by Andrew Moore
Little also claimed to have planted the first “regularly laid out pawpaw orchard” in the United States. It was planted in October 1895 for Judge Hadley, of Danville, Indiana, who was a great lover of the fruit. At ten years of age its trees, which stood fifteen feet tall, bore more than fifty bushels of pawpaws.
Little believed, as do I and many others, that the primary use of the pawpaw is to eat from hand, though he allowed that it does make a splendid pie, and that “there is no finer dessert than pawpaw eaten with cream and sugar.” According to Little, Colonel Benjamin Goss, who plotted Neosho Falls (and who was present during the drought of 1860), was the first to put these ingredients together, which, with milk, are all that is required in the best pawpaw ice cream recipe I have come across. Little also said a pawpaw could be used to make beer, the same as with persimmon, by putting it in a jar, mashing it, adding water, and letting it stand until it fermented. “It is also said that brandy, equal to peach brandy, is made of pawpaws,” he wrote. What Little’s list of products demonstrates is that at the turn of the twentieth century, pawpaws were fairly well known and used in a variety of ways. This native American fruit had become part of the fabric of the rural heartland. Now Little wanted to take it to the mainstream.
More than a century before I was introduced to pawpaws, and was flooded with my own questions about the fruit, Little attempted to address one question folks commonly struggle with today: If they have so much potential, why haven’t pawpaws been cultivated? “It is because it has always grown so plentiful in a state of nature that anyone could go out to the woods, pastures, and get all they could carry home,” Little wrote, “so there was no need of cultivating trees.”
For someone who enjoyed pawpaws, the fruit in the woods would have tasted good enough, and there were plenty of them. But Little claimed he was living at a time when the fruit’s wild abundance was in decline. He said that farmers and other landowners had once been forgiving of foragers seeking fruit on private property, but as timber disappeared, and as land was converted from woods into fields of corn, tobacco, and so on, pawpaws were becoming scarce. Over time, those forgiving farmers began to object to the pawpaw hunters, especially when fruit wound up for sale at markets.
Since Little’s time, a century of clear-cut landscapes, surface mining, housing developments, and strip malls have accelerated what the author observed in 1905. In many of the remaining green spaces, invasive plants compete and crowd the pawpaw’s habitat. Even where pawpaws persist, American interest has waned; those former foragers and farmland interlopers now live in cities and suburbs. Fewer and fewer Americans turn to the woods for fruit, nuts, greens, and meat, and fewer Americans grow gardens.
Little concluded that in response to this situation, “It is very evident that the pawpaw will receive attention and be brought under cultivation for home and market purposes.” Echoing the statement made by the American Horticultural Society almost two decades prior, he wrote, “I feel confident that no fruit is more susceptible of improvement than the pawpaw . . . I intend to devote a portion of my time to developing it and then someone else will continue its cultivation.”9
His prediction, however, was premature. Not only did wild stands of pawpaws—and the ease of access to them—begin to disappear from many landscapes, but the fruit was not taken under cultivation either. To whatever extent it was ever known or cherished in American culture, in a few more decades it would further fade and be forgotten.
— CHAPTER FOUR —
A TALE OF TWO FRUITS
In 1916, the American Genetics Association announced a contest to find the best pawpaws in America. The purpose of the contest was to collect genes of superior wild pawpaws, from which a serious, scientific breeding experiment could then be conducted. Writing in their publication the Journal of Heredity, they asserted that the pawpaw’s “drawbacks [could] probably be removed by intelligent breeding.” Not only was it exactly what Little had advocated for a decade earlier, but the contest was to be conducted on a national stage. Members of the association had studied and experimented with uncommon fruit from Europe and the tropics, including dates and figs, and they now turned their attention to their country’s indigenous flora. This signaled a turning point in the pawpaw’s story; American scientists were laying the groundwork for developing a global, commercial crop. Nothing like it had ever been attempted with pawpaw.
