Here I must say that I found more examples of indigenous southern apples than northern ones because of the work done by apple hunters Tom Brown and Lee Calhoun; for over thirty years, Calhoun produced the definitive encyclopedia of old southern apples by painstakingly tracking varieties through nursery catalogues and oral histories. The same intensive research hasn’t been conducted for northern apples, and it is also very hard to trace varieties when the names have been changed, as happened when the Equinetelle became the Buckingham. Also, if an apple wasn’t sold commercially, it won’t be in nursery catalogues. And many apples from indigenous orchards were never recorded by the incomers.
It is all down to names and naming. Anything I have been able to discover has been because there was a name to point me in a certain direction. It is no secret now that white settlers very effectively overlaid their culture on North American indigenous society and made the latter all but disappear. Where a name has survived to show us what once existed, I feel that name is still there because it was a way for the white settlers to remember a place, not because they were memorializing the indigenous use of that place. An “old Indian orchard,” for instance, would become known to the settlers by that name, and to change the name would be confusing for them. A case in point was the “Indian Orchard” Girl Scout camp that existed in the early 1950s on the west shore of Cayuga Lake in New York State.40
I researched the location of old Indian orchards by looking at early maps and gazetteers for individual states and provinces in the United States and Canada, checking for place names that bore that description. I also looked at old horticultural reports, which often had very detailed accounts of where particular varieties of apples were growing. In this way, I was able to determine the sites of these old orchards.
There are currently two locations with the name Indian Orchard in the United States—one is a neighbourhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the other a village in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. There is also an Indian Orchard Campground in Webster, New Hampshire, and an Old Indian Orchard Cemetery in Indiana. There’s a Cherokee Orchard Road in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and a road called Sioux Orchard in Orange County, Tennessee. In New Jersey, there’s a Cree Orchard Avenue. There’s a Cree Orchard Point in Weems, Virginia, and a Cree Orchard Crossing in Tyron, Pennsylvania. In Rhineland, Wisconsin, there’s a road called Chippewa Orchard, and in Texas there’s a Muskogee Orchard Road. In both the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Fairview, North Carolina, there’s a Cherokee Orchard Road.
These are the only names that have survived as markers for the old indigenous orchards. Like the varieties of apples themselves, many more names have likely been changed or left to go extinct.
This summer there was a long drought in Southern Ontario and upstate New York. The old tree behind the mini-mart in Geneva did not produce any apples, so I was unable to taste them, unable to determine whether they were descended from the Seneca orchard. This task will now, unfortunately, have to wait until next year.
Even though so much has disappeared and changed—the old orchards are gone, as is the memory of them—there are some positive developments to report. The present-day Oneidas in Green Bay, Wisconsin, have started what they call an “integrated food system,” which includes an apple orchard, a farm, a store and a cannery. In their statement of purpose, the Oneidas outline their belief that the current mass production of food is damaging to the earth and to any sense of community, and they advocate for a return to small and local production. They assert, “Our food can be one vehicle through which we reassemble our fragmented identities, reestablish community and become native not only to a place but to each other. We find this vision of people living well and responsibly with each other and with the land on which they are placed to be deeply appealing.”41
ANN JESSOP
I was curious about the apple tree I’d found in back of the ruined cabin, and I wanted to discover more about the delicious White Winter Pearmain. How had an apple I’d never heard of ended up in my particular pocket of Southern Ontario? It seemed an impossible task to determine the apple’s thirteenth-century beginnings in Norfolk, but surely, if the fruit had made the journey to America, I could find out who had brought it over from Europe.
My first research forays yielded the information that the White Winter Pearmain was one of several apple varieties taken as scions over the Mississippi River in the saddlebags of a lone young man in the early 1800s. There was no mention of how the apple came to be in the southern United States in the first place, or why it was being taken west. After reading several similar accounts, I concluded that all the stories were versions of the same tale and had come from the same unacknowledged source.
It is the combination of the vague and the specific that often signals a lie. A man rode west of the Mississippi, his saddlebags filled with apple scions, in the early nineteenth century. No details of the man—where he came from, how he happened on grafts from English apple trees, why he was interested in propagating the trees. And yet, the very precise detail of the saddlebags filled with apple cuttings. The image is romantic and vigorous—a young man riding west to plant apple trees in the 1830s, during the time of the Indian Removal Act, when the indigenous peoples of America were being driven systematically from their lands to open up the west to white settlers, and their orchards were being burned to the ground or stolen from them.
But the story changed when I discovered from an apple encyclopedia1 that it probably wasn’t a man who went west to grow apple trees but a woman. An old woman. A Quaker. And this same woman had journeyed to England in the late 1700s and brought back apple scions from trees there, and had planted numerous orchards throughout the southern states. Because of this, she became known as Annie Appleseed—and predated Johnny Appleseed by almost fifty years.
