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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Genius of Apples
  • Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 09:46:39 -0600

The Genius of Apples
OCTOBER 4, 2000

There's a hearty band of hunters ransacking the South, says Lee Calhoun,
hunting for old Southern apples. They are tracking down apple trees in the
front yards of old country homes that may disappear tomorrow. Time is
running out for these hunters. Of the 1,400 apple varieties known to have
originated in the South, only about 200 are still known to exist. "The
others are totally extinct," says Calhoun, "and when that happens, you lose
a whole apple. Most of these trees were planted in the early 1900s. I'd say
we only have about five years left to find them."

Creighton Lee Calhoun is a pomologist. Etymologically, that means he loves
apples. On his land in the Saralyn community in the heart of old Chatham
County, he is growing 450 kinds of heirloom apples. Calhoun's Nursery on
Blacktwig Road has become legendary among those who are trying to rescue a
history that is slipping away. There he collects cuttings of old varieties,
grafts them onto root stock and plants and sells the results, all in the
name of preservation and propagation. Our own Johnny Appleseed.

One hundred years ago, apples were a staple of the Southern diet. Time was,
says Calhoun, when every farmhouse in the largely rural South had apple
trees in its yard. Apples provided fresh fruit from June to November, and
were kept in the root cellar all winter. The varieties were myriad,
providing fruit through the whole summer -- early, midseason and late.
Southerners dried the tart varieties, made applesauce and apple butter from
the soft ones, and fashioned pies from the firmer fruit that held its shape
during cooking.

When I arrived at Calhoun's house, a beautiful Oriental-style structure he
shares with his wife, Edith, he had collected a basket of more than two
dozen varieties of apples for me and had written their names on the bottoms
in ink, "so you can have an apple-tasting," he said. They were red and
yellow and green and striped. But none of them were massive and waxy and
spotless like the varieties shipped to Food Lion from Washington state.
Calhoun sprays very little for the insect damage and fungal infections that
come with growing apples in the South. "An apple that's blemished is as
good as one that's not," says Calhoun. He patrols his orchard daily,
ridding the trees of caterpillars, aphids and Japanese beetles. He likes to
quote an old Chinese proverb that says, "the best fertilizer is the
farmer's footsteps."

Calhoun found his two dozen acres in Saralyn in 1977 and began clearing
land for a garden. Thinking about fruit trees, he asked an old friend in
Pittsboro for advice. "Why don't you plant some old-timey ones," said the
friend, "like the ones we used to have--Blacktwig, Red June, Nickajack,
Fallawater, Horse Apple." Calhoun liked the idea and wrote off for some
catalogs, but nobody carried the old-timey varieties. Most sellers were
limited to the apples we know from the supermarkets, like Red Delicious and
Jonathan and Macintosh from Washington, New York, New Zealand.

Calhoun wasn't discouraged. From a magazine article, he taught himself
tree-grafting, then started driving around the county looking for old apple
trees. When he spotted one in a farmhouse yard, he would go up to the house
and ask if the owners knew the apple's name. "Often," he told me, "they'd
say Granny knew, but she died in '84. But when they could name it, I would
take a cutting, graft it onto some root stock, and plant it in my orchard.
I thought there'd be only a few dozen, but I just kept finding them."
Calhoun traveled further and further away from Chatham County, finding old
Southern apples in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. He outgrew
his little orchard, and the saga of Calhoun's Nursery began.

Now Lee Calhoun gets 1,000 phone calls and letters a year asking him for
advice and sharing new information about apples. "I've met some great
people," he said. "I'm so interested in these old folks, I'm tickled that
somebody's trying to keep the apples growing. They're mostly elderly, and
to hear them talk, you'd think it was the 1800s. Most of them grew up in
the '20s and '30s on primitive farms, working with mules. They'll tell you
their apple memories--how they kept them in an unheated room under the bed,
how the apples would perfume the whole room." There are as many old stories
as there are old apples--stories of having apples for breakfast fried in
meat drippings, drying apple slices on a tin roof, eating a freshly picked
fruit right off the tree, after it had baked in the hot Southern summer
sun.

Calhoun's eyes light up with the memories: "They'll tell you all about
their apples and then send you on down the road to the neighbors. I met a
woman in Stokes County whose father fought in the Civil War. Imagine that.
The Civil War. This is the end of the line, you know. We're in double
jeopardy. The old apple trees are dying out, and so are the old people who
can identify them."

Calhoun hauled out a thick, coffee-table-size hardbound book called Old
Southern Apples--by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. (Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald &
Woodward, 1995, 326 pp.). It catalogs 1,600 extant and extinct old apples:
the Baltimore Monstrous Pippin, recorded in 1817 at a foot in diameter and
four inches high; the Blacktwig, over which a furious battle was fought in
the magazines and newspapers of 1896 (Is it or is it not the same apple as
the Paragon?); the Buff, traced in 1853 to a North Carolina seedling tree
raised by the Cherokees; the Cathead; the Chenango Strawberry; the
Cullasaga; the Duchess of Oldenburg.

