Jim Dyck has been volunteering with the annual Fort Langley Cranberry Festival from the very beginning.
"Thirty-some years," Dyck estimated.
The former president of the Fort Langley Business Improvement Association was standing next to large bins of the bright red berries under a portable awning outside the heritage hall in Fort Langley on Saturday, Oct. 12, as people lined up to make purchases.
"I had the only forklift in town so they needed [one] to unload these bins and that's how it started," recalled Dyck, who used to own Frontier Building Supply, a hardware and lumber yard a few doors down from the distribution point.
A long time volunteer said he got started with Fort Langley's Cranberry Festival because he happened to have a forklift. Thousands turned out Saturday for the annual event. pic.twitter.com/0IVvwksCDs
— Langley Advance Times (@LangleyTimes) October 12, 2024
Most festivals, Dyck gets going around 7 a.m. and continues until the berries sell out, around 4 p.m.
"I notice we don't have quite as many [berries] this year as in the past, which is a good thing, because it's very difficult to try to get rid of them at the end of the day," Dyck explained.
"Ocean Spray [the supplier] won't take them back."
As it does every year, Ocean Spray, a cooperative of cranberry growers, donated 5,000 pounds of berries to the festival, which were sold for $5 minimum for five pounds, with all the money going towards covering the cost of the event.
In addition to serving up berries, Dyck is also a buyer.
"My wife always requests some."
Fort Langley's annual Cranberry Festival is underway, an annual event celebrating and recognizing the cranberry's role in local history going back thousands of years pic.twitter.com/MmHdstjopO
— Langley Advance Times (@LangleyTimes) October 12, 2024
Langley Township Mayor Eric Woodward was also handing out packages of cranberries at the 29th annual autumn festival.
"It gets a bit better and bigger every year," Woodward noted.
"There's more vendors and more activities and it gets a little bit better every year."
Weather was ideal, sunny and warm, bringing out thousands who filled a cordoned-off Glover Road, which was packed with vendors and food trucks. Many queued up for the Lions pancake breakfast in the park across the street from the hall.
Fort Langley National Historic Site also celebrated Cranberry Fest with free admission, a cranberry stomping demonstration, cranberry treats, and presentations about the history of the cranberry trade and its impact on the Fort’s history.
Fort Langley was established by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1827, where cranberries traded with Indigenous growers were packaged into barrels and shipped to San Francisco for sale. They were widely used on sailing ships to prevent scurvy.
According to the B.C. Cranberry Marketing Commission, the province provides about 12 per cent of the North American crop,with 6,500 acres in the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island yielding more than 1 million barrels.
A grassroots annual event that draws an average of 35,000 visitors every year, the Fort Langley festival started in 1995 to celebrate the annual harvest and the history of the cranberry in the area and Fort Langley's earlier years.
In agreement with the Fort Langley Business Improvement Association, the Eric Woodward Foundation assumed long-term stewardship of the Cranberry Festival in 2020.