Ann Jessop (sometimes known as Ann Jessup) was born Ann Matthews on October 10, 1738, to Walter and Mary Matthews in North Carolina. Ann grew up in a Quaker household, and in 1758 she married John Floyd. They had one child, Elizabeth, before John died after several years of marriage. Ann then became a Quaker minister in New Garden, North Carolina, in 1765. A year later she married Thomas Jessop, a man twenty-three years her senior who had eleven children from two previous marriages. Ann and Thomas had three living children together—Jonathan, Hannah and Ann—bringing the total number of youngsters for whom she was in some way responsible to an astonishing fourteen.
Thomas died in 1783, and the following year, Ann moved with her children to York, Pennsylvania (although she seems, from the minutes of the New Garden Quaker meeting house, to have returned later to New Garden). In 1817, she travelled on horseback, with her apple scions, to Ohio and lived with one of her children, Hannah, until her death in 1822 at the age of eighty-four. This was an incredibly long life when the average woman in the early nineteenth century died at fifty-six.2
It would seem that Ann’s life could have easily been defined by her prodigious brood, or her passion for Quakerism, or her longevity. But it was an event in 1790, when she was fifty-two years old, that led to her greatest, and most lasting, achievement.
Quakers are pacifists, and when the Revolutionary War started in 1775, they refused to take sides. When the war came directly to New Garden, local Quakers tended equally to the American and the British wounded, turning their meeting house into a temporary hospital. The bloodstains apparently never came out of the floorboards, despite much scrubbing for months afterwards. And for years, a story circulated that there were bloody handprints on the walls of the meeting house from the suffering wounded. (The prints proved to be from the men who had built the structure and had used red chalk to measure the boards.)
The Battle of New Garden, on March 15, 1781, began at sunrise and lasted most of the morning. It was a precursor to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse—farther down the road—fought later that same day. These battles were part of the ongoing conflict between the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, and General Nathanael Greene, both of whom
wanted control of North Carolina and were convinced they had the support of the people there.
The courthouse was ideal for a battle because it was at the centre of several roads, and these roads could be used for shuttling supplies, and for beating a retreat, if necessary. One of the roads went right through New Garden and past the Quaker meeting house, so it can be assumed that the battle there was a strike in advance of the later battle.
The men in charge of the cavalries that day—Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee for the Americans and Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton for the British—were the favourites of their respective commanders, and both were in their mid-twenties, handsome, well educated and proud. They had fought each other before and had an ongoing hatred. There were three skirmishes—or “bouts,” as they were called then—during the morning of March 15. At some point, Lee was thrown from his favourite horse, and that horse was captured by the British and subsequently ridden into battle by Tarleton, which must have been very galling to Lee and speaks volumes as to the men’s competitiveness and familiarity with each other.
There is no accurate tally of the dead and wounded from the morning’s battle, but British casualties were higher in number. A conservative estimate puts the combined death toll at between 125 and 150 men, with as many as 180 wounded for both sides.3 The Quaker meeting house became a hospital when the armies pulled out, and was run by a British army surgeon and his two assistants. They were severely understaffed, so the more seriously wounded were cared for in the homes of New Garden residents. There must have been some mixed feelings about this, as the people of New Garden had suffered food raids from both sides for weeks before the battle, leaving some of the local farmers destitute.
The Quakers of New Garden tended the wounded for many weeks, neglecting their own farmwork in the process and also dealing with an outbreak of smallpox.4 One of the unexpected consequences of having soldiers in their houses was that Thomas Jessop’s daughter Sarah fell in love with a wounded British officer. Her father was furious at this turn of events and disowned her. This was a lasting state of affairs, and in his will two years later, Thomas left Sarah only five shillings—enough to buy two candlesticks, a small carpet or a cradle.5 He left his other daughters, Hannah and Ann, “a feather bed, and furniture and at the age of eighteen or marriage, twenty-five pounds each.”6
It was Ann senior who rallied around Sarah, accompanying her step-daughter and her new British husband back to England via sailing ship later in the year. Unfortunately, the officer succumbed to his injuries during the six-week voyage, but Sarah wasted no time becoming engaged to one of his friends, a member of the Scots Guards. When they reached port, she settled in Glasgow, Scotland, with James MacQueen, whom she married a few years later. Presumably, James and Sarah bonded over the death of Sarah’s husband, and this helped their love along. Or because Sarah was already bound for Great Britain, they made the match for practical reasons.
Ann remained with the young couple while they established themselves, and then returned to visit them almost a decade later, well after Thomas had died. This time she spent two years travelling and preaching in the United Kingdom in the company of a British Quaker minister named Hannah Stephenson, who was also in her middle years. When Ann returned to North Carolina in 1792, she brought with her scions from a variety of apple trees, as well as a grain that was called English millet in Britain but became known as alfalfa when it was planted and cultivated in North Carolina. With the help of a young Quaker Friend, Abijah Pinson, who was good at grafting, Jessop set about establishing several orchards with the scions in the spring of 1793. Pinson eventually opened a large nursery in Westfield, North Carolina, where he sold seedling trees from the same British scions.
Because Ann Jessop travelled a great deal in her work as a minister, she was able to distribute apple trees among Quaker settlements in many of the northern and western states. In this way, and with the help of Pinson’s nursery, she slowly populated America with her apple trees.
