One apple enthusiast in North Carolina has dedicated himself to rescuing heritage apples, rescuing over 1,000 types from extinction.
Tom Brown is a 79-year-old retired engineer who owns an apple orchard in Clemmons, North Carolina. This Appalachian homesteader has found a second calling in his efforts to save as many apples from extinction as possible.
It all started back in 1998, when Brown took a trip to the farmer’s market that would change his life. “There was a little stand with a bunch of strange-looking apples laid out in baskets,” he says. At the stand, there were apples the likes of which Brown had never seen.
The apples had bright green, pink, black-purple, and yellow flesh, and they came in all shapes and sizes. Upon tasting the many types, Brown found that their flavours were as diverse as their appearances. From the Newtown Pippin to the Grimes Golden to the Arkansas Black, the apples opened up a whole new world. Unfamiliar names such as Black Winesap, Candy Stripe, Royal Lemon, Rabun Bald, Yellow Bellflower, and Night Dropper pair with tales that seem plucked from pomological lore.
Take the Junaluska apple. Legend has it the variety was standardized by Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains more than two centuries ago and named after its greatest patron, an early-19th-century chief. Old-time orchardists say the apple was once a Southern favourite, but disappeared around 1900.
Brown tasted Jonathans that had rosé wine-colored flesh. Rusty Coats were soft like pears and sweet like honey. The mammoth Twenty Ounce was crisp with a tart, peachy finish. Semi-firm Etter’s Gold brought peony bouquets and grape flavors. Grimes Golden were sweet with a hint of nutmeg and white pepper.
Brown began talking to the vendor, learning that the apples he was selling were standardised in the 18th and 19th centuries, and had disappeared from the market by 1950. The vendor, orchardist Maurie Marshall, had obtained most of his old varieties personally from mountain homesteaders and apple-hunting expeditions.
Marshall also shared that hundreds of lost apples could be discovered throughout the old orchards of Appalachia through apple-hunting, a fact that Brown took to heart. “That part stayed with me,” says Brown. “I kept thinking: ‘How neat would it be to find an apple nobody’s tasted in 50 or 100 years?'”
The idea of hundreds of delicious fruit disappearing from existence seemed unfathomable to Brown, and he began researching Appalachia’s heritage apple varieties. He found that American orchards were growing about 14,000 different apple varieties at the start of the 20th century, mostly in Appalachia.
Commercial orchards in the U.S. grew about 14,000 unique apple varieties in 1905, and most of them could be found in Appalachia, says William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard and a professor of American history at Muskingum University.
There were no native North American apples except a few varieties of crabapple. The early settlers brought with them several hundred varieties from Europe. Later, the government brought in additional promising varieties. One of these was the Lieby, which was imported from Russia in 1870.
On one of my adventures, I met a man from Wilkes County who told me about remembering a Lieby apple. This started a two-year search that ended by my finding the Lieby apple in Iredell County, NC It is crisp with a subtle spicy taste and is slightly dry. The key to finding the old varieties, I’ve found, is to talk to as many elderly people as humanly possible.
Historically the abundance of apples was rooted in the colonists’ beverage preferences. Fermented beverages were popular at the time, since water wasn’t always safe to drink. Apple orchards were easier to maintain than barley fields for beer, so cider became the preferred alcoholic drink. Because of this, apple orchards were planted in abundance throughout the East Coast during the 18th century, supplying the colonists with homegrown apple cider.
Appalachia offered ideal growing conditions, from the hot summers to the rich soil. Because of this, the Shenandoah Valley was the top apple growing region by the early 1800s, and apple growers were experimenting with abandon. Growers did things like cross tannin-rich indigenous crabapples with Old World cider staples. This led to a wide variety of types of apples, such as the Taliaferro, which Thomas Jefferson declared the greatest cider apple in the world.
“The goal was to be able to pick fresh apples from June to November, and have a diverse supply of fruit throughout the year,” says Brown. Thick-skinned, late-ripening varieties provided wintertime pomaceous treats. Others were tweaked for applications such as frying, baking, dehydrating, making vinegar, and finishing livestock.
One of the ones good for drying is the October apple. It was found in Alexander County, NC. It is a deep beautiful red colour, having a dense yellow flesh and is great for drying and general cooking. In the same area, I found a Custard apple, perfect for open-faced apple pies with its spicy taste, holding its shape during cooking.
