The Ghost Orchard

by Helen Humphreys

  Hannah Stephenson never married. After Ann’s return to North Carolina, she continued to travel throughout the British Isles, often in the company of Deborah Townsend, who was described as her “beloved” and “very intimate” friend. Stephenson died of a “lingering illness” in 1804, at the age of fifty-nine, and as was the rather bizarre Quaker custom of the time, her last words were carefully recorded. Because she lingered so long, she had many last words. Sometimes she complained about her discomfort; sometimes she extolled in the virtue of the Lord. Often she remarked on the sweetness of something she had just eaten. But finally she said, “Rejoice evermore, and in everything give thanks,” and quietly slipped away.

  Sadly, it is impossible to know the details of the long northern journey of Ann Jessop and Hannah Stephenson. But we do know that Ann Jessop came back to North Carolina two years later with seeds for English millet (alfalfa) and the scions of approximately twenty different apple varieties.17 This means, at the very least, that she ate some apples on her English tour. She passed through or visited some orchards. She was made aware of the splendid properties of certain kinds of English fruit, and she desired to reproduce this fruit for her own people. And perhaps, in planting and eating the apples back in America, she was able to savour, once again, her time in England. Certain foods create, just by the act of tasting them, involuntary memories. Think of Marcel Proust launching his fleet of autobiographical tomes on the taste of a single madeleine.

  Did Ann Jessop have an interest in apples before she went to England? Did she ever consider propagating fruit before? Or did her passion for apples come out of her experiences travelling through Britain and Scotland with Hannah Stephenson?

  I imagine Ann and Hannah stopping for the evening with a Quaker household in Kent—the evening sun slanting in at the windows, and the air outside drowsy with bees—and being given a Yellow Summer Pippin to eat as part of their meal. The sweet crisp of the apple was likely unfamiliar and intoxicating to Ann. It would have been easy, when praising the taste of the fruit, to ask for a cutting to take with her. Or she might have risen early and gone out to the orchard the next morning with a pocketknife to do the task herself.

  Or, she and Hannah are riding in their horse and trap through the countryside. It is September and they can smell the ripe fruit heavy on the trees when they pass the orchards. They stop the horse. One of them climbs down from the cart and plucks several apples to take with them on their journey. This time a Russet and a Limbertwig. The rough texture of the Russet’s skin puts Ann off at first, but Hannah reassures her of the taste, and when Ann bites through the dry leather case, she is greeted with a rich, mellow juiciness beneath.

  Or, in the heat of the summer of 1790,18 Ann Jessop can’t sleep and walks out of her host’s abode into the garden that surrounds the house. She strolls under the apple trees, sampling the fruit from each one, and because she can’t sleep and does not want to go back to the stifling house, she passes the time cutting scions from those trees where the fruit is most pleasing and fully ripe.

  Among the apples that Ann Jessop took back to America were the Russet and the Limbertwig, as well as the Father Abraham, the Red Pippin, the Jannette (or Neverfail), the Striped Pippin, the Red Romanite, the Yellow Summer Pippin, the Leathercoat, the White Winter Pippin, the Striped Horse, the Speckled Pearmain, the White Winter Pearmain, the Vandiver, the Pearwarden, the French Pippin, the Red Winter Pearmain and the Golden Russet.19 They were a mix of cooking and eating apples and had a ripening range from July to January. Ann Jessop probably chose these apples because they could form the basis of an orchard. At least half were winter apples, and of those, most were good keepers and would last right through to spring. Apples could be picked fresh from the trees for that seven-month period and used for eating or cooking while they were at their tastiest. Some of the varieties, like the Russet, were fairly disease-resistant.

