DID YOU KNOW…
…Raspberry Days in Garden City is a regular phenomenon
these days. Now Bear Lake raspberries are
not the grocery store variety. Their
unique flavor may be described as eating a handful of sun ripened, freshly
picked raspberries after just finishing a breath mint. But what makes them so delicious? It might be the cooler climate or perhaps the
types of seeds they plant. In any event,
they are sensational! But what did
“berry season” mean to the farmers in the early 1900’s? Grace Sims Anderson Owen and Stella Sims Terry
Long describe it this way in their “Life Stories” recalling the experience as
children:
“During the summer we would pick raspberries until the day’s
orders from Randolph and Woodruff were picked into customers’ bottles. Boxes (which had the customers’ names on)
were placed by the road and one of the little kids was sent to sit there until
John Jensen (the mailman) came along to pick them up. They would flag him down. It wasn’t hard as during the berry season, he was
watching for them. If there weren’t
enough orders to take care of all the berries, Mom and Dad would get a load of
berries and vegetables and would either take them to Montpelier or Evanston to
sell. When we would get done picking berries, gardening, or other work, no
matter how tired we were, we would go to the lake with a bar of soap and have a
bath and swim for a while. This would
revive us; and we would be ready to go roller skating or dancing, riding bicycles,
picking wildflowers or just walking.
In the fall we would pick the apples. We older kids would climb up into the trees
and pick the apples into buckets and then let the buckets down on ropes to the
littler kids on the ground, and they would dump them into baskets and we would
pull them back up the tree to fill again.
Then Mom and Dad would take the back seat out of the car and fill this
area and trunk with apples and take them off to sell. Sometimes they would take them to Cokeville,
or Kemmerer, Wyoming, for example, to peddle.
If the people wanted the fruit and didn’t have the money, they would
trade for calves, chickens, baby pigs, or anything that would help on our farm
to make money.”
If their efforts were
profitable enough, their trips to Kemmerer included a stop at J. C. Penneys to
buy a few clothes and shoes for the kids. Did you know the Kemmerer store
is the “original” J. C. Penneys. It was
founded in 1902 by James Cash Penney and is referred to as the “Mother Store”
or “Store Number 1” and is still a tourist attraction today.
The farmers in the early years in Bear Lake were certainly
resourceful. They had to be, for on many
occasions, it meant their survival. Just
imagine what effort it would have taken to make that delicious raspberry shake you’ll
enjoy these Raspberry Days in Garden City!
Everett Lois
(Tremelling) Buelah
Grace
Roger Keller (Anderson) Cal
Everett Sims and family with their stylish “raspberry
picking” hats in front of their raspberry patch at their farm in Swan Creek (about 1947).
