Inside the Race to Save the Region's Oldest Orchard

On a hillside above the valley, among trees planted before the Civil War, a small group of volunteers is trying to rescue apples that exist nowhere else. The orchard's last commercial owner died in 2019. Since then, the trees have gone largely untended, and some of the rarest varieties are down to a single aging specimen.

The volunteers, led by a retired high school biology teacher named Frances Hale, spend winter weekends taking cuttings and grafting them onto young rootstock. It is slow, careful work. Each variety needs to be identified, often by comparing fruit and leaves against century-old nursery catalogs.

Varieties with no names

Some of the trees cannot be identified at all. Hale's team has given them provisional names based on where they stand: Lower Wall, Split Trunk, The One by the Gate. One of them produces a small, russeted apple that tastes, according to everyone who has tried it, faintly of pear and anise.

“We may be the last people who ever taste some of these,” Hale said. “Or we may be the first people who make sure we aren't.”

The group has now propagated more than sixty varieties and planted a new block of trees on land donated by a neighbor. The first of those trees fruited this fall. It was, Hale reports, a very good apple.