Who was Ann Jessop? There is virtually nothing with her direct stamp on it. She was a minister, and yet there are no sermons that survive (although one of her congregants described her as having a musical voice and a way of sermonizing that “was often a lofty style of blank verse, entertaining and interesting, holding an audience spellbound”7). If she had an interest in horticulture before travelling to England, that remains a mystery.
She had influence within her community, and influence within her family. Her son Jonathan was a renowned clockmaker and the postmaster for a period in Yorktown, Pennsylvania, as well as being a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, but he kept on with his mother’s work of propagating fruit trees and was responsible for developing the York Imperial apple. He had first called this apple Johnson’s Fine Keeper, after the man on whose land he had discovered it, but he was persuaded by the famous landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (brother to the pomologist Charles Downing) to change the name. In a letter to Jessop, Downing says: “Friend Jessup.—I have received thy basket of very fine apples; it is the Imperial of late keepers, and very fine, and as thee says it originated near York, Pennsylvania, I would suggest the name of York Imperial.”8 (Fruit growing was in the Jessop blood in succeeding generations as well, with two of Jonathan’s granddaughters going to California to start apricot orchards.)9
What becomes clear from looking through the monthly minutes of Ann Jessop’s Quaker meeting house in New Garden is how much she liked to travel. She frequently applied for permission to “take the Truth” to other communities, both near and far. She seemed to be away more than she was home, and her trips, even to neighbouring communities, were lengthy. When she went to Deep River, for example, a mere ten miles away, she was often there for almost a month at a time.10 She also travelled regularly to Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Vermont and Indiana. A family biographer noted that Ann “was wont to make frequent journeys to the northern States in connection with her ministrations.”11 She clearly had the energy and the desire to venture outside of New Garden, and after Thomas’s death in 1783, she also had the relative independence to do so. What is hard to separate out is how much of her travel was driven by religious fervour, and how much was simply wanderlust.
In 1797, Ann Jessop went to Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York. In 1798, she went to Baltimore and journeyed along the eastern shore of Maryland, and the following year, she went back to Pennsylvania. Jonathan lived in Pennsylvania, so we can assume that she wanted to visit him as much as she did the Pennsylvania meeting houses. When Jonathan was just thirteen years old, she had taken him to Yorktown to apprentice him with a cousin as a clock- and watchmaker. They had travelled together in a covered Conestoga wagon,12 “camping out at night, and keeping up a fire to drive off wild beasts.”13
It is these little details that make Ann Jessop seem a bold woman, someone who sought out adventure and was not afraid of new experiences. The fact that her son remembered their journey to Pennsylvania and recounted it to his children and grandchildren means that it was memorable—not just a journey but an adventure.
The greatest adventure of all, however, was Ann Jessop’s voyage to England in 1790, and her travels there with Hannah Stephenson. The Quakers required women preachers to work and travel in pairs. Because of this rule, female friendships were often of great importance, and single Quaker women frequently lived together as companions. Sometimes the bonds of female friendship were so close that the women involved manipulated their marriages around their friendships.14
There was a great deal of freedom in these arrangements that was not available in ordinary married life, and it is no surprise, really, that women preachers were often on the road. Still, Ann Jessop travelled more than most. And two trips across the Atlantic, with the second lasting a full two years, was quite a remarkable feat for an older woman in the 1700s.
When Ann arrived in England in the spring of 1790, the country was in turmoil over the French Revolution, whi
ch was stirring up heated debate on everything from lower taxes to assistance for the poor to larger questions of the inherent rights of humanity. In 1793, France would declare war on Britain, inciting a rebellion within the British Navy, a revolt in Ireland and riots to protest the depressed economic conditions brought on by war. So the country that Ann arrived in and journeyed through was in a state of agitation and flux, and she would not have been immune to, or ignorant of, the ideas that permeated this society at the time—especially as she was travelling with an Englishwoman. It can be assumed, because she remained in Britain for a full two years, that the political atmosphere either didn’t bother her or excited her.
Hannah Stephenson was born into a Quaker family on July 15, 1745. For the first seven years of her life she lived in Whitehaven, and then her family moved to the Isle of Man, where they were the only Quakers. According to a small biographical sketch published by the Quaker society in 1845,15 she was tormented by many temptations on the Isle of Man, yet fought through them and was rewarded with a visitation of “divine love.”
Hannah’s father died when she was seventeen, and the following year she went to Birmingham to live as a servant. She then moved to Essex and lived with a woman who owned a shop there. After that she resided with the family of Sarah Beck, who became a close friend and was a Quaker minister. Hannah became a minister herself at the age of twenty-two, and her services were described as “lively.”
Though based in Essex, Hannah also liked to travel. In 1771 she went with Sarah Beck to London, Kent and Buckinghamshire. In 1778 she went to Surrey, Sussex and Kent, as well as Suffolk, Norfolk and Norwich. That same year she went back to London, and then later to Tottenham. From 1778 until she travelled with Ann Jessop in 1790, Hannah was constantly on the road, visiting most of the counties in England. Her travels with Ann are described as “a long northern journey, which extended as far as Glasgow,”16 where presumably Ann visited with her step-daughter Sarah.
The Ghost Orchard Page 3