How the Hudson Valley became a land of orchards

Whether you pick your own or just grab a half-peck bag from a farmstand on the fly, fresh apples are among the most enticing treats of early autumn in the Hudson Valley and a staple of local agritourism. This time of year, visitors from throughout the tri-state metro area flock to Ulster County, and with good reason: It’s the second-biggest county for apple production (after Wayne County, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario) in the second-biggest apple-growing state (after Washington) in the U.S., which is the second-biggest apple-producing nation (after China) in the world.

Since 1976, the apple has been designated New York’s “official state fruit.” There are more than 600 commercial orchards comprising about 55,000 acres of apple trees statewide, yielding about 30 million bushels in a good year.

Why this area, though? What makes our state, and particularly the mid-Hudson Valley, such a fruitful apple-growing region? What’s the history behind so many orchards being established, some of them maintained by as many as seven generations of the same family?

While apple-friendliness will vary from site to site, the simple answer is a generally favorable climate. Apple trees, which originated in the mountains of central Asia – southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northwestern China – like temperate zones and don’t mind cold winters (though a late frost can drastically impact yields, as happened in late May of this year in our region).

“The Hudson Valley offers a unique and dramatic microclimate for apple-growing,” said Elizabeth Ryan, owner of Breezy Hill Orchard in Staatsburg and Stone Ridge Orchard in Ulster County. Besides the deep soils with “nearly perfect 6.5 pH” left behind by the passage of glaciers during the last Ice Age and the “incredible air drainage” afforded by the region’s rolling hills, Ryan cited the “dramatic deep river” fed by snowmelt in the Adirondacks as key to the ability of Malus domestica to thrive here.

“Fruit-growers want to be near a body of water for its moderating effects,” she explained. “It needs to be big enough to hold the temperature.” Well-drained slopes are important as well, to prevent cold air pooling around the trees for extended periods.

Ryan, who came to the Hudson Valley in 1980 with a pomology degree from Cornell University, has made it her business to document the social history of fruit-growing in the Hudson Valley, which she broadly defines as extending from Lake Tear of the Clouds to the end of Long Island Sound. She got her first of a series of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1984 to create an archive of information on the subject, launching what she calls her “endless book project” and giving illustrated lectures at places as prestigious as the Smithsonian Institution.

“I’ve been doing this for decades,” she said. “I’ve recorded 80 oral histories with fruit-growers, mostly in Ulster County, and compiled more than 5000 photos.”

Her magnum opus on the history of Hudson Valley apples isn’t finished yet, but it would be difficult to find a more knowledgeable expert on the subject, going right back to the beginnings. “Except for a few species of crabapples, apples are not indigenous to North America. Virtually all of the Malus domestica that enjoy are introduced or were developed here,” she explained. In the days before refrigerated storage and overnight transportation, “Every homestead and home had at least one apple and pear tree .… Where were you going to get the fruit if you didn’t grow it?”

Apples were used for cidermaking as well as for raw eating and baking, and “Every house had a cider press.” In Colonial times in the Northeast, hard cider was drunk at every meal, even by children. Apple bees, in which apples were cut up for drying and winter storage, were a popular social activity for young people.

Apples were introduced to North America by colonists in the early 17th century, with the first apple orchard on the continent planted in Boston by reverend William Blaxton in 1625. The Pilgrims brought apple trees with them in 1629 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Apples were introduced to what was then New Netherland by the Dutch. In 1647 “Peter Stuyvesant brought some trees from Holland and planted them in Manhattan .… Manhattan was bursting with orchards,” Ryan said. “The Huguenots, the Palatines, the English and the Dutch were all mighty fruit-growers.” In his 1655 book A Description of the New Netherlands, Adriaen van der Donck (the Jonkheer or “young squire” after whom Yonkers was named) wrote an entire chapter on fruits as part of his effort to entice Dutch settlers.

Van der Donck’s sales pitch must have worked. It wasn’t long before orchards were being planted all over what is now eastern New York State. The first – and for a long time, the largest – commercial plant nursery was established in Flushing by a Huguenot family surnamed Prince in the 1730s. In 1793 a descendant renamed it the Linnaean Botanic Garden and Nursery, and it remained in operation until 1869. Another Queens farm, in the village of Newtown (now Elmhurst), was the birthplace of the iconic Newtown Pippin apple, sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century.

While serving as ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson complained in a letter back home that in Paris, “They have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”

According to Ryan, a big part of the reason why the Hudson Valley quickly became a booming orchard region was the handy presence of the Hudson River itself to ship fruit quickly to market. “First they used sloops, and then later steamboats, up until about the 1920s.” One of the first designated public roads in the mid-Hudson, the Farmers’ Turnpike in Highland (now called the Milton Turnpike), was commissioned in 1790 for use by farmers to transport fruit and cider to the docks in Milton for shipment to New York City.

Before too long, said Ryan, “Our region was doing an international trade in fruit, shipping to England, the West Indies – and it built wealth.” The first commercial orchard in eastern New York dedicated specifically to fresh-fruit production for export was established in Esopus in the 1820s by Robert Livingston Pell. He started with 20 acres, growing Newtown Pippin apples that were shipped by schooner and later steamer to England. By 1838 he had expanded to 1200 acres (including Pell Island, now known as Esopus Island). He became immensely wealthy and built resorts on Overlook Mountain in Woodstock and at Paltz Point, later to become the site of the Mohonk Mountain House. Pell was one of the largest fruit shippers in the world until the Civil-War blockade wiped out his transatlantic market.

