A Look Back at Falmouth’s Strawberry Heyday
by Elizabeth Saito

To appreciate the scope and importance of strawberry farming in Falmouth in the early half of the 20th century, consider these statistics: in the 1930s, at the height of the industry, Falmouth produced half the strawberries grown in the state of Massachusetts; the town produced more strawberries than any other region north of Maryland; while Barnstable County ranked only 52nd for total acreage devoted to strawberries (600 acres in Falmouth alone), per acre it was the 18th most productive county in the country. 

Almost without exception, those berries were being farmed by Portuguese immigrants, who settled in the affordable and as yet undeveloped woodlands of East Falmouth. The rate of migration is hard to imagine. A town directory from 1900 lists 31 Portuguese people living in Falmouth; by 1930, 2,000 of the town’s 5,000 residents were Portuguese. It was through the incredibly hard labor of these new immigrants that the soil of Falmouth came to bear so much fruit.

The majority of Portuguese that settled in Falmouth to farm strawberries came from the Azores, and, to a lesser extent, the Cape Verde Islands. (The Azores are a cluster of islands a thousand miles off the coast of Portugal that were discovered uninhabited in the early 1400s and populated with mainland Portuguese and a smattering of other groups from Western Europe.) In the 19th century, the Azores were a popular place for whaling ships to dock, re-supply and pick up additional crew. Many Azoreans—the majority of them poor farmers working under a feudal system of land ownership—boarded the ships bound for America. Once the trend of migration was established, regular packet ships began to run between the Azores and New Bedford, where the region’s textile industry eagerly absorbed this cheap new source of labor. It was not uncommon for immigrants to arrive by boat in the night and the next day be at work inside the factories, which were dark, loud, dirty and rank.

Falmouth resident Arlene Soares, 82, is a first generation Portuguese-American. Her parents Maria and Manuel Benevides immigrated form the Azores in 1904 and worked for several years in the Fall River mills. “My father hated the mills,” Soares told me, “so he came out by train, didn’t know where he was going, didn’t speak a word of English, and landed here in East Falmouth.”

Soares and I spoke around the kitchen table in her home on Davisville Road, just several houses down from where she was born.  Her father purchased the original homestead and a few acres around the year 1918. Over the years he expanded, buying a couple acres at a time and patiently clearing the woodland for planting. The farm eventually reached 40 acres, quite a large size for that time. Soares gestured out the window, “All this used to be my father’s land.”

Soares’ mother bore twelve children (not an unusually large number for that time). Of the eight that lived to adulthood, Arlene is the sole surviving child. Soares is small and sprightly, and has the endearing habit of addressing people as “honey”. In recalling her childhood on the farm, Soares said, “we worked—all the time, from sun up to sun down.” The family grew potatoes, asparagus and turnips, but the cash crop was strawberries. “Oh honey, you never saw such strawberries.  This land produced beautifully.”

The soil in East Falmouth is a rich silt-loam, well suited for growing strawberries (as opposed to the less productive coarse sand found elsewhere on the Cape). Strawberry growing is “a lot of work, honey!” The seedlings were planted in April and continually tended through the summer; the mother plant sent out offshoots called “runners” that had to be thinned and replanted multiple times, this in addition to constant weeding. In the fall, pine needles were spread over the beds to protect the plants through the winter. “You took care of those plants for 15 months before they produced,” Soares said.

Picking season lasted just three weeks, from mid-June to the beginning of July. Even with all the children working the fields (they were let out of school early to pick) families had to hire additional labor to get the berries off the plants quickly. It is estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 seasonal workers would come to Falmouth to pick. Soares’ mother went all the way to New Bedford to recruit pickers, who were housed in small sheds on the property. Pickers were typically other Portuguese immigrants, the majority of them Cape Verdean. (The Cape Verde Islands are off the northwestern coast of Africa. They were also discovered uninhabited in the 15th century by the Portuguese, and populated with Africans; they gained their complete independence from Portugal in 1975. The Azores remain an “autonomous region” of Portugal.) Pickers were paid in colored tickets with the farmer’s name on them, which could then be used to buy goods at neighborhood stores. At the end of the season, when the farmer got his check from the buyer, the tickets were redeemed for cash. “Pay you at strawberry time” was a common saying around town.

Soares remembers picking season as a time of excitement. “I couldn’t wait for strawberry season,” she recalled. Everybody was in the fields, and the whole neighborhood of East Falmouth energized with the single mission of getting the berries off to market before they spoiled.  Crates upon crates of strawberries could be seen stacked by the roadside. If the weather turned cold, fires were lit in the fields and tended through the night to keep frost off the berries. “By the time the three weeks of strawberry season were up, the weeds were up there like crazy,” Soares said, “and it’d be time to plow the plants under.” Fifteen months of tending the beds, three weeks of picking, and that was it: time to plow the plants to the ground and start over.

According the Falmouth resident Margaret Russell, who has done extensive research on the subject, the total Falmouth crop during the height of the industry in the 1930s, was worth—depending on the strength of the season—between $250,000 and $400,000, the equivalent today of $2.9-$4.6 million. Strawberries were the preeminent industry in town, surpassing the tourist trade. The industry’s success was largely due to the farmers’ decision to form a growers’ cooperative. Co-op members held “strawberry study groups”, shared resources, and, most important, banded together to achieve greater bargaining power.

