by Andrew Moore
In the mid-1800s, steamboat pilot Jacob Anchutz plied the Ohio River between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. In southern Ohio—between those two cities and not too far from the sites on this trip—he maintained a half-acre orchard of large apple trees, and “quite a number” of pawpaw trees. In 1844, Anchutz, who was also a schoolteacher, invited his students to the orchard for a lesson in fruit trees. Writing for the Wisconsin State Horticultural Society, former pupil C. Hirschinger recalls, “The Papaws were ripe and the children and teacher were soon engaged eating them, and those acquainted with a good, ripe Papaw will imagine how we relished those.” But of the apples, Hirschinger said, “[We] only found one variety that was fit to eat, and that was a very small apple called the Lady Apple.”6
But it was an important apple orchard nonetheless. According to Anschutz, it was planted by none other than John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Appleseed famously planted apple trees from Pennsylvania to Illinois, including large nurseries in Ohio, Indiana, and present-day West Virginia. He did not graft trees and propagate preferred cultivars; rather he planted random seedling “nurseries.” The fruits from those seedlings were primarily used for cider making and not fresh consumption (indeed, it wasn’t until Prohibition that Americans began eating apples in any great numbers). Which might explain the reason Chapman “would soon be welcome in every cabin in Ohio,” as Michael Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire, “Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.”7
And it just so happens that Johnny Appleseed’s adventures, his barefoot tramping in a burlap sack and tin-bucket cap, occurred in the heart of the American Pawpaw Belt. His legend is properly set among the most fertile, bountiful pawpaw patches in the country. And as we learned from Hirschinger (“how we relished those [pawpaws]” as compared with apples unfit to eat), what is today’s forgotten fruit was then better eating, more palatable and far sweeter than the common apple. Southern Ohio, and other states in Johnny Appleseed country, are in fact places where the culture of pawpaws persists the strongest. So I had to wonder, did the man who hiked and rowed canoes across states, with bushels upon bushels of apple seeds, ever dabble in other fruits? Specifically, did he plant or even eat pawpaw? Chapman knew the medicinal plants, herbs, and wildflowers of the Old World and New; he was intimate with the natural world like few others. It’s not a stretch then to imagine Johnny Appleseed eating pawpaws in September, perhaps even as he stood at a cider press, working bitter apples into drink.
As the sun sets I decide it’s time to call it a day, determining that poking around is best suited to the daylight hours. During my trip, I’ve spent my evenings several miles upriver in Huntington, West Virginia. In the renovated downtown historic district, people fill restaurants and bars, and the outdoor spaces at Pullman Square. Tonight I’m drawn into one restaurant by the smell of wood smoke. The restaurant’s decor keeps to the theme, with tree trunks serving as pillars in the dining room, and handcrafted tables and bars made of reclaimed wood. I have a draft beer and a smoked tuna steak appetizer. I wonder, momentarily, whether pawpaw wood is good for cooking, but cringe at the idea of chopping down any large trees for the experiment.
But others have had no such qualms. In the early 1800s, one of Lawrence County’s earliest settlers, a doctor, built his entire cabin home of pawpaw trees.8 This would have been a grove to see—numerous trees large enough for timber! And the doctor, knowingly or not, may have been on to something: A chemical in pawpaw twigs and leaves repels many native insects. It’s the same reason why deer and livestock are reluctant to browse the plants, and why pawpaws can be grown organically. Perhaps the pawpaw cabin, like an oversized chest of cedar, was able to ward off the bite of mosquitoes in the humid Ohio bottomlands.
In my initial research on Huntington, I found two important culinary leads: first, that hot dogs are extremely popular—the annual West Virginia Hot Dog Festival is held here each July—and second, that Jim’s Steak and Spaghetti House is a beloved institution not to be missed. Since 1938, generations of local families, visitors, and celebrities have dined here. After an earlier day of pawpaw hunting it seemed like the right place for me, and I took a seat at the counter.
When I told a waitress it was my first visit to the restaurant and to Huntington in general, I got a big welcome, and the staff bloomed when I mentioned pawpaws as the reason for my visit. Then it happened.
When I mentioned pawpaws, the woman who had been operating the griddle dropped her spatula, turned, and looked into my eyes. She was extremely well dressed for her task—a white lace top, immaculate hair. I couldn’t tell if it was joy or anger in her eyes. Had I done something wrong? A waitress—wearing a white uniform dress, like all the others—went on to tell me about several trees her grandfather had planted near Marshall University. Meanwhile, the cook kept moving toward me. Then, with her spatula-turned-metronome, she began to sing: “Pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em your pocket; Pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em in your pocket . . .” She knew. The woman was Jimmie—named for her father, Jim—and the current proprietress of the restaurant. The griddle wasn’t her normal station, but she could stand in where needed.
With pawpaws on the figurative table, smiles were bigger, and everyone seemed to come to life. Now we really had something to talk about. One waitress remembered an uncle’s favorite phrase (“I didn’t just fall off the pawpaw tree”), while another waitress asked, to be sure she had the right fruit in mind: “They’re a rotten-looking fruit, ain’t they?”
Jim’s serves homemade pies, made fresh daily. Today was banana pie day. I ate a great big slice, with coffee, and thought about how well fresh pawpaw could substitute in this recipe. I later tried it at home and it was delicious.
