[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 198 (Wednesday, December 13, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2350-E2351]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO MR. STEPHEN LEE, LOCAL FARMER, PATRIARCH, AND AMERICAN
SUCCESS STORY
______
HON. JIM SAXTON
of new jersey
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, December 13, 1995
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Speaker, several weeks ago our Nation celebrated the
Thanksgiving holiday. It was a time to spend gathered with family and
being thankful for all that we have. For the family of Stephen V. Lee,
Jr., a local cranberry farmer back home in my district, it was a time
to truly give thanks.
Stephen Lee is an American success story. After serving his country
in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Mr. Lee returned to America and
took up the family tradition as a cranberry farmer.
Although his family had successfully farmed their property as early
as the 1870's, the Great Depression had forced its closure until Mr.
Lee took individual initiative to restore and revive the family's
agricultural heritage. After years of hard work, Mr. Lee and his sons
reclaimed the land, restored old bogs, and built new ones used for
growing the berries. His original loan of a couple thousand dollars in
the 1940's has flourished into a multimillion-dollar farm. Throughout
this productive return to the family heritage of cranberry farming, Mr.
Lee has continued to be a strong father and grandfather as well as a
leader throughout the community.
Mr. Speaker, recently Modern Maturity magazine published a story
entitled ``Crimson Harvest'' which details the life of Stephen Lee. I
would ask that this article also be included as part of Extension of
Remarks as a tribute to Mr. Lee.
[From Modern Maturity, Nov.-Dec. 1995]
Crimson Harvest
(By Mark Wexler)
On a brisk autumn afternoon Stephen V. Lee, Jr., looks out
onto a sea of floating red berries and beams like a little
boy who has just opened a bag of Halloween candy. ``How
that's what I call a pretty crop,'' he says with a big smile.
``There's good crimson color on the fruit this year, and that
means a sweet Thanksgiving.''
Lee is a fourth-generation cranberry farmer living the
American dream in the heart of New Jersey's scenic Pine
Barrens region. In the late 1940s he used a $4,000 loan to
rescue his historic family farm from the brink of bankruptcy.
Now, after years of hard work, he's turned the operation into
a million-dollar business.
``This is my life,'' he says, pointing to the miles of red-
colored bogs surrounded by trees and marshes. ``I've got
cranberry juice running through my veins.'' Today, at 85, Lee
continues to put in long days in what he calls his ``labor of
love.'' and his two sons are by his side.
Family farmers like the Lees cultivate most of the world's
cranberries on only about 30,000 acres in the United States
and Canada. There are 44 other families that grow the berries
in the Pine Barrens, a 2,000-square-mile oasis of forests,
wetlands and wildlife in southern New Jersey that in 1979 was
designated a federal preserve, which protects the area by
controlling development. Last year Pine Barrens growers
produced more than 53 million pounds of cranberries, a figure
only Massachusetts and Wisconsin farmers surpassed. ``It's
not the easiest way to make a living,'' says Lee, ``but it
keeps me young.''
The object of Lee's affection is more American than apple
pie. European settlers introduced the apple to this
continent; the cranberry is native to North America. A
slender vine that creeps along the ground, the cranberry
plant produces a tart-tasting, finicky fruit that survives
only in very specialized conditions: It requires an acid peat
soil, sand, plenty of fresh water, and a growing season
stretching from April to November. Under those conditions the
vines can live indefinitely; some Cape Cod cranberry plants
are more than 150 years old.
Cranberries don't actually grow in water. Instead, they
blossom on the dense mat of vines that make up impermeable
beds in marshy areas called bogs, which glacial deposits
originally formed. Native Americans in the Northeast picked
the berries from the natural bogs and used them to flavor
their food and dye their blankets and clothing. Because raw
cranberries have an astringent effect that contracts tissue
and stops bleeding, the Indians also used the fruit to make
poultices for wounds. And they made a tea from the leaves to
use as a diuretic.
Legend has it that when the Pilgrims arrived in New England
in 1620, the Wampanoag Indians who greeted them gave the
settlers ibimi (``bitter berries'') as goodwill gifts.
Apparently the word ibimi didn't roll easily off the Plymouth
colonists' tongues, so they coined their own names for the
fruit. Noticing that the vine's flowers vaguely resembled
cranes' heads, they eventually dubbed their new food ``crane-
berries.''
Historians disagree over whether cranberries were actually
served at the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, but one fact
is certain: They became a big hit with the English settlers,
who found the fruit not only edible and useful as a dye but
also ``excellent against the Scurvy.''
Word of the miraculous berries soon spread back to England,
and the colonists recognized a good thing when they saw it.
With a
[[Page E2351]]
bottle of cranberries fetching several shillings in London, the
colonists began picking as much of the wild fruit during
autumn as they could get their hands on. They even tried to
pacify their king with the berries: In 1677 the colonists
sent ``tenn barrells of cranburyes,'' along with Indian corn
and 3,000 codfish, as a peace offering to Charles II, who was
angry with the New World residents for minting their own
coins.
