Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  With the first eight hundred trees planted, there was only one thing left to do: wait eight long years.

  — CHAPTER SIX —

  HUNTING THE LOST KETTER FRUIT

  Between South Portsmouth and Vanceburg: In the summer, back from the river a short distance, the wild strawberry shines like red tufts on a new green carpet; the wild blackberry grows in great, thorny tangles; the pawpaw is plentiful in hillside thickets; and the persimmon bears fruit for the coon and ’possum, which boys hunt at night.

  —KENTUCKY: A GUIDE TO THE BLUEGRASS STATE (1939)1

  At the Lawrence County Courthouse in Ironton, Ohio—a handsome Greek Revival structure built during the town’s industrial twilight—I find Mrs. Ketter’s name (which had been printed in the Journal of Heredity only as Mrs. Frank Ketter), her tax records, and the deed to her Fayette Township property, where the fruit was picked.

  I’ve come here to find the lost Ketter tree, the winning cultivar from the 1916 contest that had eluded Neal Peterson. Through the collection at Blandy, Neal presumed he found links to the other prizewinning fruits, but not the top fruit itself. Estella M. Ketter’s fruit grew on a tree somewhere in Lawrence County, Ohio. Almost a century later I’m here to find that tree.

  If I find it—not even the original, but a sucker from that same patch—then that tree’s genetic information could be used by today’s breeders and growers to develop a pawpaw of the highest quality. Or it could simply be propagated as is, a new cultivar for backyards and orchards. And frankly, the Ketter fruit holds sentimental value. It was once deemed the best in the country. Why not try to celebrate it once more? I’ve imagined calling Neal Peterson to report the discovery, bringing him to the site. After all, he’d once told the Washington Post, “Anybody wandering in the woods is just as likely as a scientist to find a more perfect pawpaw. The treasure hunt is far from over.”

  The deed is vague: “Being known as the eastern half of the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section 33 . . . 22 acres, more or less.” So I head wherever I perceive “there” to be. In her letter to the Journal of Heredity, Mrs. Ketter wrote that the pawpaw grew wild on her Fayette Township property, received no attention whatsoever, and was surrounded by a thicket of mulberry and locust. I have two days to find it, and this is as good as my intel will likely get.

  On the map I see only two roads in section 33. The first branches into a holler where on either side are well-kept homes, some set back near the rising ridge, others close to the road. Judging from the architectural styles, all appear to have been built sometime in the middle of the twentieth century—fifty years after Mrs. Ketter described her pawpaw patch for the journal.

  I meet a woman and her teenage son, who are following several unleashed dogs into a field of tall grass. The woman is friendly and says it will probably be fine for me to walk in the woods and look for pawpaws. There’s a pond farther up where neighborhood kids often gather, but she doesn’t know who owns the property.

  The road ends ahead, however, and I ought to just turn around there and not proceed up the last driveway, she says. I might get a gun pulled on me, she then adds with a smile, petting one of her dogs. But when I do come to the end, I push on through the NO TRESPASSING/PRIVATE PROPERTY signs nailed to a wooden post. I’m on a mission, shotgun be damned.

  At the base of the hill an old log home sits in the clearing, painted black and white, by far the oldest structure in the holler. Maybe the Ketters built it, a retreat from their home in Ironton, “Little Chicago,” and its once booming factories and smokestacks. Perhaps it was the family’s weekend hunting lodge.

  The house appears uninhabited, and though I find it beautiful, parts of the roof are falling down. On the other side of a circular gravel drive is a patchwork quilt of a mobile home—looking less mobile and more of-the-woods. A woman stands on the porch with a can of soda, watching me approach. I stammer something about pawpaws-and-research-and-hello-how-are-you, still heeding the gun warning. Then Mary Williams and her husband, Clyde Williams, welcome me to their porch step, and proceed to graciously answer all of my questions with stories of life in Appalachian Ohio.

  Years ago Clyde “worked away” as a mechanic. But, he says, “Industrial revolution, when it was phasing itself out in the ’70s, and times got . . .” then trails off. “You had to go back to the farm. And that’s what I did, go back to the farm. Started living most of it off the land.” He and Mary both laugh at the memory. “Like my grandpa and grandmother and everybody else did.” Clyde and Mary once raised their own produce, kept chickens, goats, hogs, cattle, and as many as 250 rabbits—but they also turned to the woods. They’d snack on pawpaws and persimmons, make sassafras tea and herbal tinctures. One Christmas, since the hills were without pine trees, Mary dug out and decorated a little sassafras tree with fruit and candy.

