![]() Wild apples, crabapples, and supermarket varieties are all members of the Malus genus the ones available in grocery stores, as well as the heritage apples of old, are all varieties of Malus domestica.Īmerican propagation of apples began as early as the 1600s along the eastern seaboard, but the apple’s golden age really started during the Civil War. The only apple indigenous to this continent is a cousin, the crabapple, Lilliputian in size and extraordinarily sour due to the presence of excess malic acid-the same compound which, in normal amounts, gives apples their sweet-tart taste. From Europe, they were carried to the New World. From there human growers carried these wild, distant relatives across the Caspian Sea, spreading them into Europe. The ancestry of the large, edible apple traces back thousands of years to somewhere near present-day Kazakhstan. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the quintessential American fruit was also an immigrant. Recall that very war, during which hard cider was consumed by the barrelful, because in the 1770s the average colonist knocked back more than 30 gallons of fermented apple juice every year. During a lecture in 1858, transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described the apple as “our national fruit.” Recall the tale of pioneer nurseryman John Chapman, son of a Revolutionary War minuteman, who voyaged down the Ohio River with a boatload of apple seeds, planting orchards throughout the early American frontier (a feat that earned him his storied nickname, Johnny Appleseed). ![]() Is there a fruit more closely entwined with American culture than the apple? Soldiers in World War II told reporters they were fighting for two reasons: their mothers and apple pie. Yet it’s precisely in these moments, Benscoter tells me, that he feels he needs to keep searching, before lost apples are gone for good. We do assemble one bag of apples, but without knowing whether our quarry is an old variety. Many of the trees we investigate are already dead. I wanted to find an apple I’ve never eaten-maybe even one that Benscoter himself hasn’t rediscovered.īut after a few hours on the butte, my chances aren’t looking good. How wonderful? I’d flown 3,000 miles to Washington to join the hunt and experience it for myself. “It is difficult to describe how it feels to taste apples you’ve never tasted before,” he says. Since 2014, he has found 29 different varieties that were previously thought to be gone, some dating back to Grover Cleveland’s first presidency in the 1880s. He’s the founder of the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to rediscover heritage apples in the Pacific Northwest. Now there’s less than half that number.Ī self-styled sleuth of forgotten fruit, Benscoter pursues these rare heirlooms. As commercial agriculture supplanted family orchards, many distinct apples were displaced, too-but not lost forever.īy 1900, about 20,000 known varieties of apples grew across North America. These heirloom varieties fell out of favor when new transportation and storage methods nullified the need for locally grown apples. Some are extinct, while others grow on trees more than a century old. For the next several hours we continue, plucking apples from aged trees, sampling them in the grass, hoping to find one that people haven’t tasted in decades.īy 1900, about 20,000 known varieties of apples grew across North America. He chuckles, grasps the apple, wipes it against his shirt, bites into it, chews a few times, and promptly spits out a chunk of partially masticated fruit. ![]() “It looks like a butt.” A vertical indent creased it down the middle. “There it is, my all-time favorite apple,” Benscoter says after hauling it in. Clasping it now with both hands, he maneuvers it between a tuft of green and orange leaves, then plucks an apple with the hue of a highlighter off a branch. ![]() Hundreds still stand, scattered like patchwork between overgrown brush and tilled wheat fields.īenscoter carries a long pole topped with a metal basket resembling the pocket of a lacrosse stick. (After it closed, the abandoned hotel became an after-hours booze-soaked hangout.) But Cashup also planted several hundred apple trees in the ravines below. In the late 1800s, local legend James “Cashup” Davis erected a hotel at the top of the butte, a popular destination until travelers figured that navigating a rickety wagon up 3,600 feet was a surefire way to join the departed. Craning his neck, he fixes his bespectacled eyes on an object the size of a tennis ball. We trudge until a mess of branches-some bent low, crooked like a finger, others soaring toward the sun like Icarus-obscure the outline of his five-foot-nine-inch frame, currently draped in a T-shirt bearing the image of a whitetail buck. On a hot October afternoon, Dave Benscoter leads me into a thicket of trees rising from a slope along the edge of Steptoe Butte in eastern Washington.
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