“With an apple, I will astonish Paris.”
—Paul Cézanne
In the early twentieth-century, the nation knew Northwest Arkansas as the “Land of the Big Red Apple.” Two million apple trees grew in Washington and Benton Counties, more than any other two counties in America. Large tracts on the Springfield Plain grew common Southern varieties such as Ben Davis, Missouri Pippin, Jonathon, and Winesap. Local cultivars with names like Arkansas Red, Lady Pippin, Wilson June, Aston Bitter, Wandering Spy, and, most famously, Arkansas Black anchored “kitchen” and commercial orchards throughout the area. The apple blossom was Arkansas’s “Official State Flower.” Many upstate farmers believed apple growing was the fastest route to riches. By 1919, Arkansas produced a record five and a half million bushels of apples annually. But “Southern apple mania” would last only two decades.
The decline began in the early 1920s with waves of disease and pest infestation striking entire regions, jumping from orchard to orchard, pitting farmers against neighbors, and rocketing the cost of cultivation. The primary culprits were fire blight, the codling moth, the San Jose scale, apple scab, and cedar-apple rust. Costly treatment was only partially effective: pruning infected limbs, wrapping trunks with burlap, and spraying oil, lead arsenate, and copper sulfate. Pesticide residue demanded an acid wash before shipping, which hastened the ripening and spoiling of the fruit. In 1925, the codling moth alone caused two million dollars of damage to the Arkansas apple industry. In 1930, fire blight destroyed 30 percent of the state’s apple crop.
Southerners largely accepted blemished fruit at the beginning of the century, when they dried most apples for storage or fermented them for cider and vinegar. As consumer taste for “snack” apples developed in markets far from Southern orchards, so did the demand for “perfect” fruit. Wormholes, scabs, asymmetry, scald, and bruises made most Southern fruit unmarketable. Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, requiring proper labeling and quality standards of all fruit shipped out of the state, further cut profits.
In the latter half of the 1920s and early 1930s, severe climate and economic events assaulted the entire state of Arkansas. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 began in the late spring and affected the Mississippi River valley from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico. Broken levees along the Mississippi, Arkansas, White, and St. Francis Rivers flooded five million acres in the state. Although crop damage was primarily confined to the cotton-growing regions of the Delta, the economic damage to the state was catastrophic, affecting all Arkansans. Unusually harsh spring rains and late freezes after the blossoms set often resulted in near-total crop failure for the year.
Like other Mississippi River states, Arkansas had not yet recovered from the agricultural depression after the Great Flood when the stock market crashed in 1929, spinning the Arkansas banking industry out of control and plunging the nation into the Great Depression. Land foreclosure and bank failure were commonplace throughout the agricultural regions in the South. Northwest Arkansas was no exception.
As if flooding and credit loss were not enough of an assault, in 1930 and 1931, a severe drought spread across the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and over to the mid-Atlantic states. Rainfall in June and July 1930 was the lowest in Arkansas’s history. Crop failure was catastrophic, especially in Arkansas and Oklahoma. By November, food shortages were commonplace; pellagra and typhoid fever became epidemic. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression had just begun.
What was once an Arkansas yield of five million apple bushels a year dwindled to less than two million by 1935 and less than 250,000 by the 1960s. The industry never recovered from the Great Depression. Some blame environmental factors such as frost, rain, and drought. Others point out that Arkansas orchardists failed to adapt to a changing market that demanded high-quality fruit shipped around the country. Arkansans had a reputation for mislabeling and mixing fruit from different varieties in the same barrel and supplying poor-eating apple types, such as the Ben Davis, long after their demand dwindled. Most importantly, Arkansas farmers could not absorb the increased pest and disease control costs and remain competitive in the national market.
The collapse of the Arkansas apple industry in the late 1920s coincided with an uptick in “apple fever” in Washington State’s Columbia River Basin. With the help of the refrigerated railcar, favorable shipping rates, abundant sunshine, and federally assisted irrigation, Western farmers outcompeted apple growers in the South and Northeast. Washington State consistently supplied large, colorful, flawless apples such as the Red Delicious to grocers worldwide. Today, Washington grows 123 million bushels of apples a year, 42 percent of the US market, including all popular varieties such as Gala, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp.
Many authoritative texts attribute the origin of the Arkansas Black apple to the orchard of John Braithwaite (Brattwait) in about 1870. The Braithwaite red-brick farmhouse, built in 1862, still stands in the northern part of Bentonville. “Uncle John,” as he was known to his friends and kin, was born in England in 1811. By 1840, he lived in Benton County and later became accomplished in fruit tree grafting. Other sources credit DeKalb Holt, the son of the early Washington County settler Jack Holt, for developing the Arkansas Black in the 1870s. Yet another story suggests that John Crawford of Lincoln, Arkansas, in the 1840s, first identified the variety. Crawford propagated a cross between the Limber-twig and the Black Twig apple, which he called the Arkansas (also known as the Mammoth Black Twig), which undoubtedly caused confusion.
Farmers often misused heredity lines and labels in the nineteenth-century, leading to unique local nicknames of emerging fruit lineages. One can see how these monikers obscure the exact origin of the Arkansas Black. What is not in dispute: the apple is a true Arkansas native.
Southern heirloom apples still grow in small orchards in Northwest Arkansas, and fruit stands occasionally sell Arkansas Black apples from late November to early February. No commercial market exists for what was once the pride of Arkansas. Saplings, available from online nurseries for purchase, are advertised as the “baker’s favorite” with “sharp flavor . . . sweet aftertaste with notes of sugar and cinnamon.” The tree is hardy in zones 4-9 and is best pollinated by a Gala or Granny Smith variety.
Born of chance on a Bentonville farm in the 1870s, the Arkansas Black apple, whose skin turns deep red—almost black—with storage, caught the attention of the nation and the world when it won first place at the 1900 Paris (World) Exposition. Subsequently, it showed well at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In the 1890s, the artist Paul Cézanne claimed he would astonish Paris with a still-life painting of an apple; the Arkansas Black did just that and more.