During picking season, the co-op arranged nightly transport of the berries by truck to Boston. Cynthia Botelho, 79, of East Falmouth remembers riding along with her father, John Augusta, who served for a time as president of the co-op. Botelho says she would usually fall asleep on the drive up to the city, but would wake when they hit the cobblestones outside Quincy Market. She remembers that the trucks from Falmouth would all pull in together and the dealers would shout, “the fern berries are here” (Falmouth farmers covered their crates with ferns as a kind of trademark, and to keep the sun off the berries).  Wholesale dealers wearing Fedora hats with their shirt sleeves rolled up would crowd around the trucks. “And they’d all come, all these men, and outbid each other for the berries,” Botelho said, “and I’d be in the truck, you know, this little kid, taking it all in.”

World War II and the lifting of the Great Depression spelled the end of strawberry farming in Falmouth. With the young men off to war, and so many citizens involved with the war effort domestically, there weren’t enough workers to pick the berries. Town organizations tried to rally volunteers, German POWs were even brought down from Cape Edwards to pick, but these were patchwork and unsustainable solutions. When the war ended, men coming back from the service didn’t want to work the family farm anymore; and, at the same time, the Cape’s tourism industry began to expand. Farmland gave way to housing developments. A large number of the Portuguese went into the trades and literally built up the town. Many of the construction and landscaping businesses in town bear Portuguese names: Demello Excavation, Rapoza Sealcoating, Souza Home Improvement, to name a few.

Arthur Rapoza, 75, a retired real estate lawyer in town, helped grow strawberries as a boy on his father’s farm. When his father returned from serving in the merchant marines, he abandoned farming and went on to make his living building houses. In explaining his father’s change in profession, Rapoza said, “[strawberry farming] was an awfully hard job; planting, and plowing under, terribly difficult; not something you would look forward to, or really do if you had a lot of options.” Rapoza remembers his father plowing their fields with a horse and hand-held plow “one furrow at a time, with the reins around his neck.” Carpentry, by comparison, was much lighter work.  As another resident put it, “You planted on your knees, weeded on your knees and picked on your knees.”

Rapoza jokes that “This is not the town I grew up in: I grew up in the small town of East Falmouth. There were no strangers, everybody knew each other—my God, what a difference!” Davisville Road, where Arlene Soares grew up and still lives, is a case in point.  Davisville is a straight road, two miles long, running south from Route 28 until it hits the ocean. Soares says that back in the 1930s there were no side roads leading off Davisville, which was dirt at the time—“If you got out there in the mud, you were just stuck”—and the only houses, about 12 to 15 of them, directly abutted the street, with farmland behind.

Today, Davisville is paved with a sidewalk and yellow dividing line; multiple streets branch off it, leading to housing developments— Fisherman’s Cove, Greene Pond Estates, Seashell Lane—and at the end of the road, large estates look out onto Vineyard Sound. What was once a tight-knit community of immigrant farmers living hand to mouth is now a well-to-do neighborhood with plenty of upper-middle class retirees and vacant summer homes. “We don’t even know our neighbors,” Soares said. “Like this couple, here”—pointing next door—“very nice people, but they only come down weekends in the summertime, we don’t know them…I tell my children, my grandchildren they’ll never know the life we had: the closeness we had with all of our neighbors. If there was anybody who had a problem, no matter what it was, the neighbors were there to help.” Soares summed up her conflicted feelings about the past—did she ever wish the old days back?—by saying, “We worked hard, but we worked together.”

And it is well to remember that the goodwill and togetherness that existed within the Portuguese community did not always extend through the whole of Falmouth. It was hard to be a Portuguese immigrant in a traditionally Yankee town. The Portuguese were often looked down upon by residents of the wealthier and more established parts of town: Woods Hole, West Falmouth and the downtown area.  Alice Valadao, 82, of East Falmouth, still tenses when recalls the day her brother drove his new truck downtown, only to be told by a young man on the street that he “didn’t belong there.” “Discrimination?” she says, “Sure, there was plenty.” Although prejudice against the Portuguese eased as the years went by, with several first-generation Portuguese holding prominent positions in town government, class tensions between the different villages of Falmouth remain a reality today.

The only farm still cultivating strawberries commercially in Falmouth is Tony Andrews Farm on Old Meeting House Road (open 7 days a week June–October 31st). Andrews hailed from the Cape Verde Islands and was one of the first farmers to employ irrigation, and pioneered the practice of “pick your own” to compensate for labor shortages. Andrew’s son, Geoffrey, carries on the family tradition.  There is still an annual strawberry festival in Falmouth, although, ironically, this event was the brainchild of the local Chamber of Commerce who organized the first festival in the 1950s (as the industry was dying) as a means of attracting summer visitors. An outside consultant was hired to run the event. Arlene Soares says of the Portuguese community, “We were not really involved in that: our big celebration was the pig killing.” For obvious reasons this more authentic festival, where families gathered to slaughter their barnyard pig and make sausages and blood pudding, was not selected as a promotional tool. Soares is amused by the idea that the Portuguese would take several days off during strawberry seasons to construct elaborate floats and parade them down main street: “We did the work, honey.”

Elizabeth Saito is a freelance journalist living in Falmouth. She would like to thank Professor Frank Sousa at the UMass Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and Margaret Russell for their generous assistance in researching this article.