The association offered two rewards: “Fifty dollars will be paid for the largest individual tree, and $50 for the tree, regardless of size, which bears the best fruit.” Contestants were required to send a photo of the tree and a statement about its growing conditions. Additionally, for the excellence of fruit award, contestants had to send at least six fruits by parcel post to the association’s office in Washington, DC. “The award will be made on the excellence of flavor, small number and size of seeds, but more particularly on the condition in which the fruits reach this office,” they wrote.1 With these criteria, the association was selecting for genetic characteristics that would allow pawpaw to be shipped greater distances—or simply at all—a feat determined necessary for the pawpaw to meet market demands. Six fruits arriving in good condition is a tall order even with today’s modern advances in speed and packaging. Again, picked too early and the fruit won’t ripen; picked too late, and the package arrives rank, sticky, and full of flies. Nevertheless, it was accomplished. The association received reports from more than 230 different sites, and fruit from seventy-five trees (which, if directions were followed, meant at least 450 individual pawpaws). Entries came from “almost the whole of the recognized range of the species,” including Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, east Texas, and as far west as the Texas panhandle. However, the top seven fruits came from just five states: three from Ohio, two from Indiana, and one apiece from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and a lone western representative, Kansas. Interestingly, no more than 2.27 degrees of latitude separated any of the top seven locations.
The prizewinning fruit, submitted by Mrs. Frank Ketter, was picked from the hills of Lawrence County, Ohio, in the southernmost part of the state. It arrived in perfect condition, the association reported. “The flesh is medium yellow in color, mild but very rich in flavor, neither insipid nor cloying. The amount and quality of the flesh, together with the good shipping and ripening qualities of the fruit, make this an extremely desirable variety.”2
Suddenly, the best of America’s pawpaw folk knowledge, and the best pawpaws themselves, were in the hands of scientists. With a little time and research the fruit appeared poised to break out. Like the cranberry, the pecan, and other native American crops, it would surely soon be domesticated and brought into agriculture. Alas, it did not. On the heels of this contest came no radical change in the pawpaw’s standing. Nothing much happened at all.
Today blueberries are one of the most common fruits eaten and grown in America, and in much of the temperate world. In 2012, Americans harvested more than 564 million pounds of wild and cultivated blueberries for an industry valued at approximately $780 million.3 The fruit has long been harvested, from Maine to Florida, but as a cultivated, commercial crop, blueberries are still young. It has been only one hundred years since plantsmen successfully domesticated the plant. At the time of the 1916 pawpaw contest, blueberries and pawpaws occupied essentially the same place in food culture: wild foods that Americans gathered and ate. Then all of a sudden both were being given serious attention by scientists, and for the blueberry, the right man entered at the right time.
Frederick Vernon Coville was a career botanist with the US Department of Agriculture, where he served as chief botanist. In 1910, Coville published Experiments in Blueberry Culture (USDA Bulletin 193), in which he wrote that blueberries must be grown in moist, highly acidic soil. A simple enough statement. Indeed, this is common knowledge to anyone gr
owing blueberries today, on a farm or in their backyard. But at the time it was revolutionary. Whereas most cultivated, edible plants want soil with neutral pH of 7, blueberry thrives only at pH 4.5 to 4.8. And Coville made a second discovery: that blueberries are not self-fertile, but require cross-pollination. “Soon after, he made the first successful crosses designed to improve important traits, such as berry size and flavor,” J. Kim Kaplan wrote in Agricultural Research magazine. “The blueberry was tamed.”4
With the science determined, Coville collaborated with New Jersey farmer Elizabeth White—who had also been working with the fruit—to develop a commercial variety of blueberry. The two were successful, and in 1916—the same year as the Journal of Heredity’s pawpaw contest—the first domestic blueberry was released. So while blueberries entered the domesticated commercial world of agriculture, pawpaws did not. Robert Brannan, a pawpaw researcher at Ohio University, puts it this way: “Pawpaw lost, blueberry won.”
