A Cranberry Legacy Slowly Fading Away At Double Trouble State Park

by Patricia A. Miller

One hundred years ago, Commodore Edward Crabbe took a trip to a tract of land in the pines of Berkeley Township, to see if he could make a living felling timber and harvesting cranberries.

He liked what he saw. The land was studded with prized Atlantic white cedars. Crabbe bought the tract and named his business the Double Trouble Company.

The Crabbe family stayed 60 years. When the white cedars were cut, Crabbe turned to cranberries, which grew profusely in the moist soil where the cedars once stood.

The Crabbe family said goodbye to Double Trouble when they sold the land to the state for a park in 1964. Over the years, the state leased the bogs to cranberry companies that would harvest the berries and maintain the bogs.

But things are very different now. It’s been four years since the last full “Red October” at Double Trouble. There was a brief harvest in the fall of 2012, when Deptford-based Honest Berries funneled the berries out of the flooded bogs to sell. But the season was cut short when Superstorm Sandy roared into Bayville.

By the winter of 2013, the crimson berries - swept out of the bogs by Sandy - studded the snow off in the woods.

The state Department of Environmental Protection had hoped Honest Berries or another leaseholder would step up for the fall harvests of 2013 and 2014. But that didn’t happen.

The rich red cranberries could still be seen hanging from the plants in the Gowdy Bog off the main trail this fall. But the vista had markedly changed. Where the bogs were once a sea of dark green and red, beige weeds, some more than a foot high, are gradually taking over.

“It’s a shame,” said Daniel Crabbe, Edward Crabbe’s grandson. “They are letting it go.”

The Gowdy bog is now a patchwork of weeds and plants. And the weeds are winning.

It’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Since residents approved the state Open Space amendment on Election Day, that means state corporate tax business revenues that could possibly have gone to bog maintenance will be funneled towards open space, state Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson Bob Considine said.

“So priorities will have to be made with less money available,” he said. “It’s likely the maintenance of the bogs - which requires machinery we don’t own - will not be a priority.”

The bogs need to be maintained each year so sunlight can hit the cranberry plants, Crabbe said.

“You have to keep the weeds down,” he said. “You can mow them.”

Occasionally the bogs have to be sanded, too, Crabbe said.

He understands that money is the issue. But that doesn’t make it any easier to see the bogs his family cultivated for so long lay fallow.

“The longer it goes, the harder it is to get them back,” Crabbe said.

The cranberry bogs and a number of outbuildings at the park make up about 200 acres of the roughly 8,400-acre park. They are part of the Double Trouble Historic District, which was placed on the State Register of Historic Places in 1977 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Photo credits: Patricia A. Miller and Daniel Crabbe