  One of the apple scions that Ann Jessop brought back with her from England was the White Winter Pearmain—the apple that I had found growing on the old tree behind the deserted log cabin. In a nursery catalogue from North Carolina in 1870, the White Winter Pearmain was described by the state’s leading pomologists as “the highest flavored apple in cultivation.”20

  The English apples that Ann and Abijah Pinson planted proved to be very popular and sold widely across the state, with many of the North Carolina Quakers grafting orchards for themselves. A nursery was started in Lynchburg, Virginia, to sell seedlings from the English apples, and another nursery was opened near Philadelphia for the same purpose. Through the early decades of the nineteenth century, grafts of the original apples were carried by Quakers and planted in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri—and eventually every state and territory west of the Mississippi.21 Most of the southern and Midwestern states were planted with apples that had originated with Ann Jessop’s English scions.

  Abijah Pinson, the man who helped Jessop set up her original orchard, was the son of Richard Pinson, a Quaker renowned for his eccentricities. He would not wear coloured cloth or use paper money. He didn’t believe in owning land and refused to pay taxes. And he was very punctual in all his habits, both business and personal—so much so that when he was sick and feeble and unable to rouse himself from his bed, his horse, so used to the standard routine, would leap the pasture fence on meeting days, walk to the meeting house by himself and stand under his usual tree for exactly one hour before returning home again.

  The relationship between Ann and Abijah was long-lasting. Not only did they work together, taking grafts and planting orchards, but Abijah married Jessop’s daughter Ann.

  When Ann Jessop returned from England, she was fifty-four years old, the age that I am now. It is a beguiling age, where the limits of life and energy are apparent, but also where there is still the drive and desire to start again, to have a second act. It’s the late summer of life, Joanne liked to say. And just as flowers will sometimes bloom again in August or strawberries have a second harvest, human passions can run high in the fifties. Not for the last time, but perhaps for the last time when there is still the energy to cater to those desires.

  Ann Jessop left on her travels to England as a Quaker minister, and she came back as a pomologist. She worked with Abijah in planting orchards—the hard, physical work of digging and setting trees, and then maintaining them with pruning and burning the dead wood. She used apples as a form of commerce, to support herself and her family. In a sense it became the family business, with son-in-law Abijah running seedling nurseries and son Jonathan planting orchards in Pennsylvania. Even when Ann was seventy-nine years old and went to live with her daughter Hannah in Ohio, she took grafts of her English apple trees with her in her saddlebags and planted them west of the Mississippi.

  There is nothing left of Ann in terms of anything she wrote, or said, or thought; what we have instead is something more intimate than any of that: her taste. She went to England and chose twenty apples, out of all the varieties that grew there in 1790, to bring back to America. She chose these apples—and that meant she tasted them, and she liked the taste of them above others. They weren’t chosen simply for their practical advantages—the long-keeping winter apples, for example—as there were other apples with these same characteristics. This was the heyday of apples, and there were thousands upon thousands of varieties. No, Ann Jessop chose the apples that she liked the taste of, and that she wanted to continue to taste when she set up her own orchards back home in North Carolina.

  It is an intimate act, tasting an apple—having the flesh of the fruit in our mouths, the juice on our tongues. Ann Jessop bites into an apple in an English orchard in the hot summer of 1790 in the middle of her life, and I bite into the same kind of apple in 2016, in the middle of my life, and taste what she did. For the time it takes to eat the apple, I am where she was, and I know what she knows, and there is no separation between us.

  The log cabin and the dead apple tree led me to the White Winter Pearmain, which in turn l
ed me to Ann Jessop. This is what happens with research. It opens up a world that you couldn’t have imagined existed. And while it is impossible to trace the individual White Winter Pearmain trees that Jessop planted, it is perhaps not out of the realm of possibility to hope for some trace of her original orchards.

  I drive down to North Carolina in late April. It is a journey from early spring to full-blown summer—a journey from the pink granite of the Canadian Shield to the dusky bloom of the Blue Ridge Mountains, ending in the lush greenery of North Carolina. I leave the scrawny woods of Southern Ontario, the trees still bare from winter, and arrive to the most majestic oaks I have ever seen, fully leafed out and hundreds of feet high.

