Cranberry Fun Facts

The cranberry gets its name from Dutch and German settlers, who nicknamed it the “crane berry”. When cranberry vines bloom in the late spring, the pale flowers resemble the head and bill of a crane.
The cranberry is one of only a handful of major fruits native to North America. Others include the blueberry and Concord grape.
A barrel of cranberries weighs 100 pounds. Give or take a few, there are about 450 cranberries in a pound and 4,400 cranberries in one gallon of juice.
Cranberries are primarily grown in five U.S. states - Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington - as well as British Columbia and Quebec, Canada.
Contrary to popular belief, cranberries do not grow in water. A perennial plant, cranberries grow on low-running vines in sandy bogs and marshes. Because cranberries float, some bogs are flooded with water when the fruit is ready for harvest. Others are harvested using machines that resemble lawnmowers that “comb” fresh cranberries off the vines.
Cranberries bounce! Small pockets of air inside the fruit enable fresh fruit to bounce. It is also what makes berries float in water, which is how many cranberries are harvested.
If all the cranberry bogs in North America were put together, they would comprise an area equal in size to the tiny island of Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, which is approximately 47 square miles.
If you strung all the cranberries produced in North America last year, they would stretch from Boston to Los Angeles more than 565 times.

Historically speaking

Native Americans used cranberries, fat and ground venison to make a survival cake known as pemmican. They also used the fruit in poultices and fabric dyes.
Legend has it that Pilgrims served cranberries, along with wild turkey and succotash, at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Documentation suggests that the first commercial cranberry harvest took place in Dennis, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod) in 1816.
In the 1880s, a New Jersey grower named John “Peg Leg” Webb discovered that cranberries bounce. Instead of carrying his crop down from the storage loft of his barn, Webb poured them down the steps. He noticed that only the freshest, firmest fruit reached the bottom; rotten or bruised berries didn't bounce and remained on the steps. This discovery led to the invention of "bounceboards", tools used to separate rotten berries from fresh ones.
During World War II, American troops required about one million pounds of dehydrated cranberries a year.
Today, Americans consume some 400 million pounds of cranberries each year, 20 percent of that during Thanksgiving week!