"reckon up all the names of these wild apples"

 [From October 18, 2008]

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything. – Gertrude Stein



The odd perversity of human nature. How else can you explain it? The fruit associated with our expulsion from Paradise is the fruit we hold in highest regard.

The forbidden fruit,
The golden apples,
The apple of discord,
Adam’s Apple,
William Tell’s apple,
Isaac Newton’s apple,
Johnny Appleseed’s apple,
Apple of my eye,
Apple a day,
Baseball hot dogs apple pie and Chevrolet,
An apple for the teacher,
The Big Apple
And one bad apple.
How ‘bout them apples?

On a brisk October afternoon in the 1850s Silas McDowell wandered the Cullasaja Valley searching for wild apples. On that same afternoon, hundreds of miles to the north, Henry David Thoreau set out from Concord searching for wild apples. Silas left us the Nickajack, the Alarkee, the Equinetely, the Cullawhee, the Junaluskee, the Watauga, the Tillequah and the Chestooah. Henry left us a treatise on Wild Apples in which he contemplated the naming of them.



Oh, the delights of pomaceous nomenclature! When enthobotanist Gary Nabhan visited Highlands recently, he spoke of the many varieties of apples originating from the Southern Appalachians:

I think the names of these apples are interesting because some of the varieties go by multiple names. The Nickajack apple that was first promoted in Franklin was also known as Carolina Spice, Spotted Buck, Colonel Summerhour and World’s Wonder. What a great name for an apple – World’s Wonder. You have things like Hubberson’s Nonesuch and Seek-No-Further. Just park yourself under that tree and wait for them to fall into your lap! That’s about the highest compliment you can give another species. Seek No Further!




When apple breeders breed apples they must eventually name those apples. That was the challenge facing some Minnesota apple breeders after they crossed a Gala with a Braeburn:

We put a very scientific 'keep an eye on this one' note on the Sugar Shack tree. Of course, we hadn't named it yet, and we are the type of people who would name an apple 'Keep An Eye On This One,' but we later thought 'Sugar Shack' was a better name. The guys who named the apple variety 'Westfield Seek-no-further' in Connecticut 'way back in the mid-1700's didn't do too bad with a novel name, though. Antique apple collectors are still growing the variety, and the intriguing name certainly has something to do with that. We could name an apple 'Minnesota Never-stop-growing-this-one' and then hang around a few hundred years and see if it worked. It's worth a shot.



Some UK orchardists consider how the naming of apples has become yet another corporate enterprise in this fallen world:

Part of the appeal of the old heritage apple varieties is their good honest names. In the "good old days" apples were named without fuss. A common strategy was the name of the person who discovered them - Pott’s Seedling, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kidd’s Orange Red, Granny Smith, Chivers Delight and so on. If that didn’t have quite the right ring to it, the name of the local village might suffice: Ribston Pippin, Barnack Beauty, Allington Pippin, Braeburn. Another popular strategy was to borrow the name of a famous person such as Lord Lambourne, Freyberg, Bismarck for example. If you were stuck (or not very inventive) you just went for something really simple like Red Delicious or Golden Delicious. In the 21st century however the important job of naming (or branding) new apple varieties is no longer left to the happy grower, but has been taken over by marketing departments, who see apples as just another consumer item, and might as well be naming a new car as a new apple. Thus we have Kanzi, a brand new 21st century apple, which means "hidden treasure" in Swahili - of course.

For the last word on this subject, I’ll yield to Henry David Thoreau for a passage from Wild Apples:

The Naming of Them

[73] It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.

[74] In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our Crab might yield to cultivation.

[75] Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation.

[76] There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis), also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed, (gelato-soluta,) good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus viridis);--this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;--the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug-Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue,--Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,--

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples."

The Presence of the Past

[From September 8, 2009]

 

It is possible to roam these mountains without feeling the presence of the past. It is not possible for me, though.

Yesterday, I was sitting on a front porch in Webster, North Carolina, the same front porch that was mentioned in the New York Times almost 120 years ago. But that is another story for another time.

In September of 1776, General Griffith Rutherford led a frontier militia of 2,400 men on an expedition against the Cherokees. The army departed from Old Fort on September 1, and followed the Swannanoa River, Hominy Creek and Richland Creek as they made their way west in the following days. They sighted their first Indians on September 6, not long before they crossed Balsam Gap.

Some years later, David Swain wrote about the events that occurred west of the Balsams, on Scott’s Creek:

The latter stream obtains its name from John Scott, a trader among the Cherokees – a negro of whom was shot by Rev. James Hall, the Chaplain [of the expedition], as he ran, mistaking him for an Indian.

One week later, the same Rev. Hall would deliver a sermon from atop the Nuquassee (Nikwasi) mound in present-day Franklin.