Pawpaw development did continue, however, just at a much slower pace than blueberries. Between 1900 and 1960 at least fifty-six pawpaw cultivars appeared, chosen and named because they were believed to have special merit, though fewer than twenty of those are still available today.5 For comparison, a 1905 publication listed seventeen thousand apple cultivars referred to in American publications between 1804 and 1904.6 Organizations like the Northern Nut Growers Association, comprising both professional and amateur plantsmen, became important networks for pawpaw enthusiasts to share information on growing conditions and requirements, and for sharing cultivated material.
In California, legendary plant breeder Luther Burbank grew pawpaws, and wrote of his belief that cultivated varieties “[are] superior to that of any other fruit, and as they can be still further improved, the Pawpaw will soon become a grand standard fruit in America, and will be cultivated like other fruits.”7 Celebrated horticulturist David Fairchild, who introduced soybeans, pistachios, mangoes, dates, bamboos, and certain cultivars of wheat and rice to the United States, was also drawn to work with pawpaw. At his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Fairchild grew a tree from seeds of the prize-winning Ketter pawpaw, which produced fruit he considered superior even to the parent. He named this tree for himself, and it became yet another cultivar. Although Fairchild was more interested in true tropical plants, and would move full-time to his home in Coconut Grove, Florida, he did encourage another northern plantsman, George A. Zimmerman, to continue working with pawpaw. Zimmerman undertook an ambitious eighteen-year pawpaw-breeding project that included more than sixty named and unnamed varieties—likely every known cultivar of the era—that he’d begun collecting in 1923.8 But despite the potential he clearly saw in the fruit, Zimmerman reported that it was difficult to convince farmers or scientists to give the pawpaw serious attention. “The fruit men won’t even condescend to look at it,” he wrote in 1938.9 Luckily, there were a few others, true believers in the pawpaw, who didn’t need convincing.
Every fall, Ernest Downing and his father explored the Ohio woods on horseback, searching for exceptional fruit. At least two cultivars—Middletown, selected in 1915, and Mason-WLW, in 1938—were discovered on these Sunday excursions, and propagated at their fruit farm outside New Madison, Ohio. Homer Jacobs, of the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland, Ohio, grew seedlings from fruit collected in West Virginia. A superior-producing tree Jacobs selected in 1945 was subsequently named Sweet Alice. Both Middletown and Sweet Alice have remained in the fruit trade to this day.10 And between 1925 and 1958, Pennsylvania nurseryman John W. Hershey offered cultivated trees for sale, including crosses of Fairchild and other varieties at Zimmerman’s orchard, via a mail-order catalog. In the late 1950s, Corwin Davis began exploring the woods of Michigan; he would over the next thirty years select and name at least five cultivars that are still among the best.
Yet Zimmerman was the foremost expert on pawpaws in his time, the man whose work was most likely to bring the fruit to the greater American public. But his work ended abruptly in 1941. “Dr. Zimmerman’s early death was a horticultural tragedy,” Fairchild wrote.11 Between 1950 and 1985, outstanding wild fruit and crosses of superior fruit continued to be selected—notably by Davis, Gibson, Ward, and Glaser—but with few exceptions these horticulturalists did not experiment with Zimmerman’s material. It was as if his breeding work, his collection of sixty named varieties as well as the germplasm gathered from the 1916 contest, never occurred. The knowledge he accrued, and the plants themselves, were vanishing.
It’s unfair to put the burden of an entire fruit’s development on one man’s shoulders, but I have to wonder, if Zimmerman had lived, where might pawpaws be today. Surely this is what Fairchild had considered when he wrote those words. But in the early twentieth century, there was no breakthrough moment for pawpaw. Blueberry had a champion in Frederick Coville. For that crop, it came down to one man at the right moment making the right discoveries. For the pawpaw, that champion had yet to arrive.
