$80 a Barrel in 1998. About $22 at the Last Big Thacher Harvest.

HARWICH · THE LAST BIG HARVEST

Ray Thacher Jr. keeps a two-acre bog by his home. He says the trust that bought the 50 acres takes over in January.

5 min read · A Celebrate Lower Cape spotlight

A hundred pounds of cranberries brings about $22 this year. That figure is Ray Thacher Jr.'s, given to the Cape Cod Chronicle this month, and he set it beside two others: $50 a barrel in the 1980s, and $80 in 1998.

On Oct. 15, by the Chronicle's photo captions, Jayne Thacher, Nicolle Estrada, and Ray Thacher III worked the last harvest on the family's bogs off Great Western Road in North Harwich. If you've ridden the Harwich stretch of the Cape Cod Rail Trail (a route this newsletter mapped in May), you've likely had the moment the Harwich Conservation Trust describes, when the woods open onto these bogs.

So why does a family that has grown cranberries in Harwich since the mid-1950s stop on its Great Western Road bogs? And what becomes of a bog when nobody floods it for harvest again?

A truck and a bulldozer

The family business began, in the Chronicle's telling, with Ray Jr.'s father, the late Raymond "Link" Thacher, shortly after high school. He bought a truck and a bulldozer and hired out on other growers' bogs.

The farmers often paid him in pieces of their bogs.

In 1956 he bought the five-acre Dam Brook Bog, near what became the family home on Main Street. In 1964 he and two partners bought an 80-acre parcel of bogs stretching across Great Western Road, and the business grew from there. A 2024 Chronicle report says he turned the bogs over to his son in 2015.

Nine lots that never got built

Now the arithmetic. At about $22, a barrel brings a little more than a quarter of what Thacher says it did in 1998, $58 less for the same hundred pounds, in dollars not adjusted for inflation. It wasn't easy surviving at $50 a barrel, Thacher told the Chronicle, and the berries in supermarkets now come from Wisconsin, the top-producing state, by his account.

Michael Lach, the trust's executive director, put the pressure plainly when the trust announced the planned purchase in 2024. "It's important to recognize that it's the economic market forces that are causing local bog owners to look for alternatives," he said. "Overproduction of cranberries in the Midwest and in Canada has hurt the local market."

For this land, the alternative had a number too. The trust's project page calls the 50 acres the largest remaining undeveloped parcel in Harwich and says it could have become a nine-lot subdivision. Instead, the trust reported in January, a $3.5 million purchase closed in 2025: $2 million from the state, $500,000 from Harwich's Community Preservation Fund, and the rest from donors.

Two acres on the other side

The Chronicle reports that the trust bought "50 acres around the 21 acres in and around the bogs." When the trust bought them, Ray Thacher Jr. signed a two-year lease to keep harvesting, and he told the paper the trust takes over in January. No day has been published.

Oct. 15 was the last harvest off those bogs. It was not, by his own account, the family's last cranberry. He is keeping the two-acre bog next to his home, on the opposite side of Great Western Road, and he says he will keep harvesting there.

"We do not yet have a timeline"

What comes next is a plan, not a schedule. The trust plans a "rewilding" of the land for wildlife, wetland health, water quality, and walking trails, and a $150,000 grant from the state Division of Ecological Restoration is paying for groundwater and surface-water flow data and early design concepts, according to the trust. Money for final design and permits still has to be found.

The trust has done this before, on retired bogs off Bank Street. At Cold Brook, the stream runs free again, and an otter moved into the den built for it. The trust's January post had a line for anyone waiting on Great Western Road: "These complex eco-restorations take time, but as folks have experienced the results at Cold Brook and Hinckleys Pond, it's worth the wait."

Lach, speaking to the Chronicle this month, was more exact about the wait:

KEEP READING

What Harwich does with old bogs

Retired cranberry land, and what the trust has already turned it into.