Agriculture and people

Angelina DiMatteo's death picking at the Evans & Wills bogs

Newspaper-index summary; single source

An October 1937 newspaper index record reports the sudden death of Angelina DiMatteo, 35, a Vineland woman picking cranberries at the Evans & Wills bogs in Medford, and names the foreman, doctor and coroner involved.

Taken ill at the bogs

A Burlington County Library index summary of the New Jersey Mirror's October 27, 1937 "The Local News in Brief" column records the death of Mrs. Angelina DiMatteo, 35, of Vineland. By that record she was taken ill early on a Monday morning at the Evans & Wills cranberry bogs in Medford, where she worked as a picker, and died soon afterwards; the record attributes the death to heart disease. Which Monday is not established. Several other records in this index carry a librarian's bracketed reading of a relative day reference, and this one does not, so no calendar date is claimed here beyond a Monday shortly before the October 27 issue.

The record names the foreman at the bogs, Julius Gerber, who sent for a doctor, E. J. Haines of Medford, after she was taken ill; by the account she died before the physician reached her. Coroner Clarence S. Roberts Jr., of Moorestown, was called and issued the burial certificate. Her body was sent to Vineland for burial. That the coroner issued a burial certificate is all the record says of any official examination: it reports no autopsy, no inquest and no formal determination of cause, so the heart-disease attribution is the newspaper's, carried here as such.

A Vineland picker at a Medford bog

The item is four sentences long, and most of what can be said about it is what it does not say. It gives DiMatteo's name, age and home town, the bog she was working, and the three men called to her — a foreman, a doctor, a coroner — and then it stops. It does not say how long she had been at Medford, whether she travelled with family or a crew, where pickers were housed, or anything about the Evans & Wills operation beyond its name and its town.

It is worth noting what is absent in tone as well. Papers of this period often wrote about Italian-named labourers dismissively, and that register does turn up elsewhere in this same index — a 1917 item in it refers to the men who attacked a cranberry payroll party simply as "the Italians" (see John Rigley's 1917 suit). Nothing of that kind appears in this record: this record is plain and unadorned, and it names her, which such items frequently did not. Her removal to Vineland for burial is consistent with the well-attested pattern of South Jersey pickers travelling to Burlington County bogs for the harvest, though the record itself does not describe her as a seasonal or migrant worker, and this entry does not assert that she was.

Sources and research limits

Burlington County Library index to the New Jersey Mirror, October 27, 1937, page 5, column 4, under the running head "THE LOCAL NEWS IN BRIEF / Items of Interest to Residents of Mount Holly and Vicinity" — Re-checked on September 13, 2026 by searching the index for the surname DiMatteo, which returns this row and no other. What was inspected is the librarian-written summary of a single short item, not the newspaper page, which was not seen. Nothing is quoted from that summary here; it is retold in this writer's words. Limits: the record does not identify which Monday, and no calendar date is asserted; it reports heart disease as the cause but records no autopsy, inquest or medical finding, only a coroner's burial certificate; it says nothing about the Evans & Wills operation beyond its name and location. No second source for DiMatteo, the bogs, or the men named was found, so every fact here rests on this one index record.