  Then Clyde tells me about Catfish, Man of the Woods, the late mountain-man herb doctor, born Clarence Gray. Catfish practiced and promoted herbal remedies and folk medicine from his home, over the river in Glenwood, West Virginia. When Clyde was younger he took an interest in the folk remedies, bitters, and other concoctions Catfish promoted and sold. Just the previous week, in fact, he and Mary dusted off an old recipe and made a bottle of Catfish’s famous cure-all. Clyde brings up “the Catfish” because I want to know about pawpaws. To Clyde, pawpaws belong to a particular way of life—one that includes sassafras tea, butchering hogs, and log cabins—and to a time of self-sufficiency and knowledge that is disappearing. “Young people don’t know anything about it,” he says. “Everything’s dying away.”

  Clyde was born over the river in Kentucky, but grew up here, and in nearby Sunrise Holler. The log cabin was built by Williams’s father and himself, as a boy, with poplar and oak taken from these hills. I eventually get around to asking about the Ketters, but they haven’t heard of anyone by that name. However, both Clyde and Mary do have fond memories of pawpaws. Clyde remembers as a boy having to drive the cattle in from pasture at night. “I used to go up and bring the cattle in, and there was pawpaw, little pawpaw bushes and trees and stuff all over the tops of them hills up in there,” he says. “I’d go up there and eat pawpaws with them, me and the cattle. I’d get me a pawpaw, maybe stick me a couple in my pockets”—he laughs—“and bring them home with me, you know.” I ask if his family ever cooked with pawpaws. “We just ate them is all we did,” he says. “Back then, my mom and dad, everybody, they all ate pawpaws and stuff, when they was plentiful. All over the pasture fields there were pawpaw bushes everywhere.” He repeats himself to underscore the point: “You found them everywhere.”

  Clyde says there used to be pawpaw trees in this holler—once known as Bear Meat Holler—when he’d first moved here, but they all died out. “I don’t know whether it was that ethanol plant that put out all that chemicals, but there’s just not any around here anymore,” he says. And beneath power lines and along gas lines, companies began spraying with chemical herbicides. “They’re all gone now.”

  After talking with the Williamses I drive back to the open field where I spoke to the woman with her dogs. I continue beyond the pond to a small, forested ridge and hike for thirty minutes, thinking I might find a patch Clyde had missed. When I first left the courthouse, deed in hand, I thought I might find the Ketter fruit easily, in the woods where Estella reported picking it. But all I find is a single seedling no more than a foot tall. None of the timber is very large, the vast majority of trees no older than fifty years. In fact, it’s clear the landscape has been altered a good deal since the Ketters were last here—trees cut, trees regrown, new roads and a few more houses built. Or perhaps their patch of land was elsewhere; the documents, unfortunately, aren’t explicit. Regardless, a good amount of bushwhacking awaits.

  More than twenty years have passed since Clyde Williams ate his last pawpaw. The lapse is fairly common. Many older Appalachians have told me they remember eating it as a kid—eit
her loving the flavor or despising the taste and smell—but somewhere along the line, for various reasons, they stopped eating pawpaws, or encountering the fruit at all. Some, like Clyde, say the trees are harder to find in their part of the woods. Or as they got older, they spent less time wandering, were less eager to poke their faces through spiderwebs or risk poison ivy, less able to descend steep hillsides. Perhaps you get to a certain age and you begin to fear that trespassing, even in the relatively innocent pursuit of pawpaws, will result in the fabled shotgun greeting.

