresponds to approximately $ 84 000 in 2023 currency. How much was that per acre, you ask, my metrically challenged reading friend? Well, that came to $ 3 000, a sum which corresponds to approximately $ 34 000 in 2023 currency.
On top of that, Larocque had to pay a hefty rental fee for the heavy equipment needed to do the work and a hefty transport fee to have said equipment delivered to the train station at Lemieux, a station which was along the route of the famous Ocean Limited passenger train operated between Montréal, Québec, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, by Canadian National Railway. (Hello, SB!)
A brief digression if I may. The lake harnessed at the request of Larocque, Lake Soulard / Lake Saint-Louis if you must know, was an unusual body of water whose content had overflown almost every year but whose bed had dried up during summer heat waves.
In addition, even though it had an area equivalent to almost 70 Canadian football fields, end zones included, Lake Soulard was said to be all but invisible in 1942 when an individual who seemed to write mainly for C-I-L Oval, the inhouse magazine of Canadian Industries Limited, a large and well known chemical products manufacturer based in Montréal, visited Larocque’s cranberry bog. In an article published in the November 1942 issue of Paysana, Jean Robitaille stated that this unlikely invisibility resulted from the huge amounts of debris from the surrounding forest which covered almost the entire lake.
Incidentally, Paysana was a monthly journal of home economics and family education published in Montréal by urban women for rural women. One of the urban women in question was Françoise Gaudet-Smet, the director of the magazine and a well known author / editor / journalist who became a well known television host in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in that guise that my late mother discovered her, unless she had come across one or more of her books earlier on, which was quite possible. My mother was not to be disturbed when Mrs. Gaudet-Smet was present on the tube, but back to our story, and…
To answer your question, Paysana was not the only Québec magazine to offer an article on Larocque and his cranberry bog during the Second World War. There were articles
- in a December 1941 issue of the general interest weekly magazine Le Samedi,
- in the July 1942 issue of the roman catholic general interest monthly magazine Relations, and
- in the December 1944 issue of the general interest monthly magazine La Revue moderne.
Mind you, there was also an article in a December 1945 issue of Le Samedi.
The first cranberry variety cultivated by Larocque came from the… Cape Cod region. To be more precise, the plants in question came from the Cranberry Experiment Station of the Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station and / or a Massachusetts producer. Ours is a small world, is it not?
Larocque, Lucien Larocque, his son, and a clerk by the name of Paul Corriveau, formed Les Producteurs de Québec Limitée of Drummondville in February 1939.
How large was the 1938 or 1939 crop, you ask, my reading friend? Well, there was no crop in 1938, or in 1939 for that matter. You see, a cranberry plant apparently produces fruits only 3, if not 4 or even 5 years after being planted. I still kid you not. And that might be another reason why Larocque was the first Quebecer to take the plunge and set up a cranberry bog.
Mind you, a cranberry plant treaty like royalty might remain productive for up to 150 years. I, err, kid you not.
The local men hired by Larocque, up to 100 or so, planted their first cranberry plants in 1939, by hand. The area under cultivation that year was 1.7 or so hectare (4.2 or so acres). The site seemed so promising that a further 6.9 or so hectares (17 or so acres) were put under cultivation in 1940. The cultivated area grew to 12.3 or so hectares (30.4 acres) in 1941. By that time, the cranberry bog exploited by Les Producteurs de Québec might, I repeat might, have been one of the largest, if not the largest in Canada.
Theoretically, the 12.3 or so hectares (30.4 acres) of the cranberry bog could have produced up to 95 or so metric tonnes (95 or so Imperial tons / 105 or so American tons) of berries worth between $ 31 500 and $ 37 800, sums which correspond to between $ 600 000 and $ 720 000 in 2023 currency. Actual revenues tended to be lower than that, of course. And yes, you are quite right, my observant reading friend, the land which produced that bounty had been deemed all but useless / worthless before Larocque’s arrival in Lemieux.
Interestingly, Larocque was not the only person developing a cranberry bog in Québec at the time. Nay, he was not.
In August 1939, a postmaster from Shawinigan Falls, Québec, began to put together a cranberry bog near a nearby and pretty small body of water he owned, Lake Valmont, near Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, Québec. The municipal council of that community was intrigued to such an extent that it offered a small grant to Napoléon Jacques. The latter readily recognised that the assistance of the aforementioned Browne and of another expert hailing from the aforementioned Central Experimental Farm, plant pathologist H.N. Racicot (Hello, RR!), had proven indispensable in launching his project.
A small team began to plant cranberry seedlings in May 1940. By August, Jacques had somewhat less than 0.2 hectare (0.45 acre) of cranberries under cultivation. By 1945, that area had grown to 1.2 or so hectare (3 or so acres). Jacques’ cranberry bog seemed to have faded into history at some point in the 1940s, quite possibly as a result of the latter’s death, in December 1946, at the age of 71, which means that we should probably get back to our story.
We shall do so only next week, however. You undoubtedly have places to see and things to go.
Ta ta for now.
Rénald Fortier
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