Cranberries, Saltworks, and Marconi's Wireless

Three very different industries shaped Cape Cod, and all three grew out of its sandy soil and its edge on the sea. The first is the cranberry, one of the few fruits native to North America. Around eighteen sixteen, a Revolutionary War veteran named Henry Hall, in the town of Dennis, noticed that wild cranberries grew better where wind blew beach sand over the vines.

He began deliberately sanding and transplanting them, and Cape Cod became a cradle of the cranberry industry. Those low red bogs, flooded and glowing at harvest, still ring the region, and the growers' cooperative Ocean Spray was founded in Massachusetts in nineteen thirty. The second industry was salt.

Sea captains too old to sail built long wooden vats along the shore to evaporate seawater, and by the early eighteen hundreds saltworks lined the Cape, until the railroad brought cheaper mined salt and swept them away. And the third was invisible. On a bluff at South Wellfleet, the inventor Guglielmo Marconi built a wireless station with four towers each two hundred ten feet tall.

On the eighteenth of January, nineteen oh three, from that spot, he sent the first public two-way wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean, greetings exchanged between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward the Seventh of England. The station is gone now, most of it eroded into the sea, but from this sandy arm the modern age of instant communication first reached across an ocean.