Kingston (Massachusetts) Public Library
According to a recent article in the Kingston Reporter, 20% of American cranberry consumption falls during Thanksgiving week.
Our love for this particular fruit is certainly not new. This image of Keith & Adams cranberry bog on Summer Street dates back to around 1885.
Source: Image is from the Mary Hathaway Collection (MC21).
A beautiful cabinet card recently came into the Local History Room, part of a larger collection. While the contrast in the original is a little faded (and has been adjusted in this scan), the image is otherwise perfect, and the subject — harvesting the cranberry crop — could not be more timely.
This close-up shows men, women and children at work, dressed more formally than we might expect for such manual labor.
But where is this bog? It could be almost anywhere: the blank back of the cabinet card yields no clues. A little sleuthing through the photograph collections however, turns up a second copy, much more worn but bearing a typed caption that tells us that this is indeed a Kingston location.
