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Has there ever been a fruit as celebrated as the apple? Heaven, wrote Emily Dickinson, is an apple that’s just out of reach. “Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it, dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it,” noted Henry David Thoreau. “Surely,” he declared, “the apple is the noblest of fruits.”
If you’re fortunate to live near a farmers market with a generous selection of heirloom apples, you might agree with both Dickinson and her fellow Bay Stater. You might gaze upon the crates teeming with painterly fruits boasting fanciful names—a classic Esopus Spitzenberg or even a Hubbardston Nonesuch, or perhaps a newfangled breed like Ludacrisp—and think that we’re living in a time of apple abundance.
But this is not the golden age of the apple, not even close.
In fact, by the middle of the 19th century, there were about 17,000 named varieties of apples in North America. Today, that number is closer to 4,500—and the dozen or so cultivars you’ll likely find at farmers markets and U-pick orchards represent an even smaller slice of that figure. If you shop for apples at the supermarket, you’ll find a far more dismal selection.
How did we get from so many to so few? Once upon a time in our nation’s history, “seeds were planted by the millions,” says John Bunker, a Maine-based pomologist and founder of the Maine Heritage Orchard. Bunker is one of a handful of lay apple historians who have charted the rise and decline of the fruit across North America, seeking out cultivars thought to be extinct and documenting its myriad genetic manifestations throughout the past several centuries.
Wherever they settled, Bunker says, arriving colonists sowed the seeds of “keepers” that had survived their long transatlantic voyages, leading to an explosive proliferation of apple varieties across North America. That sheer number of trees led the Virginia pomologist James Fitz to note in 1872 that while stone fruit may be particularly suited to one region or another, apples are cultivated all over the country: “The apple is, so to speak, our democratic fruit.”
An ancient hybrid
To understand how the apple became so abundant in North America, there are two important things to know. First, apples are what’s known as “extreme heterozygotes”—which is to say that if you plant the seed of a McIntosh apple, for example, you’ll get something entirely different when that seedling eventually fruits. Like humans, most apples are diploids, meaning that they have a complete set of chromosomes from each of their parents. While they may carry the genetic lineage of their forebears, apples grown from seed are not clones. The only way to keep getting McIntoshes—or Baldwins, or Winesaps, or any other cultivar—is by grafting a cutting from the original tree onto rootstock.
“The first McIntosh was from a seed,” says Bunker. “Every other McIntosh that ever was, was from a graft.”
The other thing to know is that, like the first colonists, apples were foreigners in North America. A few crab apple species are native to the continent, but they are not the apples that grew to dominate orchards here or elsewhere. The apple that we cook, eat, and make cider with is taxonomically known as Malus domestica, which is a hybrid species that descended from a genetic soup of other apple species, including Malus sieversii, Malus orientalis, and Malus sylvestris, as well as Malus baccata. Originating in the Tian Shan mountains of what is now Kazakhstan, Malus sierversii is the most important of the bunch, being the prime ancestor of nearly all of the apple varieties we know today. Somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, humans and their animal neighbors—particularly bears, who have a predilection for large, juicy fruit—began selecting the largest and most desirable examples of Malus sieversii, eventually carrying their seeds from Central Asia.
Over time, that Kazakh apple radiated outward, making its way to Russia and across the Middle East, eventually arriving in Europe via the Silk Road around 1500 BCE. As Thoreau noted, ancient mythologies speak to the apple’s importance among cultures spanning from the Levant to Scandinavia. The Norse goddess Iðunn was known as the keeper of magical apples, which held the secret to eternal youth. In the Old Testament, King Solomon sings: “Comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” And there would have been no Trojan War had jealous Eris not hurled her apple of discord at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.
Across Europe, apples became not merely a food source—after all, you can only eat so many apples. Instead, they were often preserved by fermentation in the form of cider. Celtic Britons were making cider during the reign of Julius Caesar, while sidra in Spain dates back to the first century BCE. In Medieval France, cider was a mainstay of the table, especially those of Normandy, which became the cradle of the continent’s cider production (and cider vinegar). By the late 15th century, when the first ships departed from Spain in search of sea routes to the Far East, the apple was firmly ensconced in the European diet.
The rise of the American apple
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the first apples came to North America. Bunker believes that it was either the Basques or the French who brought them initially, but they would soon be joined by colonists from everywhere else in Europe. “Everybody brought them here,” Bunker says. “Wherever they landed, they brought them.”
The apples that did arrive represented only a slice of what was being grown in Europe, however. “The apples that store the best are going to be the apples that are the most desirable for planting when you get to your new home in New England or wherever,” says Bunker. “You have this larger diversity in Europe, and then you have a funnel of what got onto the ships and came over. And then once it got here, it spread out again.”
