Uncle Sid in the 1920s

Melinda Crowley of Cranberry Museum fame sent me a photostat of a hundred-year-old news article which said in part:

The Oregon Daily Journal, Portland, Sunday Morning, July 16, 1920
Pacific Growers now have the additional encouragement of having today as an example, the heaviest producing cranberry bog on record.  It is owned by S.W. Richardson of Oysterville, Washington.

Aunt Bu – C. 1918

Less than an acre in extent, the field hardly impresses the visitor as something remarkable.  Should you, however, go down into it and notice the clusters of berries and blossoms making a solid mat several inches thick on the bed of sand, you begin asking questions.
Though a bog that has just come into bearing, this little patch produced last year 265 barrels of cranberries.  Cranberries last year opened the market at $14 and one of the beauties of cranberries is that, once started, the upkeep is practically nothing. Like alfalfa, it keeps going.
So this world’s champion bog and grower produced nearly $3,000 worth of berries from about six-sevenths of an acre.

S.W. Richardson was Sidney Worth Richardson, my maternal grandmother’s younger brother.  I was named after him and knew him very well — not as a cranberry farmer, but as a pear orchardist.  And not in Oysterville but in Medford where he lived with his wife Beulah.  I’ve always known about his bog here but not that it was a “world’s champion bog.”  I believe the reason there wasn’t much talk about its glories is because my Great-Uncle Sid had a bit of a “past” — a past which affected both sides of my mother’s family…

But that’s another story.  Maybe I’ll tell it tomorrow.