A Modern Johnny Appleseed
Tom Brown ’63, ’64 works to identify and bring back heritage apple breeds.
By Kelley Freund
Growing up in rural Iredell County, N.C., Tom Brown ’63, ’64 remembers his mother making cider out of the fruit of their backyard apple trees. Many years later, Brown was able to identify them as McLeans. You won’t find McLeans in a grocery store. Instead, engineered varieties like Red Delicious and Pink Lady dominate, and heritage apples like the ones in Brown’s childhood backyard are disappearing.
Brown is working to change that. The retired chemical engineer spends his time hunting down lost apple varieties and bringing them back from near extinction. His mission began with a trip to a farmer’s market about 25 years ago in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he came across a vendor selling heritage apples. “There were names I was not familiar with, and their colors and tastes were so different from the grocery store apples,” says Brown, who lives in Clemmons, N.C. “I was fascinated.”
“Their colors and tastes were so different from the grocery store apples.”
When Brown learned there was a lost variety from his own neck of the woods — the Harper’s Seedling — he decided to find it. Brown has since discovered more than 1,200 lost varieties. And yes, he did find the Harper’s Seedling, 16 years after that trip to the farmer’s market. But Brown isn’t fazed by the challenge of tracking down old apples. “I say to myself, if I’m not finding something, it doesn’t mean it’s not out there,” he says. “It means I’m not looking hard enough.”
To identify lost varieties, Brown researches where they originated and then travels to those locations. He combs through letters, historical documents and old nursery catalogs. At festivals, he sets up a display where people stop and tell him about a relative who knows about apples or someone who has an orchard. And then Brown will pay a visit.
It’s getting more difficult to identify old varieties as the people who remember them are passing away and the trees disappear. Brown has a 10-acre orchard, where he grows more than 700 varieties. “I felt an obligation to do this because nobody else was doing it intensely at this critical time when these apples were rapidly disappearing,” Brown says. “To me it’s important to preserve the agricultural heritage of communities.”
On the Web:
Visit Tom Brown’s website to read more about his searches:
