Drive out Polpis Road past the Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum in October and you'll pass two properties that used to look identical: flat, sandy, ringed by scrub oak, flooded ankle-deep and glowing the color of cranberry sauce. Only one of them still does that. The other, Windswept Bog, hasn't turned red in years. It's not neglect. It's the result of a restoration that took four years to plan and finished construction in March 2025, and understanding why one bog kept its color while the other lost it tells you something about how this whole stretch of eastern Nantucket actually works.
One Road, Two Bogs, Same Family
Milestone Cranberry Bog and Windswept Bog both belong to the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, and both were built as commercial operations more than a century ago. The Foundation took over Milestone, the island's last commercial cranberry farm, in 1968. Windswept came under Foundation ownership a bit later, and the two properties spent the following decades under the same family's care. Tom Larrabee Sr., a Nantucket native who'd been working the bogs since 1951, was named bog manager for the Foundation in 1979. His son Tom Jr. joined him, and today the operation is run by Tom Jr.'s son, Nick Larrabee, the third generation of the same family tending land his grandfather learned by hand.
That continuity is part of what makes the split so striking. This isn't a story about one property being cared for and the other abandoned. The same people managed both bogs. One kept producing. One didn't.
The Vote That Split Their Fates
By the 2010s, cranberry farming on Nantucket was fighting an economics problem, not a soil problem. Competition from Canadian and Great Lakes growers had pushed prices down, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has pointed to warming winters as another factor changing the growing conditions cranberries depend on. Windswept had carried organic certification since 2004. Even so, in 2019 the Foundation's Board of Trustees voted to retire cranberry cultivation there for good.
Karen Beattie, the Foundation's vice president of science and stewardship, described the choice to N Magazine in direct terms: rather than let 40 acres of retired farmland just sit, "we made a conscious decision" to turn it into something else. Milestone got the opposite verdict, one Beattie tied to the reality that growing cranberries profitably has gotten harder everywhere, not just here. One bog was worth keeping as a working farm. The other was worth more as restored land.
| Milestone Bog | Windswept Bog | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Active cranberry farm | Retired 2019, restored wetland |
| Acreage under bog | About 195 acres cultivated | 40 acres former bog, now wetland |
| Total property | Surrounded by thousands of acres of Middle Moors conservation land | 231 acres total |
| Public access | Worn paths through a working farm | Marked trails, gateway to the Middle and Eastern Moors |
| What you'll see in October | Flooded red bog, wet and dry harvest | Ponds, shrub swamp, native plant regrowth |
What Four Winters of Construction Actually Did
The Windswept restoration wasn't a quick landscaping job. Planning started in 2019 and construction ran only during the winter dormant season, from November to mid-March, to avoid disturbing nesting birds and rare plants. Phase one, completed in March 2024, restored about 14 acres of former bog cells to connected wetland. Phase two, running from November 2024 through mid-March 2025, finished the remaining 26.2 acres. Crews from SumCo Eco-Contracting, working off engineering plans from Fuss & O'Neill, removed more than 2,500 feet of old berms and 28 water control structures, then dug out the sand layer that a century of cranberry farming had compacted over the original wetland soil.
The money behind it tells you how seriously the state took the project. The Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration granted more than $1.6 million toward it in 2020, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service added a $1 million National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant in 2024. That's not a typical hedge-clipping budget. It's a watershed-scale intervention.
What's grown back is already measurable. Foundation ecologist Danielle O'Dell has been tracking spotted turtles at Windswept with radio telemetry, and since the restoration finished, she's found turtles ranging across sections of the new wetland they never used before. Kelly Omand, who monitors plant recovery, has documented native wetland species reappearing from seed banks that had been buried under sand since the early 1900s. The property still functions as a public trail network too, connecting through Foundation land into the Middle and Eastern Moors and linking south to Land Bank property, so the walking access that existed when it was a working bog hasn't gone anywhere.
The Harbor Reason Nobody Photographs
Here's the part of this story that has nothing to do with turtles or wildflowers and everything to do with water you might actually put a boat or a rake into. Windswept sits in a natural basin that collects runoff from the roads, septic systems, and lawns around it, along with decades of fertilizer applied directly to the bog. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the sand layers built up over a century of cultivation let that runoff pass straight through the property and into Polpis Harbor, then on into Nantucket Harbor, where elevated bacteria and nitrogen levels have threatened the island's scalloping and boating industries.
That's the piece a drive-by glance at the bog doesn't tell you. The red water that used to sit there every October wasn't just picturesque. It was sitting on top of a drainage system that had been quietly feeding pollution into the harbor for a hundred years. Restoring the wetland's natural hydrology doesn't just bring back turtles. It restores the property's original job as a filter, catching nutrients and bacteria before they reach water where people scallop and moor boats. If you've noticed Polpis Harbor's water quality holding up, this restoration is part of why.
What Still Turns Red Every October
None of this touches Milestone, which remains the oldest continuously operated farm on the island. Nick Larrabee still manages roughly 195 acres of active bog, with help from the Foundation's Plant Propagation & Cranberry Bog Assistant, Jason Pearl. Most of the crop, about 95 percent, is wet harvested, which is what produces that flooded, floating red carpet everyone associates with cranberry season. The remaining berries are dry harvested by machine and sold fresh, both through island vendors and directly at the Foundation's office at 118 Cliff Road.
The Foundation runs a public Cranberry Harvest Tour most Octobers, led by interpretive educator Neil Foley alongside Nick Larrabee, walking visitors through the working bog to watch the dry harvest in progress. Last year's tour ran on October 15. Dates shift slightly year to year, so check the Foundation's calendar closer to the season if you want to catch it.
Walking Both This Fall
If you want to see the contrast for yourself, both properties are easy stops off Polpis Road. Windswept has marked trails, including a loop around Stump Pond, a human-made reservoir left over from the original cranberry operation that's now one of the more ecologically distinct ponds on the island. Milestone doesn't have official trails since it's still a working farm, but there are worn paths along the bog edges where you can watch the harvest without getting in the way. Both sit within a few minutes of the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, and both are reachable by the Polpis Road bike path if you'd rather pedal than park.
What you're really looking at, on either side of that stretch of road, is the same institution making two different bets about what a piece of Nantucket land is for. One bog is still worth the labor of a third-generation family business. The other is worth more as a filter for the harbor down the hill. Neither choice was sentimental. Both were made by people who've spent decades deciding what this land can still do for the island.
If watching that kind of decision play out on your own commute makes you curious about what's happening with land and value elsewhere in Polpis, that's a conversation John McGarr has regularly with people who live here. Reach out anytime, or start with a free home valuation to see where your own property stands.