  As Clyde and Mary told me, pawpaws were once part of the rural life in southern Ohio. In her 1955 novel Squaw Winter: A Love Story Based on the Indian Folklore of Highland County, Violet Morgan wrote:

  Hanging from the rafters in the cabin were bunches of sassafras, bags of herbs, peppermint, catnip, and dried apples and peaches; fat bags of chestnuts, walnuts, hickory nuts, and butternuts. On the shelf in a corner were pots and glass jars filled with persimmons, berries, pickle beans, tomatoes, apple and paw-paw butter, tree molasses, and sweet bee honey; and wines full of the glint of the wild flavor of the Ohio hills. Buried deep behind their cabin was their store of potatoes, turnips, and cabbages.2

  Although shelves stocked with pawpaw butter may be a rarer sight today, collecting fruit is not by any means over. A few miles upriver, in Chesapeake, Ohio, I meet eighty-eight-year-old Ruth Austin, who spends her weekends selling homegrown vegetables at the flea market, and when they’re in season, pawpaws too.

  Ruth’s daughter, Ann, grew up with pawpaws. As a young girl, Ann would mimic her grandfather, and on hunting trips they’d stop and eat fresh pawpaws—but only the black, extremely ripe ones. “It was part of the farm life,” Ann says. “Everybody ate them. A lot of people liked them. I grew up with them too, but I didn’t eat them. I just wiped them off of my hands.” Ann shakes her head in disgust at the memory. “That’s not my kind of fruit.”

  Yet it was Ann—who during our conversation repeatedly declares her hatred for the rotten-smelling fruit—who recently began putting pawpaws into the hands of friends, family, and strangers. Years ago, she began collecting unwanted fruit from friends’ yards—plums, pears, and spare apples that would otherwise have rotted in the grass. And in one backyard, in Ashland, Kentucky, a friend had two pawpaw trees (unlike Ann, this friend was fond of the fruit). Ann originally brought them home to her mother, knowing they’d be a treat. When it was clear there was still an abundance, Ruth began selling them at market. Now, to meet the demand at the market, Ann collects fruit from the woods on her mother’s farm.

  Her pawpaws are the first taste many have had in decades, offering a sweet memory of the old days. One man for whom a friend was caretaking, and who was ninety-five years old and ill, had been talking about pawpaws nonstop, how badly he wanted one. But the caretaker had no idea how to find one. When the story was finally relayed to Ann, she sent as many as she could. “The old guy was so tickled to get pawpaws,” she says.

  Unlike her daughter, Ruth loves pawpaws. Since she lives alone on her farm, selling produce at the market—which is just over the bridge from Huntington, West Virginia—is her main way to socialize. The same is true for many of the vendors. If there are any leftover tomatoes or peppers at the end of the day, it’s all given away. It’s mostly older folks who buy pawpaws from Ruth, people of her own generation. On the farm, Ruth still raises a large vegetable garden, shells piles of stubborn black walnuts, cans food, and even hunts with her grandsons. “She’s quite a deer hunter,” Ann says. “And she’s a crack shot.”

  Ann says roadside pawpaws are harder to find, and like Clyde Williams also cites spraying. But her mother says they’re still to be found along cricks, near springs, and especially abundant in Gallia County, where it just so happens another of the seven exceptional fruits of the 1916 contest originated (and where, in the eighteenth century, the Scioto Land Company once told French colonists, “French custard, ready for serving, hung from the trees.”)3 But as to whether there are now more or fewer pawpaws growing in an area, I’ve often noticed such discrepancies in reports. Even within the same family, some people say the pawpaw is abundant, while others claim it’s disappearing. Perhaps it’s a game of memory: The fruit seemed more abundant in the past, when it was more appreciated, and when, from a child’s perspective, the woods seemed endless, giving, and filled with more of the sticky, too-sweet fruit than any one person could eat.

  I got the tip to check the Chesapeake flea market one afternoon while pulled over on a back road somewhere in Lawrence County. I was looking at my oversized county map when a man in a small pickup truck drove up and asked, “Are you looking for me?” No, I wasn’t, I told him. He let on that he was waiting for someone, so then I explained what I was up to. I’d been driving around all day, on ridgetop roads and along streambanks, looking for pawpaw trees. I’d found some wild ones—a few small patches, but none bearing fruit. The man knew where a tree was, he said, and offered to drive me there. I followed him a short distance to the property. The trees were far back in a woman’s backyard, and were small, recent plantings. I then asked the man about the Ketter family. He said he knew where some Ketters once lived, grandchildren perhaps, on another dead-end road that I had already been down, and where I had found nothing.