Throughout the next couple of centuries, apple seed–sowing continued, leading to new wild apple varieties across the continent. “Johnny Appleseed was a real person,” says Dave Benscoter, a former FBI agent turned apple historian and orchardist based in Washington state. “He really went through the Ohio Valley and those places, dropping apple seeds into the ground and raising trees that way.”
Eventually, however, people turned from raising seedlings to selecting and grafting varieties that produced the best fruit for whatever purpose, be that cider making, baking, or eating out of hand. They began naming those varieties, although inconsistently, which is often a point of confusion for apple historians as they try to identify old trees. “So many of these apples have multiple synonyms—like, maybe even 20,” says Bunker. “Baldwin had four or five names before Baldwin came along, for example.”
And so it was that each town had its own collection of local apple cultivars, with names sometimes becoming altered as grafted trees changed hands. “I like to think of it like folk songs,” says Bunker. “In Virginia, they’ve got one set of verses. In Tennessee, another, or in one two counties over. But it’s the same song.”
By the time of America’s founding, the apple was as common as water, and named varieties numbered in the thousands. Benjamin Franklin was known to be a fan of the Pippin, which perhaps inspired his version of the “bad apple” metaphor in the 1736 edition of the Poor Richard’s Almanack. (Though he did not, as popular lore contends, devise the maxim that an apple a day keeps the doctor away.) George Washington grew hundreds of apple trees at Mount Vernon, as did Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, where he maintained a comparatively tidy collection of only four apple cultivars.
Even at the peak of American apple diversity, however, cultivation had its critics. Thoreau, although deeply skeptical of people, sang the praises of apples that still grew from seed in an article in The Atlantic in 1862. For Thoreau, taking the chance on a wild apple—which could be bracingly bitter or “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream”—was part of the thrill.
“Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities—not so much for their beauty, as for their fairness and soundness,” Throreau wrote. “Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their ‘Favorites’ and ‘None-suches’ and ‘Seek-no-farthers,’ when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them.”
Little did Thoreau know that those many varieties he so despised would soon become extinct.
The death of the small farm
The fall of America’s love affair with the apple arguably began at the same time the temperance movement was on the rise during the mid-19th century, when cider production began to decline across the nation. Tales of activists destroying orchards are probably the stuff of legend, but with their insistence that “lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours,” temperance advocates did few favors for apple farmers.
After the Civil War, the shape of American agriculture also began to change. Mechanization and the expansion of railroads led to a shift away from subsistence farming and toward commercialization. “When you are growing for market, you can’t have 16,000 varieties,” says Bunker. “Here, we wanted the one-size-fits-all. You go to any town and you can get the same apple, or the same fill-in the blank.”
Bunker says the move toward commercialization “crushed the true small, semi self-sufficient, diversified farm,” as farmers settled on a small handful of varieties that would grow in a variety of climates and soil types. Small farms also became consolidated by larger operations, which opted to focus on one or two apple varieties that grew and ripened at the same time, streamlining the harvesting and marketing process. These few apple varieties were not selected for flavor or versatility so much as beauty and hardiness in transportation and storage.
“Cortland would be one. Granny Smith, maybe,” says Bunker. “A few apples that are sort of reasonable excuses for a culinary apple. But you have no good culinary apples, except occasionally in certain local markets.” McIntosh, a heritage apple, became the go-to in New England, while the newer Red Delicious began its rise in the West. Meanwhile, culinary apples—that is, those meant for cooking—were largely on the outs, as were cider apples that were equally unfit for eating raw. For the most part, all you’d find at stores was dessert fruit.
By the 1940s, Red Delicious—which was originally known as Hawkeye and was striped red and yellow—had become the most popular apple in the United States. Selected for its consistently deep red color and suitability for storage, Red Delicious was a perfect apple for piling into attractive displays at grocery stores, regardless of how it tasted.
But how did the striped and sweet Hawkeye become the bland Red Delicious? “Once in a while, a tree will send off a branch and that branch will produce fruit that is just a little bit different from the other fruit. Genetically, it's exactly the same,” says Benscoter. “Sometimes those branches would produce a redder apple than the rest of the tree.”
Benscoter, who is 68, remembers that once upon a time in Washington state, Red Delicious was in fact delicious—but those redder varieties always won out. “The funny thing was, it seems like the redder the apple got, the less flavor it had,” Benscoter says. “But now to me, a Red Delicious just tastes like cardboard.”
Dan Bussey—a fellow apple historian who wrote a multivolume, 3,500-page history of North American apples over the course of 30 years—says that flavor was “never a criteria” for Red Delicious. “It was always the looks, and when it ripened, and what color it was,” he says. “So it’s sad we focused on the marketing instead of the quality.”