In 1816 American Revolution veteran Henry Hall made a
discovery that would change the nature of cranberry-
harvesting forever. At his seaside farm on Cape Cod, Hall
decided to cut down some trees growing on a hill overlooking
the beach. Wild cranberries grew in a marsh behind the hill.
With the trees gone, the wind whipped sand onto the vines.
Hall expected the plants to die, but the opposite occurred:
The cranberries flourished under the sand while competing
weeds disappeared. Hall began transplanting his vines,
fencing them in and covering them with sand.
Thus cranberry cultivation was born.
Stephen Lee, a native of Ireland, bought 2,000 acres of New
Jersey pinelands in 1868. The area, he discovered, was
perfect for growing the cranberries. Woodlands and freshwater
marshes pockmarked the landscape, while he could easily
flatten the sandy soil to cultivate the fruit.
During the 1870s Lee and his son, James, carved out a
series of cranberry bogs, most of which are still in use.
Cranberry farming in those days was not necessarily
profitable, and for the next two generations the Lee family
struggled. As the Great Depression took hold, the family shut
down the farm operation and moved to a nearby town.
Meanwhile, cranberry growers elsewhere had developed new
methods to improve their harvest. Around the turn of the
century, Wisconsin farmers found they could harvest twice as
many berries by flooding their bogs then scooping up the
floating fruit. (Flooding also gets rid of insects and
protects against frost.) A Few years later Boston attorney
and cranberry grower Marcus Urann had another idea: a canned
sauce made from cranberries that, according to the label, was
``like homemade.'' In 1930 he merged his company with two
other firms to form the Ocean Spray cooperative, owned today
by the very farmers who grow the berries.
One of those farmers, U.S. Navy veteran Stephen V. Lee, Jr.
(great-grandson of the Stephen Lee mentioned earlier),
survived both the Normandy invasion and fiery battles in the
South Pacific during World War II before returning to New
Jersey to pick up the pieces of the family farm.
Lee borrowed $4,000 from Ocean Spray and began the arduous
task of reclaiming the land. Starting with some of the
original vines his ancestor had planted, he restored the bogs
and constructed new ones. ``It takes about seven years to
develop a productive bog,'' he says.
Eventually Lee's cranberry bogs began to pay off, while the
industry itself was expanding its product lines to include
juices that were, according to the ads, ``a food drink that
aids digestion.''
Then came ``Black Monday.''
Seventeen days before Thanksgiving 1959 federal authorities
announced that some Oregon and Washington cranberries were
contaminated with a herbicide that was known to cause cancer
in laboratory rats. The Secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare suggested that Americans ``pass up cranberries this
year.'' Growers protested, claiming a person would have to
eat 15,000 pounds of contaminated cranberries every day for
years to get cancer. Vice President Richard Nixon solemnly
ate four helpings of cranberry sauce on television to
demonstrate that the fruit was safe. But the damage was done.
``We took a terrible loss that year,'' says Lee. ``Nobody was
buying the stuff. It took a few years for us to recover.''
Today, cranberries aren't seen as posing a health threat;
in fact, they're widely considered beneficial. In 1994
doctors at Harvard Medical School released a study that
confirms an old folk remedy: Cranberry juice really does help
prevent urinary-tract infections. The researchers reported
that the women who drank ten ounces of cranberry beverage
daily for six months were 58 percent less likely to have such
infections than the women who drank a placebo beverage.
Scientists had thought the berries' acidic nature knocked out
infection, but the new study suggests that cranberries
contain a compound that prevents infectious bacteria from
adhering to the bladder walls. The doctors studied only older
women because they are most prone to the infections. (Women
in general have a much higher rate of urinary-tract problems
than men.)
Motivated in part by such discoveries, Americans now
consume more than 340 million pounds of cranberries a year.
In the past decade Ocean Spray's sales have nearly tripled to
more than $1 billion annually.
``When I was young, there weren't a lot of choices with
cranberries. You ate sauce--and more sauce,'' says Stephen V.
Lee III, who returned home in 1973 to help run the family
farm after serving as a flight instructor at the U.S. Air
Force Academy in Colorado. Today Stephen III runs the
business end of the operation--a task his mother, Marjorie,
performed until her death in the early 1970s. ``My parent's
policy was that their children should go off and try other
occupations before deciding on careers as cranberry
farmers,'' he says.
His younger brother, Abbott, decided on his career several
years ago after studying agriculture at a nearby college.
Today he maintains the family's 125 acres of cranberry bogs,
using innovative harvesting equipment he himself invented to
reduce manpower needs.
The brothers' father, Stephen V., Jr., bounds across a dirt
mound bordering one of the bogs and scoops up a handful of
berries from a flooded area. ``There's a rule of thumb with a
family farm like this,'' he says. ``The first generation
acquires the land, the second generation improves it, and the
third gets to spend the money.''
It didn't quite work that way for the Lee patriarch,
however, ``My sons are the fifth generation,'' he chuckles.
``And they're the ones who are really getting to enjoy the
fruits of all this labor.''
____________________