He wrote this book by hand, compiling, he says, at least 30,000 facts
gleaned from trips to the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Md.
There, with his wife, he trudged up and down the library's 14 floors and
sorted through thousands of boxes of old seed and nursery catalogs. The
curator of rare books took the seekers to a steamy room in the sub-basement
to inspect files compiled by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's pomology
section between 1886 and 1920. There they found thousands of handwritten
cards tracing the origins of old apple varieties.

They also found what Calhoun says is a "priceless national treasure"--7,000
hand-painted pictures of American fruit, executed by USDA artists from 1885
to 1930, all unpublished. Calhoun enlisted Chatham County photographer
Jerry Markatos to spend two days "in a darkened niche" at the library,
making 48 color plates from the original drawings to grace the book. Each
one includes the handwritten identification of the apple and the signature
of the artist.

Calhoun's book contains a treasure trove of apple lore. When the first
English settlers arrived on this continent, says Calhoun, they found plenty
of fruit, but, to their surprise, no apples. The English had always had
apples and had come to regard them as native to their own land. But in
fact, they originated in Kazakh-stan, in central Asia, and seeds were
carried to Europe around 1,500 B.C. The Greeks, Romans and Etruscans grew
apples, and Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, described 29
varieties. The Romans carried apples with them to northern Europe, where
they thrived in the British Isles.

The first settlers to Maryland were instructed by Lord Baltimore to take
with them "kernalls of pears and apples, especially of Pippins, Permains
and Deesons, for making thereafter of Cider and Perry." Most Southern farms
of the Colonial period had orchards. George Washington had 200 apple and
peach trees planted on his farm in Berkeley County, Va., but even ordinary
farmers usually had 50-200 trees, mostly for making cider. A rough rule of
thumb for Southern farm families, says Calhoun, was six apple trees per
person.

The earliest documented nurseries in North Carolina were operated by
Quakers, offering apple trees from cuttings brought from England in 1806 by
Ann Jessup, a Quaker minister in Guilford County. Descendants of her trees
spread throughout the Carolinas, and were sold to North Carolinians
migrating into the Northwest Territories from 1820 to 1826. The coming of
the railroads in the 1880s, especially into the Appalachians and Arkansas,
brought on an "apple boom" in the South. But overproduction, poorly sited
orchards, falling prices after World War I and competition from the West
Coast doomed the Southern apple boom. In North Carolina, ten million
bushels of apples were sold in the early 1910s, compared to about 3 million
in 1950.

Most Southern trees were grown from seeds. "This means that the South was
literally a vast agricultural experiment station," says Calhoun. Because
each apple seed is genetically different from all other apple seeds, it
will, if planted, produce a tree and fruit different from all other apple
trees and fruit. Calhoun explains that to reproduce a distinct variety of
apple, we cannot rely on the seeds. Apple biology requires that its genes
be passed on through a root sprout or, more reliably, through a twig cut
from the tree and inserted into the pencil-diameter, severed trunk of a
young apple tree. The twig and trunk fuse into a tree which grows up to be
identical to the tree from which the twig was taken. Each new tree will
bear fruit identical to the original tree.

And out of the millions upon millions of apple trees grown from seeds in
the South from 1607 to 1900, only a few were of exceptional quality, "the
geniuses of apples," as Calhoun calls them. Those are the ones that were
cherished and saved and shared and traded and sold. It is those varieties
Calhoun has collected, grafted and sold in his nursery. And because apple
trees only live about 100 years, the rest of those genius apples from 1900
will be gone in five years if they are not found and saved by the apple
hunters.

Walking in the orchard with Calhoun, I was surprised to find the trees
espaliered, that is, with the branches trained along wires stretched in
parallel aisles. Calhoun assures me that this method produces the most
bountiful harvest, and he is presently writing a book on "espaliering for
beginners," which he says is "really fun," and a good idea for people with
an urban lot or a small amount of room for the orchard. There are a variety
of shapes that work well, he says, and, when in fruit, they will "stop
traffic."

As we passed through the rows of trees, Calhoun spotted some favorites. He
showed me the July-August Go No Further, from West Virginia (as in: "that's
the best, you might as well stop looking"); Aunt Cora's Yard Apple (grown
by an African-American midwife in Virginia); the Ben Davis (from 1870 to
1920 the most popular commercial apple in the U.S., the Red Delicious of
its day); the Spitzenburg (Thomas Jefferson's favorite, grown at
Monticello); and the Rattling Core (its seeds are loose inside, and
rattle).

As I drove down Blacktwig Road through the wilds of Saralyn, I couldn't
help remembering that song from Disney's Johnny Appleseed: "Oh, the Lord is
good to me/and so I thank the Lord/for giving me the things I need/the sun,
the rain and the apple seed/Oh, the Lord is good to me."

At home in my kitchen, a Dixie Red Delight, a Nickajack, a Ben Davis and a
Rockingham Red have already been served up in a delicious pie, and the rest
of my famous, cherished, rescued old Southern apples are waiting in a cool
spot in my storage shed. If there are any left in December after his orders
are all filled, Lee Calhoun will sell me a couple of little apple trees,
and I will plant them on the meadow in Saxapahaw where I got married. Thank
you, Lord.

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