He notes that Red Delicious is not a bad apple cultivar per se: “That’s the funny thing,” he says. “There are over 200 different clones of Red Delicious. They always sold them as ‘Red Delicious’ but only three were probably known to have more flavor than the others.”
By the 1980s, Red Delicious had grown to dominate Washington state’s apple harvest. Soon, however, consumers came to realize that this mealy, flavorless excuse for an apple was no longer what they wanted. With sales declining, the mass planting of Red Delicious began to seriously strain Washington state’s apple industry, pushing it to the brink of collapse. To tackle the crisis, in 2000, Congress approved a massive apple bailout that provided a financial lifeline to the state, where apple growers faced staggering losses of $760 million since 1997. At the time, one farmer told The New York Times that they had no one to blame but themselves: “For almost 50 years, we’ve been cramming down the consumer’s throat a red apple with ever thicker skin, sometimes mushy, sometimes very good if done right, but a product that was bred for color and size and not for taste.”
The return of the heritage apple
Nowadays, with the Red Delicious in the rearview mirror for many consumers, orchards large and small have begun to focus on growing other varieties, especially those heritage cultivars that were once deemed too imperfect for market. At the same time, however, newer varieties have proliferated, including the omnipresent Honeycrisp, which is now the most-planted apple in Washington and Minnesota. In 2016, Wired reported that “Honeycrisp has transformed from a seasonal delicacy to an industrialized staple that consumers expect in any season or any climate” and quoted one producer saying that Honeycrisp apples “are going to become an increasingly unreliable eating experience.”
So if James Fitz was correct and apples are indeed our democratic fruit, perhaps local representation matters for apples as much as it does for democracy. “Some apples just do well in the Midwest and do well in the South,” says Bussey, “and we need to appreciate our own terroir as it were, as far as the kind of apples that do best in our climate with the conditions that we have and the soils types.”
It’s that appreciation of terroir and of history that animates apple sleuths like Bunker, Bussey, and Benscoter.
“I had no idea that I would ever go down this road at all,” says Benscoter, who fell in love with apples after he retired from the Bureau. After helping a neighbor with her orchard, he began researching the types of trees that were growing on her property and fell down the apple rabbit hole. “I started jumping online and I just got sucked into the history of apple growing in Eastern Washington. And I bought a book by Lee Calhoun, Old Southern Apples, and that’s where I first heard the term ‘lost’ or ‘extinct apples.’”
Benscoter realized that all of the apple detectives he knew—such as Bunker and the late Tom Burford, who wrote Apples of North America—were based on the East Coast. “I just figured, you know, it couldn’t be done out here for some reason,” he says. Nevertheless, he began hunting for long forgotten apples on his own, founding the nonprofit Lost Apple Project in 2014. Since then, the Lost Apple Project has discovered more than 20 apple varieties that were previously believed to be extinct in North America. “Now we’re working with Washington State University to do DNA testing on each apple,” he adds. “[With] DNA testing, we instantly know if it is a named variety—we don’t have to look at that apple anymore.”
Perhaps some of those varieties previously presumed extinct may be grown once again. For several years, Bussey worked for the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, where they grafted heritage varieties and sold them around the country. “People had a chance to try something they may not otherwise ever get a chance to,” he says. “I’m starting an orchard here in southern Wisconsin, a community orchard, and it will be that anyone can come in and pick anything that’s there.” He plans to keep more than 600 varieties of trees in the collection.
“I want people to have that experience of trying things they’ve never tried before,” Bussey says, adding that a farmers market is the next best option for expanding your apple knowledge. “How your apples were grown and knowing your farmers market and your grower, I think makes such a huge difference. The commercial stuff? I buy an apple in the store—it’s like I can’t take it because they’re so bland. They’re absolutely so bland.”
Bunker agrees: “The farmers market, the farmstand, the CSA, the U-pick. They’re all models in which more diversity of everything—vegetables and fruits—fits really well.”
Of course, if you happen to live in an area with untouched woodlands, wild apples still exist for the plucking, despite Thoreau’s prediction that they would become extinct. As a naturalist, he lamented the loss of the “wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man” and decried the day that “we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.”
There is something romantic about the heady days of mass appleseed-sowing, when, as Thoreau says, “those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out.” But if it weren’t for selection and for the grafting, every American apple would be a gamble. The Red Delicious might never have existed, but neither would the Baldwin, the Roxbury Russet, or the Rhode Island Greening. The thousands of named varieties that still exist, and those that are being rediscovered, would have died out within a single lifespan.
“We didn’t realize what treasures some of the local varieties that we had were,” says Bussey. “It’s really something when you get a hold of a good apple that just makes you happy.”