I have been enriched by the wonderful stories of the many elderly people I’ve talked with about apples. They’ve told me how to make water apple dumplings, how to preserve apples using sulfur and hot coals, the 1923 great flood, walking over a mountain in the snow to go to school, the shooting at the court house, delivering apples to a distant city with a wagon and a team of mules, etc. Along with the many unique, beautiful and delicious varieties of apples, these wonderful stories are also rapidly slipping away.
Apples were the garden’s crown jewels, says Appalachian Food Summit co-founder and renowned chef, Travis Milton. People took pride in having something unique to brag about to their neighbours.
However, due to urban migration, factory tampering, and food corporations, the Appalachian tradition of heritage apples was destroyed throughout the 1900s. Small orchards eventually went out of business, as conglomerates were only interested in apple varieties that matured quickly and withstood long-distance shipping. By the end of the 20th century, there were less than 100 apple varieties being produced by commercial orchards, and 11,000 heirloom apples had gone extinct.
“It upset me to learn about that,” says Brown. “These were foods that people had once cared about deeply, that’d been central to their lives. It felt wrong to just let them die.”
Brown was deeply upset to learn about the many lost apple varieties, and this feeling spurred him into action. Brown was in search of a retirement hobby, and his experience as an engineer would give him the organisation necessary for such a task. He had inadvertently discovered a new passion in his mid-70’s, and he was ready to dive in.
Marshall connected Tom Brown with a group of heritage orchardists, who taught him about identifying, grafting, and maintaining heritage apple trees. He learned about the lost apple varieties, making lists of their former growing locations and distinguishing characteristics.
Brown started by visiting former popular growing locations, along with placing ads in newspapers to glean information about old apple trees. “When I explain what I’m doing, most people are really receptive,” said Brown. However, many of the people who contacted him didn’t offer any concrete information, instead telling childhood stories about “old man such-and-such had a tree with 20 different types of apples grafted onto it.”
However, through detective work, persistence, and more than a few wild goose chases, Brown began to track down growing locations of heirloom varieties like the Royal Lemon, Neverfail, Candy Stripe, and Black Winesap. He drives over 30,000 miles a year to identify and catalogue heritage species, and his heritage orchard in North Carolina is filled with clones of rediscovered heritage varieties.
“Saving an apple from the brink of extinction is a miraculous feeling,” says Brown. “It’s incredibly rewarding–and incredibly addictive!”
This apple hunter has found his “true life’s work,” and is racing against time to save as many apple varieties as he can. Brown has saved about 1,200 and hopes to recover another 100 varieties or more in his lifetime, but says that even just one more would be rewarding enough.
Today Brown’s orchard is filled with clones of trees recovered in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. He divides time between apple-hunting, tending trees, donating scionwood to nonprofit heritage orchards, and selling about 1,000 saplings annually.
Brown’s work has been commended by conservationists and culinary professionals alike. Chefs like Travis Milton are stoked to have hundreds of new flavours to experiment with. Craft cidermakers say reintroduced heirlooms are inspiring a cider renaissance.
“Tom has helped redefine what’s possible,” says Foggy Ridge Cider owner, Diane Flynt, who won a James Beard Foundation award in 2018. She says heirlooms such as Hewes Virginia Crab and Arkansas Black are for Appalachia what noble grape varieties like Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon are for Bordeaux.
Brown is thrilled the apples are being put to good use. But he’s quick to note that many still need saving. And they’re getting harder to find.
“It takes me probably 20-30 times more work and a lot more driving to locate one new tree,” says Brown.
Meanwhile, his ‘cherished recipe’ was Big Mama’s Apple Cake also featured on The Very Vera Show.
“Big Mama, Mamie Warrington Everett, was my wife’s grandmother and she lived near Yazoo, Mississippi,” Brown said, noting that the honorific “Big Mama” referred to her as the family leader. The cake is made of a delectable combination of tart apples, vanilla, allspice, cinnamon, and studded with walnuts or pecans and moist, chewy bliss.
“Like any good recipe, we’re sure its connection to his family’s roots makes it all the sweeter.” https://www.veryvera.com/recipes/recipe/big-mamas-apple-cake/
Do you know of an old apple variety? To help Tom Brown in his search for rare and “extinct” apple varieties, or to find out more, see his website, http://www.applesearch.org, or call him at 336-766-5842. Tom Brown is retired and lives in Clemmons, NC. He is also the brother-in-law of New Life Journals editor and publisher.
Reference https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/heritage-appalachian-apples.amp?__twitter_impression=true
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