PART II
PAWPAWS TO THE PEOPLE
— CHAPTER FIVE —
JOHNNY PAWPAWSEED
There’s a photo of Neal Peterson easily found on the Internet—the first image I see of him—that captures the essence of the man we might call Johnny Pawpawseed. He’s in a thick patch of trees, with his head positioned next to an unusually large cluster of pawpaws, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, containing at least nine large fruits. He’s wearing a collared, button-down white shirt, sleeves rolled, and a salmon-colored headband. He appears young, with kind eyes, sporting a thick brown mustache and tousled hair. I guess that it was taken in the late 1980s. He looks every bit the mad scientist out in the field, deep in a lush jungle. This grove of pawpaws and others like it have, in fact, been his laboratory for decades.
I’m meeting Neal for lunch at the Country Cafe in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he has lived since retiring from the USDA’s Economic Research Service. I spent this cold, sunny, early-December morning exploring the town—much of which is a national historic park—and saw the sights: where John Brown raided the armory; the Appalachian Trail, which leads through the center of town; rapids at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers. I popped into tourist shops, bookstores, art galleries, historic buildings dating to the early nineteenth century, and asked folks about pawpaws. I figured that since it was the home of the pawpaw’s longtime champion, the fruit would be well known. But like so often, it wasn’t.
When Peterson enters the café, he looks much the same as he did in the photograph, with a few exceptions: his mustache is now gray, and there is a ball cap in place of the headband. He has always known pawpaws. As a child in St. Albans, West Virginia, he tells me, they were abundant, but had only one primary use: for throwing at other kids. In summer, they’re hard as rocks; toward fall, they explode, splattering into a gross, sticky mess. Neal had no idea you could actually eat these things. “I’d known them from the time I was a child, but I’d never eaten the fruit because no one had ever told me that I could do that,” he says with formal elocution. “I never ate a pawpaw, but I knew them very well. They were around, growing in the woods behind our house. And how do you miss them with those big, long leaves?”
Now, though, Neal knows more about these things than just about anybody else who has ever lived. Certainly he has been working with pawpaws longer than any other person. Yet Neal is modest, even a bit hesitant to broadcast the news of his work. What he lacks in bombast, though, Neal makes up for with the quirkiness of a true “pawpaw nut” (his own preferred expression for those of our ilk). For example, on his website, the following instructions are given for contacting him: “By Foot: Follow the Appalachian trail to Harpers Ferry and then inquire with the Town Office or with Laura at ‘The Outfitters at Harpers Ferry.’” Or, “Follow the C & O Canal trail to Harpers Ferry and then inquire, as above, with the Town Office or with Laura.” Neal says at least one person—a true devotee no doubt—has followed those instructions to th
e letter. Others have hitchhiked to meet him. I drove and called ahead.
It might seem strange that someone would go to such lengths to talk with him. But consider the following: It’s safe to say that without Neal, even fewer people would have any clue about pawpaws. He has bred the fruit for the past three decades, and is responsible for six of the best cultivars that exist, which are sold through licensed nurseries throughout the country. He has been a tireless promoter and teacher, earning the nicknames Johnny Pawpawseed, Papa Pawpaw, and Mahatma Pawpaw. And three decades later, he’s still at it, still growing from seed, still hand-pollinating, still grafting and breeding pawpaws. More succinctly, as his colleague Robert Brannan once put it, “Without Neal, pawpaws are still in the woods.”
To be sure, pawpaws are far from being an important agricultural crop. But if the fruit continues to climb in popularity, Peterson will likely be regarded—as Frederick V. Coville and Elizabeth White are with blueberries—as the one who brought pawpaws out of the wilderness and onto the table.
Peterson’s love affair with gardening began with the common blue violet. At the age of twelve his mother gave him free rein in the woods. Their home was just a quarter mile from the edge of town, but the backyard blended into a wide expanse of woods where the neighborhood’s children could wander and explore. Worn paths formed by foot traffic crisscrossed the woods. With his parents’ encouragement, Neal transplanted trees, shrubs, and flowers, and rearranged them to his liking in the woods at home.