September 7, 2009 was a quiet and pleasant day in Webster. Had I been occupying the same spot on September 7, 1776, I would have seen something remarkable. One thousand of Rutherford’s soldiers marched through what is now Webster. They forded the Tuckasegee and continued up Savannah Creek. As they ascended the Cowee Mountains, they encountered a small party of Cherokees waiting in ambush.

In his diary, Lieutenant William Lenoir recorded:

[We] marcht to a little Town on Tuckeyseagey River [and] 8 miles from thence towards watauger [Watauga] saw some indians walking up a mountain & we was attacked by about 20 indians on the top of the mountain at 3 o’clock within about 7 miles of said Town. William Alexander was wounded in the foot and no visible Dammage done to the Indians only a few kettles taken & c. then marcht within 2 miles of the said Town and lay on a small Emanance – 20 [miles marched that day].

The village and mound of Watauga were located along the Little Tennessee River near where you would find Lake Emory today. But when the militia arrived there September 8, the town was already deserted. The systematic destruction of Cherokee villages on the Little Tennessee was about to begin.

On September 10, the violence intensified:

A detachment of 300 men was sent to destroy a town called Sugartown immediately above the junction of the [Little] Tennessee & Sugartown [Cullasaja] rivers. The ground on which the town was situated was flanked on 2 sides by the rivers in the form of a triangle, & the remaining angle on the third side was enclosed by a strong work of brush and timber. When the soldiers had finally entered the town a fire was opened upon them by the indians from the riverbanks and the brush works, & finding themselves surrounded by a invisible foe they took shelter in the cabins and remained there for about 3 hours, at which time they were relieved by a strong detachment from the main army from about 4 miles below, where the firing of the small army had been distantly heard. The detachment lost 18 men killed and 22 wounded. The indians did not sustain any loss that was discovered.

A prisoner, whom they had taken, upon the promise of his life, proposed to lead the army to what was called the hidden town, where their women, children, & a large number of cattle were collected. This was 7 miles distant from Nuquassee in a narrow valley on the Sugartown river and surrounded at all points by mountains and was very difficult to approach from the fact that the mountains jutted in abruptly upon the river, in many places leaving scarcely room for a foot path.

However, on reaching the town there was not an indian to be found save a few very old & decreped men and women, the other indians being discovered some hundreds of feet above them on the crests of the mountains apparently looking down & taking a calm survey of them from their secure situations. They achieved nothing but the destruction of this town & some few beef cattle by that day’s adventures.

[This account of the Sugartown excursion was based on an 1850 letter from Silas McDowell, who lived in the Cullasaja Valley just down river from the gorge. The details he had heard and subsequently shared in his letter contradict other reports. According to some histories of the Rutherford expedition, the militia suffered only a few casualties.]

Letter from Webster

 

Webster, North Carolina

[A serious longitudinal study of letters to the editor would reveal a great deal about changes in American culture. When reading LTEs these days, the term “more heat than light” comes to mind, in contrast to this example from the past.]

May 4, 1889

Nearly all the farmers have taken their cattle to the mountain range, have sheared their sheep and ‘turned them to the woods,’ and now have little feeding to do, excepting their work horses and mules. We are all about done planting corn, and I think the land for that crop has been better prepared for planting than it usually is. Our oats, sown on clay land are doing no good, on account of dry cool weather. Some farmers are talking about plowing them up and planting in corn. Wheat is looking very promising and will be a good crop if nothing occurs in the future to injure it.

I think the freeze last night ruined our prospects for peaches, apples and grapes. The clover fields are looking fine, especially where land plaster has been sown on the clover. I am glad to see the farmers sowing more clover, and using plaster to nourish it. I am satisfied that this is one of our best means for renovating the upland fields; and I am further satisfied that we have a soil in this community, well adapted to the production of clover, if we will but study and practice the proper mode for its culture and management.

– A. J. Long, Sr., Near Webster, N. C. (letter to the editor of the Tuckasegee Democrat newspaper)

Later that month, Mr. Long realized that the fruit crops were not as severely damaged as he had feared, and he also mentioned the thermal belt, a concept brought to prominence by Macon County’s Silas McDowell:

“Mr. Editor: Two weeks ago I gave it as my opinion that all the fruit about Webster was killed by the frost, but observations since have convinced me of my mistake. I find now, that in all the orchards (unforeseen contingencies excepted) there will be some peaches and out on the high lands, near the thermal belt, there will be abundance of both peaches and apples. I notice that the peach and damson trees in Webster are full of fruit; and I can see that the people in town are flattering themselves, that they will yet, have a peach pie this summer. … A. J. Long, Sr. Near Webster, May 20th, 1889″

Silas McDowell - Visions of Mountain Agriculture

 [What better way to commence this site than with an article about Silas McDowell. I’ve been inspired by his work for more than forty years and wrote this piece for the Spring 1992 edition of Katuah Journal. McDowell lived near the Cullasaja River in Macon County in the 19th century and in innumerable letters and articles shared his own explorations of the Cowees. This will be the first of many posts featuring Silas McDowell.]