By 1875, the New York census counted 18,278,636 apple trees in the state. As the fruit industry rapidly expanded, the labor force began to employ increasing numbers of recent immigrants. These included Irish people who had fled the great potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s, and Italians, many of whom came to the Hudson Valley to work on the massive public-works projects of the era: the D&H Canal, the Catskill Aqueduct, the Rondout and Ashokan reservoirs.

In World War I, the orchards faced a labor shortage and began to recruit women from New York City, inspired by Great Britain’s effort known as the Women’s Land Army. The last standing women’s dormitory from that program, in Milton, was only recently demolished, Ryan said.

World War II saw the beginnings of the tradition – still thriving today – of recruiting Jamaican migrant workers: “They were considered the elite pickers. It was a godsend. Bob Greig, the father of Norman Greig from Greig Farm in Red Hook, met the first Jamaicans at Grand Central Station.”

Another major milestone of the early 1940s was the introduction of controlled atmosphere (CA) storage for apples. The first successful commercial CA storage room in the U.S. was built in 1941 at Hurd’s Family Farm in Clintondale.

The New York Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, known today as the Cornell AgriTech program of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, has been a key player in the orchard industry in New York State and beyond, since 1870. It is the preeminent think tank, laboratory and proving ground where pomologists have developed some 70 new apple cultivars over the past century and a half. It’s a massive undertaking, complicated by the fact that Malus domestica is what geneticists call heterozygous. Trying to grow new apple plants from seed and hoping they’ll resemble their parents is a total crapshoot.

The early settlers brought potted or baled apple saplings from their home countries, or else wasted a lot of time experimenting with apples grown from seed that ended up tasting bitter. That worked well enough for the likes of John Chapman a/k/a Johnny Appleseed, who was planting nurseries in Ohio and Indiana primarily meant to be used for cidering. Culinary apples needed to be more palatable. Grafting branches of trees known to yield apples of superior quality onto existing rootstocks soon became the favored approach.

Of course, on occasion a random seedling would grow into a tree that produced excellent fruit, These would be cherished, coddled and regrafted – not to mention crossed with other known outstanding cultivars — in hopes of generating a few usable offspring.

The two best-known apple varieties to be discovered here in Ulster County were the Esopus Spitzenburg, first found in the mid-1700s growing along the banks of the Hudson River near the village of Esopus; and the Jonathan, believed to be a Spitzenburg offspring, first discovered in 1826 as a chance seedling on the farm of Philip Rick in Woodstock. The “Rick apple” was later renamed after Jonathan Zander, who brought it to the attention of to the Albany Horticultural Society to have it officially recognized.

The once-ubiquitous Jonathan is rarely seen for sale in these parts any more, and the Spitzenburg had all but died out until the recent resurgence of interest in heirloom apple varieties. “There are a few people around growing the Spitz – one in Ulster Park, Tom Maynard,” said Ryan, “and I ferment a varietal of the Esopus Spitzenburg for cider.”

The DNA of these two Ulster County natives is also to be found in dozens of varieties of apple still commercially produced and enjoyed today. Among their best-known descendants are the JonaMac (Jonathan x McIntosh); Idared (Jonathan x Wagener – another New York native, first grown in Penn Yan in 1791) — and Jonagold (Golden Delicious x Jonathan).

The Jonagold was a 1943 discovery of the NYS Agricultural Experiment Station. Other apple varieties developed at Cornell include the Cortland (McIntosh x Ben Davis, 1898), Macoun (McIntosh x Jersey Black, 1932), Fortune (Red Spy x Empire, 1962), Liberty (Macoun x Purdue 54-12, 1978), RubyFrost (Braeburn x Autumn Crisp, 2015) and SnapDragon (Honeycrisp x Golden Delicious x Monroe x Melrose, 2015).

The most recent releases from Cornell AgriTech in 2020 were Cordera (Honeycrisp x Liberty), Pink Luster (Honeycrisp x Gala), and Firecracker (Golden Delicious x Monroe x Melrose). These three newcomers aren’t yet widely available, but each year you can find a wider variety of apple cultivars including some rediscovered heirlooms.at the Hudson Valley’s farmstands and farmers’ markets. One place to brush up on your familiarity with the widely available breeds is at the New York State Apple Growers’ Association website: www.applesfromny.com/varieties.

U-pick farms

Below is a list of 19 u-pick farms in Ulster County, waiting for you to explore and sample their wares. Some have onsite bakeries, plus added attractions such as hayrides, petting zoos, scarecrow dioramas and corn mazes. Check the websites for more details, including hours of operation.

Apple Hill Farm

24 Route 32 South, New Paltz

applehillfarm.com

Clarke’s Family Farm

2086 Rout 44/55, Modena

clarkesfamilyfarm.com

Dressel Farms

271 Route 208, New Paltz

dresselfarms.com

DuBois Farms

209 Perkinsville Road, Highland

duboisfarms.com