Kidder Mountain
New Ipswich Historical Society
Kidder Mountain
Newspaper Clipping
PICKED 25,000 BOXES OF BLUEBERRIES
Sept. 14, 1930
NEW IPSWICH, N. H., Sept. 14- The little town of New Ipswich, in the southern part of New Hampshire, boasts of the champion blueberry- picking family in New England. The family consists of a mother and nine children and is known to the population of the little town as the Koivula family.
During the eight weeks of the blueberry-picking season the mother and the nine children have realized the sum of $2500 for the berries that they have picked. These facts became known today, when officials of the United Co-operative Farmers, Inc., of Fitchburg, Mass., who marketed the berries, made the fact known. As the average price at wholesale was 10 cents per box, it will be seen that the family picked 25,000 boxes during the picking season.
James Roger diary entries
11th August 1912
Showers during night; fair and warm after; wind S.E. Mr. Lord preached from Psalm “What is Man that thou art mindful of him.” Thin attendance. Vesper Service at 4 p.m. Miss Brown & Mrs. Phelps Soloists. C. Perry violinist. Fair attendance. Sunday School: 12 Seniors; 5 Juniors. Collection: 23 cents. Service in Baptist Church at 7 p.m. and at Homestead 7:30.
Good for the Koivulas. We picked berries as an extended family in their pastures when we were kids. To bring home for making pies and cakes and freezing for later. The family were very smart about their berry business and tolerated no fooling around. They’d accept kids coming back from picking with blue teeth but were very strict about weighing up what you picked. Even in a little tin beach pail. Our mothers fortunately impressed upon us idiotic children to act with respect; the outing wasn’t supposed to be a field day. Somehow we managed to make it so. A rite of passage for Finn kids to understand from whence our food came. Our parents had been hungry during the Depression and our grandparents in Finland before emigrating. They knew how closely the proverbial wolf lurked near the door.
My father Toivo Kangas, related to me how he would pick blueberries on Kidder Mountain for the Koivula’s in the late 1920’s & early 1930’s and he was paid 5 cents a quart. I said to him, “Is that all?” He replied that, “There wasn’t much choice in those days.” So after paying the pickers there was still a little room for a retail mark up to 10 cents. The last commercial truck I saw collecting blueberries in New Ipswich from local blueberry fields was around 1971. Later on my parents “introduced” us to family blueberry picking on Kidder Mountain when I was 5 or 6 in the early 1960’s. By that time the Koivula’s were no longer commercially harvesting blueberries and instead they were charging a small fee for each quart of self picked blueberries. One would pay at a window on their house which they would open when you were ready to leave. I still remember the locations on the mountain where we could find the largest and sweetest berries.