Amongst the valleys of the southern Alleghanies sometimes winter is succeeded by warm weather, which, continuing through the months of March and April, brings out vegetation rapidly, and clothes the forests in an early verdure.  This pleasant spring weather is terminated by a few days’ rain, and the clearing up is followed by cold, raking winds from the northwest, leaving the atmosphere of a pure indigo tint, through which wink bright stars, but if the wind subsides at night, the succeeding morning shows a heavy hoar frost; vegetation is utterly killed, including all manner of fruit germs, and the landscape clothed in verdure the day before now looks dark and dreary. – Silas McDowell

On the morning of April 28, 1858, Silas McDowell encountered this bleak scene when he went out to inspect his farm.  The Macon County fruit grower had spent almost thirty years establishing his orchard of 600 apple trees near the banks of the Cullasaja River. However, this late spring freeze “made nearly a clean sweep from our mountain valleys in Western North Carolina of the richest promise of a fruit crop that we have ever had.”  For anyone else, the incident would have been a crushing disappointment.  For McDowell, it was another opportunity to examine nature’s mysteries and to find a better way of farming in the mountains.  

McDowell had deliberately selected a sheltered valley for his orchard.  Only a settler too poor to buy bottom land would have tried to grow fruit high on the mountainsides.  And yet, on this April morning, McDowell realized his mistake.  While his own trees “seemed as if clothed in a black pall,” he observed on the mountains looming over his orchard a broad horizontal band of vegetation left unscathed by the freeze.    

Around 1780, Thomas Jefferson had witnessed similar temperature inversions in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. He reported, “I have known frosts so severe as to kill the hiccory trees round about Monticello, and yet not injure the tender fruit blossoms then in bloom on the top and higher parts of the mountain.”  Silas McDowell understood that this was more than simply a quirk of topography and climate.  He suspected that thermal belts could be the secret to successful fruit production in mountainous areas.  

By the summer of 1858 he wrote that “all description of fruit trees which have the good fortune to be located in this vernal region, are now bending beneath a heavy crop of fruit.”  He began to promote the value of this zone for fruit growers and contributed a report to the United States Agricultural Reports for 1861.  In his article on the “belt of no frost” McDowell explained:

The beautiful phenomenon of the ‘Verdant Zone’ or ‘Thermal Belt’ exhibits itself upon our mountain sides, commencing about three hundred feet vertical height above the valleys, and traversing them in a perfectly horizontal line throughout their entire length like a vast green ribbon upon a black ground.

Born in South Carolina in 1795, McDowell moved to Asheville in his youth for training as a tailor.  He practiced his trade in Charleston and Morganton before settling in Macon County’s Cullasaja Valley, where he gained renown as a fruit grower, amateur naturalist and story teller.  His articles on the mountains were published in popular magazines and caught the attention of leading botanists, who sought his help in finding rare plants of the Southern Appalachians.  When a visiting scientist asked which college he had attended, McDowell pointed to the hills surrounding his farm and replied, “These wild mountains are the only college at which my name has ever been entered as a student!”  In a tribute to Silas McDowell, T. F. Glenn remembered him as modest and unassuming, and also:

…intuitive, impulsive and passionate.  His companionship with nature was a marked feature of his character. His glowing imagination imparted to the most trivial objects beauty and sublimity.  By a native force of genius, by dint of fiery energy of will, by persistent application, he surmounted obstacles. 

McDowell’s tenacious efforts to raise winter keeping apples had earned him a reputation among southern fruit growers even before the thermal belt episode. When McDowell and his bride, Elizabeth, moved to Macon County in 1830 they brought a baby’s cradle filled with small apple trees from her grandfather’s orchard near Asheville.  Being especially fond of winter apples, McDowell chose varieties recommended by northern pomologists.  His results were like those of other southern growers:

I made a complete failure, for when my trees began to bear fruit, it matured and fell from the tree long before the proper time, and though they were an excellent collection of Autumn Apples, there was not a good Winter keeper amongst them.

For fifteen years, McDowell struggled to raise winter keepers. Then, the editor of a farm paper in Athens, Georgia suggested that he take grafts from native seedling apples.  McDowell followed James Carmack’s advice and searched the hills around his home for fruit stock.  He found what he had been looking for:

Amongst old Cherokee seedling Apple trees – as well as other Southern seedlings, I have succeeded in conferring on Southern Pomology a list of names of Winter Apples, which both as to their highly aromatic taste, as well as late winter keeping qualities, cannot be excelled by as many varieties of Winter Apples in the United States.  