  At the end of another holler in section 33 I stop to speak with a man out on the lawn with his German shepherd. He walks me out to the woods behind his home to show me a large pawpaw tree. I ask if I can explore the woods a bit more. He says sure, and my new friend, the dog, leads the way. We jump over streams, crouch under prickly vines, but make no discoveries.

  The man grew up east of Charleston, West Virginia, along the Kanawha River. “You could go into the hills and get anything,” he says when I return, and of course there were pawpaws, and walnuts, persimmons, hickory nuts, and whatever else was in season and abundance. He bought this property in 1968. The previous owners—not the Ketters—had farmed cattle on seventy acres. There was an old farmhouse and barn back then, but now the buildings are gone.

  The Ketters I am so desperate to find weren’t cattle people of course, but fruit people. In the early 1900s, the family operated an orchard in nearby South Point called Spring Hill Orchard.4 But Frank Ketter’s exposure to fruit began even earlier. At a young age he worked for the C. H. Ketter Grocery Company. Later he and his brother ran the Ketter Produce Co. (The Ketters were prominent Irontonians: A relative operated the Ketter Buggy Co.; others, early auto mechanics, operated the Ketter Garage.) Looking through microfiche at the Briggs Lawrence County Public Library I find advertisements in the Ironton Evening Tribune listing the Ketter Produce Co.’s available Christmas fruits: oranges, grapefruit, lemons, apples, pears, grapes, raisins, figs, and dates; nuts: walnuts, almonds, filberts, Brazil nuts, pecans, coconuts; and vegetables: Irish and sweet potatoes, cabbage, carrots, beets, celery, and lettuce. Quite the offering. But of course, December was not pawpaw season. Unfortunately, I find no advertisements in September issues of the Evening Tribune.

  But it was Estella, not Frank, who mailed the box of pawpaws to Washington, DC. “Mrs. Ketter was a beloved resident, one whose life was associated with the cultural development of the community and one whose days were filled with intimate contact with the city’s leaders,” her obituary reads. She was a member of the First Presbyterian Church, Daughters of the American Revolution, the Tourist Club, Ladies Association of the Presbyterian Church, and the Music Club, among others. Although the Evening Tribune republished the Journal of Heredity article proclaiming Mrs. Ketter’s fruit the best in the country (“Lawrence County to the Front in Pawpaw Culture”), her obituary in May 1939 made no reference to her success with pawpaws. I’m aided at the Briggs Library by Marta Ramey, director of the local history department. Ramey, who knows more about Lawrence County history than most others, has never heard of Mrs. Ketter and her pawpaw fruit. Judging by the obituary, its noteworthiness appears to have faded even before Mrs.
Ketter’s passing.5

  In Burlington, Ohio, I pull over to a roadside produce stand where an older gentleman sits in a chair, boxes of tomatoes and apples at his feet. He has a second empty seat in the shade of a tree. He says he had a feeling someone might want to stop and talk awhile. And so I do.

  In most parts of the county, ask a vendor about pawpaws and you’ll get a predictable response: a confused look, and the return question: “What’s a pawpaw?” But not Mr. Cox. He coolly replies, “Not today, but I can get you some.” Over on Greasy Ridge—named for bear grease, he says—there’s lots of pawpaws, and he knows a man that could gather some.

  Stewart Cox, I learn through our conversation, is the great-grandson of Nelson Cox, a pioneer in American apple production who established orchards in this region in the mid-1800s. The Encee (or NC) cultivar is named for him. Stewart spent his younger years on Greasy Ridge, where his family continued the tradition of apple growing, and still does to this day. But I’m interested in a different fruit.

  “Pawpaws are a peculiar kind of fruit,” Cox says. “You have to have a certain kind of taste to appreciate them.” His family gathered and sold them, of course (Cox’s emphasis), but they’d also eat them. “And Dad always bragged on them, loved them. But the rest of us didn’t care that much for them.” Cox laughs. “I’d rather have an apple.”

  Stewart’s grandfather was influential in establishing the state fair and state market. But fruit was also trucked to the large markets in Columbus, and nearer, to Huntington. “And of course they’d have pawpaws on the trucks—in season—when there was a crop,” he says, “but as a wild tree there wasn’t always a good crop, or any at all.” The current year attests to that. “They were not as well loved as you think, probably,” Cox says. “They were the poor man’s banana.”