  This is a trip I might have made with Joanne. We travelled a lot together over the course of our twenty-year friendship. We went across Canada by train, to the Arctic and to New York City. We also had many short adventures closer to home, including a canoe trip down a long stretch of river in a predawn world that included owls lifting over the water on their shadowy wings and deer sleeping along the edge of the riverbank. In fact, when I thought about Ann Jessop’s trip through England with Hannah Stephenson, it reminded me of a journey, given a change of century and circumstances, that Joanne and I might have undertaken. I believe that Ann and Hannah must have had the same sort of easy companionship, to be able to travel so closely together for a full two years.

  Joanne, being a poet, would have found much of her own material in a shared voyage to North Carolina.

  When I get to New Garden, I find a new Quaker meeting house near the site of the old one, a low-slung brick building that replaced the original wooden meeting house where Ann Jessop was a minister. Nearby there is Jessup Grove Road, which leads to Jessup Lane, a short, tree-filled driveway that was probably the site of the original homestead belonging to Thomas and Ann.

  In the cemetery out back of the new meeting house, I find the grave of Randall Jarrell, the poet, as well as the cornerstones of the original meeting house and several enormous oak trees. Near the centre of the cemetery is a bronze plaque commemorating the Revolutionary Oak, which used to grow there, and under which, in a mass grave, were buried the American and British dead from the 1781 battle. The tree was dynamited by vandals in 1955 to protest Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the Guilford campus to talk about racially integrating public schools.

  Tucked up against the trunks of other oak trees, some of which are two to three hundred years old, are grave markers from the early nineteenth century, including two marked “Jesup.”22 One grave is for M. Jesup, who died in August 1813, and the other is for D. Jesup, who died in May 1811. The stones are flat—stones that were likely found nearby—laid on top of the graves, but the real markers are, of course, the trees, which grow tall and strong, up out of the dead bodies, in essence becoming the new life-form for the dead lying entwined in their roots.

  Standing under the oak trees, it is possible to imagine the time of Ann Jessop because the land on which the original meeting house stood remains in much the same condition as it was in the late 1700s. As a cemetery, it has been preserved from development. But the surrounding area has been overlaid by the roads and buildings of the twentieth century, making it impossible for me to catch a glimpse of the eighteenth beyond the names of Jessup Grove Road and Jessup Lane.

  Jonathan Jessop was ten years old when the “skirmish” in New Garden took place between the British and American troops. He drew a detailed map of the event, showing the British camped near Deep River and the Americans near the Guilford Courthouse. He drew the battle near the courthouse in a starburst of red ink, perhaps to represent the blood. His house, where he lived with his father and mother, is also shown, and if his sketch is to be believed—which I am inclined towards because of the elaborate detail—the “skirmish” of New Garden happened directly outside their door. They would have had a full and intimate view of the fighting.

  Ann Jessop’s great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, Emily, agreed to meet with me while I was in North Carolina, and generously spent a day driving around with me and looking for remnants of her ancestor’s orchards. Because of the development in the area, it seemed unlikely we would find anything there, but I had some hope for Westfield,23 where Abijah Pinson had his apple nursery, so we drove an hour northwest, a journey of fifty-seven miles—which in Ann Jessop’s time, with her means of transport, would have taken two days.

  Some of the roads in the Westfield area had intriguing names (3 Dog Farm Lane, Beaverdam Creek, Animal Farm Trail, Fishpond Road), but two in particular—Jessup Grove Church Road and Apple Blossom Lane—seemed to gesture towards the bit of the past that I was interested in.

  We started with Jessup Grove Church Road. I wondered if it had originally been called Jessup Grove, with Church Road added on later, to indicate the presence of the twentieth-century Baptist church that is there now. If the names had been put together, it perhaps meant that the Jessup grove was still in evidence at the time of the name change, or that everyone in the area knew the road by that name, so it couldn’t easily be altered. (Interestingly, in the same area is an Indian Grove Church Road, which again seems to indicate that whatever the “Indian grove” was, it predated the newer Baptist church. The “grove” in that case could have been a settlement, a grove of trees or even an apple orchard.)

