Grandma's blueberry battalion

Forest blueberries. Source: USDA.gov

 © 2022 Christy K Robinson 

My grandmother, Lois Stone Steen, of International Falls, Minnesota, was a monster about wild blueberries. 

My great-aunt Helen (top-center) at age 18 in 1933,
blueberry picker!

My Arizona parents scheduled the annual 2,000-mile road trip to coincide with the Minnesota blueberry picking season in late July and early August, and the aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors were recruited to go out picking en masse. Everyone either arrived at the rendezvous with pails, pots, or plastic buckets or were issued them in a military-style operation. 

It was an all-day event with a break for sandwiches and coffee at lunchtime. I was just a little kid who probably ate a third of the berries I picked. And though the only thing I had to worry about was touching poison ivy, I suppose that the adults were bear spotters. 

My grandmother Lois with her blueberry collection pot,
her sister-in-law Mary, and sister Helen (age 38 here),
with my uncle David (eating blueberries), cousin Linda, and aunt Harriet. 

Blueberry pickers at lunch time: Lois's husband Harry Steen, Louis Prebil,
Russell Stone, Helen Stone Prebil, David Forsell, Harriet Steen, Mary Stein Stone,
and Terry Stone.

At the end of the day, we dumped our pails into a big tub in Grandma's back yard, and the berries were rinsed and air dried. 

My cousin Trish said, "We used to go out all day with Grandma Anna [Glad-Hall] and pick outside of International Falls, cleaned them by putting a wool blanket on a table and rolling the berries over the blanket. All the leaves stuck to the blanket. A lot of the berries were frozen after cleaning and enjoyed all winter.”

Finally, over the next days, there was baking. There was canning. There was freezing. There was jamming. There were blueberry pancakes.

The blueberries came back to the relatives, neighbors, and church members as treats in many forms. When I say "monster," it's because it was an operation she organized, and many people were happy to participate--and enjoy the fruits thereof. 

Seeing scans of old albums like the 1933 photo above, makes me think that the blueberry madness was something my grandmother, the oldest child of six in a financially strapped family, learned from her mother and grandmother. My cousin Trish's memory of her grandmother Anna (who was my grandmother's aunt by marriage and a good friend of my grandmother) indicates that the blueberry hunters were foraging and harvesting the forests around their town, to supplement their diets all year. By the time I came along as a child in the 1960s, it was more of a traditional social event than a harvest so they'd have food in the cellar.

If you've speed-read this article to the end so you can find a recipe for wild blueberries, I'm sorry. This is not a recipe blog. It's about history and ancestry. I wish you well in finding a great recipe for cobbler or muffins (I'm a jammer and sell or give my jams in November and December). But I hope this anecdote about picking berries in summer will resonate with your own personal history. 

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Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title):  

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)

When the dog days of summer are actually dog months

I offer up these photos of my great-aunt Helen Stone Prebil, doing what she and her sisters often did in the winters of International Falls, Minnesota. Temperatures could often be -40 degrees for days at a time. The weather there is so extreme that my mother, who had been born with severe lung disease, had to spend some of her high school years with relatives in warm and dry California. When she was 18, she married my father and they prepared to move to Arizona for her health. Phoenix has long been known as therapeutic for TB and asthma patients. Living here extended her life by about 35 years. 

Family road trips took almost 3 days and nights of driving,
in the days before the interstate highway system.

I was born in Phoenix, where the daytime summer temperatures can be 112-120º for days and weeks at a time, punctuated by the occasional humid day with monsoon storms. It takes imagination to survive those days even with expensive air conditioning, wet towels on the shoulders, and fans. It takes thinking about snow and drinking iced tea.

When my mom was younger, she'd tell me about how her crazy aunts Ruby, Ruth, and Helen would go out into the International Falls snow in their swimsuits and take pictures of how brave they were. Sure enough, my cousin scanned this one from her grandmother Helen's album. Obviously taken in the 1930s, it was in black and white. But with photo editing apps and utilities, I've colorized it to immortalize great-aunt Helen frolicking in the snow.

I hope we all feel cooler for having seen it!