His catalog of new apples featured the Carmack, Nickajack, Bullasage, Mavereck Winter Sweet, Royal Pearmam, Hoover, Golden Pippin, Buff, Kingrussett and Neverfail.  “None but late keepers in the list,” McDowell noted with delight.  In 1870, William Saunders with the Agriculture Department concluded, “There is not a doubt about it, the finest winter apples in America are grown on these mountain lands.”  McDowell could take much of the credit.

McDowell, always concerned with the region’s economy, believed that vineyards established within the thermal belt could be a mainstay of mountain agriculture.  “The Grape,” McDowell predicted:

…will never fail to yield to the husbandman a rich and abundant crop of its luscious and heart-cheering fruit; and had the vine locomotion, corporal and mental sense, I would bid it to ‘Tarry not in all the plains; but flee to the mountains for its life,’ and take refuge under the protection of the Thermal Stratum!

Much as he had in his quest for winter apples, McDowell explored the mountains to find superior varieties of grapes.  He speculated on the potential of hybridizing some of the specimens:

We cannot well command our risibles when, in fancy, we anticipate the aspect of that monster Grape that will be produced by the hybridal cross betwixt the Hon. A. G. Semmes’s eight pound bunches and the Mammoth Grape Prof. C. D. Smith and ourself measured yesterday, the single berries of which girted three and a quarter inches round.

After the Civil War, McDowell continued to write on agricultural topics, presided over the Fruit Growers Association and pleaded for extension of the Western North Carolina Railroad. He was constantly learning more – from natural phenomena, the culture of the Cherokees and the latest farm journals.  In his judgment, the climate and terrain of the mountains did not have to be obstacles to successful farming.  Instead, the unique character of the mountains could support a distinctive form of agriculture.

Diversity was one aspect of the mountain agriculture he envisioned:

Dairying, grape culture, bee culture, sheep husbandry supplemented by a woolen cloth factory.  Are these the only items of new industries our mountain section is capable of? 

He went on to suggest one more:  

I have recently learned that a man studied Fish culture, constructed him a three-acre pond near the city of Atlanta, Ga., and then from Florida procured a can of eggs of the Scaly Trout species. 

After hatching the eggs and raising the fish to maturity, the man realized an income of fifteen thousand dollars in one year.  Wanting to attempt a similar venture with mountain trout, McDowell had a small pond built amid a grove of oaks near his home:

Their feed will consist of the waste from the kitchen and table, with all small animals that come my way, chopped up fine, supplemented by a lazy cat, in an emergency.  There is nothing but the lack of a pure stream and vim to hinder any man having a mountain farm, to do the same thing, and have a fat trout for breakfast every day the year through.

     McDowell lived long enough to see the impact of extractive industries on the mountain environment.  When Western North Carolina’s first corundum mine opened near McDowell’s farm in 1871, he turned a disaster into a blessing.  Thirty years before, a flood had swept across the best portion of his farm, “a fertile bottom-field of about 50 acres.”  McDowell described the damage. “I found that field, on which I expected to make forty bushels of corn to the acre, to be a miniature Sahara of white sand, and would no longer pay the expense of resetting and keeping up the fences.”

The field had remained in this condition until the coming of the corundum mine, which was polluting the Cullasaja River.  “As the mine was worked by means of a hose-pipe, a red stream of clay and water came running down the mountain’s side defiling our beautiful river and chasing away the fish.”  It occurred to McDowell that he could protect the river and reclaim his field at the same time:

Thanks to Sir Samuel Baker for his suggestions in relation to redeeming some of the African deserts by sitting them with the muddy waters of the Nile.   And I forthwith applied to Col. Jenks, who controlled the mine, for leave to run a ditch down the mountain from the mine to my sands – a distance of three-fourths of a mile. The next thing I did, was to throw up a dike on the river side of the bottom, to hold on the sands the muddy waters until they are absorbed – a thing not hard to do, as the sands swallow them up very fast and ‘thirst for more.’  The water of my ditch performs the carrying service of ten dump carts, and does the thing for nothing and we may add, loads itself.  This enterprise I view as my last act in life’s drama, and I feel ambitious to do the thing well, and make my best bow to my fellow-farmers as the curtain drops.   

Silas McDowell died in 1879.  His life work, promoting agricultural practices appropriate to the region, endures. McDowell brought curiosity, ingenuity, perseverance and humor to the task, qualities that would enhance any efforts to renew mountain agriculture as we approach the 21st century.