Meet the first Americans who found apple-picking adorable
Today, the tradition helps fuel a billion-dollar industry.
The first chill in the air means digging out the down comforter, planning a Halloween costume, and ordering a pumpkin spice latte. If you’re one of the 250 million Americans who lives in a city, autumn might involve driving to an adorable orchard and paying to pick a farmer’s precious little apples.
The city slicker apple picking excursion is a cliché at this point, perhaps an elaborate Instagram photo op. The event manufactures warm and fuzzies for the type of people who resent getting their shoes muddy.
Agritourism is a booming business, and a not-so-recent one. An agritourist is one of tens of thousands of people annually who visits farms and ranches nationwide to learn from and enjoy a rural experience. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, wineries count.
In the United States, agritourism has existed ever since cities have. As city dwellers grew weary of the summer heat in the 1800s, they visited family members who remained in the country. They thought it was so cute to sleep on haystacks, so quaint to bathe in a nearby stream, so scrumptious to boil potatoes and eat them with hand-churned butter. Wooden huts with thatched roofs were charming. Village children ran amongst roaming cattle and ducks.
Meanwhile, the apple industry was booming. Early settlers mainly used inedible, bitter apples to make cider: “The chief purpose of the colonial fruit garden was not to grow fruit for the table, but rather to secure a supply of ‘most excellent and comfortable drinks,’” according to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (BBG). Party on, pilgrims. But as more farmers experimented with innovative grafting, new varieties of apples multiplied — with names like “Father Abraham,” “Monstrous Pippin,” “Roxbury Russet,” and “Maiden’s Blush.” In the mid-1780s, Thomas Jefferson boasted in a letter from Paris, “They have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”
In the 19th century, fruit had a moment. By 1905, the United States Department of Agriculture published a bulletin containing 17,000 different apple names across some 14,000 varieties; they ranged from the size of a cherry to bigger than a grapefruit. Every delicious new variety caused a popular uproar, not unlike Cronut mania. Says the BBG, apples “were critically reviewed and rated with the enthusiasm now reserved for Hollywood movies and popular music.”
Around this time, the Board of Agriculture was heavily advertising Northeast farm destinations to city dwellers, “wealthy ladies who wanted to milk cows and make their own preserves,” according to Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. For farm women, visitors required patience, especially those who wanted to “help out in the kitchen.” One farm owner commented sarcastically on the difference between real farm work and visitors’ idea of leisure:
They find the morning so fresh after you have served their late breakfast, and the glass of milk so refreshing after their afternoon nap, and the cream is so delicious, and the piazza so cool, you think some day you would really like to enjoy it yourself for a few minutes.
Despite their irony, these visits made rural communities mountains of cash. New Hampshire’s Bureau of Labor estimated tourism in 1899 earned the state $6.6 million.
Though the popularity of farm visits later dipped, the post-war American family sought a return to traditional ideals and the pick-your-own movement took up yet again. Dude ranches and roadside farm stands offered packaged glimpses of country living. By 1958, recreation in general surged to a $34 billion per year business. Then, as more people moved to cities in the 1970s and 1980s, concern grew over the preservation of bucolic America. The field of rural tourism grew deliberately.
Today the US hosts more than 25,000 agritourism sites with products valued over a billion dollars. These include campsites, target-shooting facilities, and even rural wedding venues. Besides recreation, picking apples and slurping cider can help support the economic viability of rural communities and their small businesses.
Upstate New York orchards charge about $25 for a half-bushel, which amounts to roughly 60 medium apples, or 7 pies. Don’t forget to factor in apple cider donuts and a precious tchotchke from the gift shop. They pair great with a pumpkin spice latte. But doesn’t everything?