  There is no Jessop grove there now—only a scattering of young apple trees along the road, in no particular pattern. But there is a tree nursery, and there are large sections of cleared fields with nothing growing on them, indications that something used to be there. It is no small feat to hack a clearing out of the thick North Carolina forests, so those fields would have been cleared for a purpose. And perhaps the presence of the large tree nursery spoke to the earlier nursery belonging to Abijah Pinson. Often, the same enterprises appear on the same spot, sometimes with the present-day businesses having knowledge of the past ones, but sometimes not. It is as though the land itself has memory of how it was used. Or the location is specifically suited to one type of pursuit, and multiple people, in different times, simply have the same idea of what to do in that place.

  We drove next to Apple Blossom Lane, a road that didn’t have a single apple tree on it—a fact I found heartening, because again there were these large cleared fields. It seemed that the large empty fields in a short stretch of road called Apple Blossom Lane meant they must have once been full of apple trees.

  There were several impressive, sprawling houses on the lane, and one of the empty fields was for sale. The road petered out into a cul-de-sac, and we parked there for a while. There was a beautiful view, over the unsold field, of the thick green forest, and beyond that of a mountain I forgot to ask Emily the name of. The field had golden and orange tall grasses near the road, and short green grass behind that. It was easily over four acres—a size I’m familiar with because it’s the standard for many Ontario farm fields.

  Emily and I talked a lot that day, and by the time we were parked in Apple Blossom Lane, it had become clear to me that we had, weirdly, a great deal in common. We were both writers, but really that was the least of it. Our commonality ranged further than our professions, extending to personality traits, and even to the fact that she had just finished a book I was currently reading.24

  I didn’t know what to make of our similarities. I had very low expectations for my trip to North Carolina. I was excited about driving around with Ann Jessop’s great-granddaughter times six, but I had no assumptions of liking her beyond that fact, and no sense of what our conversation might be. I didn’t think I would find any remaining apple trees, because apple trees don’t live much past a hundred years. Any I did find, in the spot where the original orchards once stood, would have come from the seeds of the first trees, and even that seemed an unlikely prospect. It is hard for two hundred years to pass without land being developed and trees disappearing.

  I had come to North Carolina mainly to make a connection with Emily, who had been very generous
in sharing information about Ann Jessop, and also to see the landscape. It was wonderful to drive around the back roads of Westfield and marvel in the beauty and exquisite lushness of the countryside, and to see all the Jessop graves in the Quaker cemetery, even though they dated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Ann Jessop was, I think, a strong woman. She had adventures and made bold choices. Emily is a strong woman, and it is not hard to see in her the strength of that bloodline. But here I wonder about what writing is or can be. There is a prophetic or mysterious quality to it sometimes—when you are on the track of something, and even before that, when you are attracted to a subject. It is a kind of magic, and this is the only way I can think to understand why I had more in common with Emily than almost any other person, intimates included, and why that didn’t feel at all accidental. It is an odd sensation, when on the trail of research, to also feel that the research has, in a feeling that cannot be fully articulated, been on the trail of you.

  The day we spent together was a gift, and I was lucky enough to recognize that while it was happening, which is also a gift.

  At one point, when we were parked on Apple Blossom Lane, where there were no apple blossoms, Emily remarked on how hard it is to know what anyone is thinking. “You don’t know what I’m thinking,” she said, “and I don’t know what you’re thinking,” which made it seem as though she was thinking something really interesting, when I was only wondering what kind of bird had made the nest I could see in the scraggly tree in front of the car. I was also wondering what the orange grass at the edge of the field was called, and I was thinking how beautiful the trees beyond that field were. I was a bit drunk on the appearance of summer after the long and seemingly endless Canadian winter.