In 1959 the cranberry industry was devastated when the FDA announced that trace amounts of pesticides found in the berries could cause cancer in rats. While Ocean Spray eventually bounced back, that year, nationwide, Americans, including First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, served apple sauce on their Thanksgiving tables and many growers divested in the crop. That is when 60 acres in Yarmouth Port known as Simpkins Bog went on the market and was purchased by Jacki Rivero’s grandmother, Olga DiTiberio, for $5000.

On a shelf in the living room of her Yarmouth Port farmhouse is a sweet albeit aging photo of Jacki wearing a blue cardigan, her blonde wispy hair dashing over her brow, leaning into a box of cranberries perched on the bog. Her granddad Jerome Ditiberio is towering over, smiling down on her.

“This land was my refuge, retreat, escape, and just a place where a kid could let her imagination run wild,” said Jacki recalling her idyllic childhood on the land she explored with her dog. Her uncle Emmanuel DiTiberio collected old cars including an old English hackney he converted into a “bog buggy” to delight little Jacki bumping down the trails around the bogs.

The trails are mostly overgrown now but were still passable on a recent misty morning.

“Right there,” Jacki pointed into the forested wetland surrounded by the neatly cut furrows that once irrigated the bogs now filling with skunk cabbage. “That is where the photo was taken.”

In May Jacki made the second of three planned donations, 9.12 acres, of her Yarmouth Port land to the Native Land Conservancy which will ultimately amount to about 30 acres by 2028. In 2020 she began by donating 10.8 acres.

“I love this land and I want it preserved. This is what the Cape looked like when I was growing up. Now, when I die, there will be one little piece of it that will still look like Cape Cod.”

Raised and educated in Plainville, CT Jacki has always considered Simpkins Bog her home.

“Any chance we could we came up here,” she said, “we spent all summer here, we spent all the holidays here.”

It is thanks to the stubborn conviction of her grandmother who declined many lucrative offers from developers that the land is still in the family today.

“My grandmother was routinely asked, what are you gonna do with all this land? And she used to say . . . look at it.”

After college, Jacki married Martin Rivero an artist and photographer, and moved to Marin County in California where she had an IT career. In 1995 she inherited the property from her uncle Emmanuel and has lived there full-time since 2004. In 2018 she retired with the hope of spending her golden years with her husband on Simpkins Bog. Sadly, Martin became chronically ill making her a widow in 2023 but not before they decided to donate much of the Simpkins Bog land to conservation.

From the living room nostalgically furnished with her grandmother’s overstuffed chairs with wooden legs ornately carved over a braided rug, the picture window looks out on the land.

White’s Brook meanders through a pine grove, there’s honeysuckle, blueberries, concord grapes, and yes, even cranberries. It is habitat to wildlife like deer, fox, rabbits, osprey, hawks, and turkeys Jacki has a particular fondness for. Jacki and Martin were also conscious of the Wampanoag historical connection to the land. So when they approached Mark Robinson at the Compact for advice on donating the land they were happy to be matched with the Native Land Conservancy. She has now restored the land to the care of the people who are most connected to it.

“People will enjoy it,” she said. “they will walk around and say, this is what the Cape once was.”