A bar and restaurant near Marshall University have become my office. I come here to decompress, strategize over Google Maps, and fill up on good food.
Members of a traditional old-time band are regulars at the bar, and the three young men pass fiddle, banjo, and guitar freely among one another, taking turns on each. They’re in their early twenties, and had come to Marshall University from Point Pleasant, another West Virginia town, situated upriver at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha. In high school they’d played blues and garage rock, some jazz, but over the past several years were drawn to the music of their home state. Indeed, most of the songs they perform tonight are West Virginia tunes. In due time I of course get around to asking about pawpaws. “I’ve eaten them before,” the guitarist says. “Yeah, one of those things you grab whenever you’re out hiking.” The fiddle player adds, conclusively: “We’ve eaten some pawpaws in our time.”
I tell the band why I’m here, about the 1916 contest. Pawpaws are well known in West Virginia; in Appalachia, perhaps more than any other region. Yet only a few contest entries came from the Mountain State, and West Virginia wasn’t among the seven superior fruits, although its border states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—were. The band considers my conundrum, and the banjo player offers his thoughts: “We keep our secrets pretty close to us around here.”
It would be a poor excuse to the scientific community (and I’m sure there were other more sound reasons), but to the modern pawpaw enthusiast it doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
The next day I drive to Huntington’s Old Central City. Oversized quilt patterns are affixed to the sides of several buildings, like those I’ve seen hoisted onto barns along the region’s highways. The neighborhood reminds me of pioneer towns in old western movies. Flat, one-story wooden facades resemble those of old taverns or frontier general stores. To round out the scene, kids cruise the streets on bicycles, carrying water guns. Otherwise, it’s quiet; tumbleweed would not be out of place.
The farmers market in Central City is located in an old train depot. I arrive on what is an off day for most vendors, but a small, permanent stand is still open. I buy a bag of Rome Beauty apples, a variety selected over the ri
ver in Rome, Ohio, and then ask the market manager, Lori, about pawpaws.
“They’re a kind of popular thing around here,” she says. One particular vendor—who is absent but whom I’d have met on market day—brings pawpaws each September. “People see them and they get excited. They’ll say, ‘I haven’t seen one since I was a kid!’” They’re most popular among older folks who ate the fruit years ago under different circumstances, she guesses. “People were poor and they’d go into the woods and gather pawpaws and different things.”
But if I want pawpaws today, all is not lost. A man down the road in a tan house—she points to it—has trees and sells to the public.
The sidewalk in front of Finley Pauley’s house is a market stand in its own right—Concord grapes, tomatoes (both red and green), butternut squash, and apples are piled in crates and baskets, all of it grown in his own backyard. He sells other things too: bicycles, including a vintage folding model, compact fluorescent light bulbs, VHS tapes, a wide assortment of goods. The short path to his front door is lined in rosebushes and grape arbors.
And, yes, he sells pawpaws. But the trees are all done. It has been a strange and early season, weather warm and dry.
I ask Finley when he first became interested in pawpaws. “Well, when I was a boy that’s all we did. We ate pawpaws, pawpaws, and pawpaws to survive and this and that,” he says with a chuckle. “When I was a kid we ate so many pawpaws that I just don’t care for them now.” He hadn’t even planted the trees in his yard. They just came up, he says. Someone—maybe Finley, maybe not—spat out some seeds once, he supposes, and well, here they are. Folks come to Finley year after year. “I don’t even advertise,” he says. “I sell every one I get.”
At the Briggs Library I learned that the Ketters had an orchard in South Point. Poring over a map of the town I find a road called Orchard Lane, and wonder what relics I might find here. It’s a dead-end road, surrounded by large open parcels on either side. I wonder if this was the site of the Ketters’ orchard, and set off one more time to find a trace of Estella’s fruit. Although I don’t believe it was grown commercially in their orchard, perhaps with pride they had brought a single graft of the prizewinning fruit out of the woods. The road begins at a grid of newer housing, and then climbs a large hill where the houses are fewer and widely spaced. At the very top, the view opens up to the Ohio River; parts of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio are all visible.
It must have been a most beautiful orchard when it was in production, whoever it belonged to. But there is no trace of it today, just private lawns and a few second-growth woodlots—no thickets of pawpaws, no scraggly apple trees, no unkempt peach trees.
Back in town, though, as I drive along the river road I spot the unmistakable teardrop leaves. Those unfamiliar with the tree might mistake it for an ornamental exotic. “Welcome to tropical southern Ohio,” I have been told. It is only mid-September, but several leaves are already yellowing, a sign of stress perhaps. It has been a hot and early spring and summer.
A vegetable patch grows adjacent to the pawpaw tree. Inside rows of tomatoes staked five feet high, a ninety-year-old man is hoeing weeds and harvesting kale. He wears a white beard, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt. He grew up eating pawpaws, and still enjoys them, he says. Unfortunately, a much larger tree that had borne well had to be cut down because it was in the power lines. I assume he is eager to finish his work and get out of the heat, and so I say good-bye and thank him for his time.
As I drive back to Huntington I accept that I am unlikely to find the Ketter fruit. But what I have found, and perhaps this is more valuable, is a living pawpaw culture. Here, at least, the pawpaw is not a forgotten fruit.
In the morning, after a biscuit and fried apple breakfast, I decide to look for the trees planted by the uncle of my waitress at Jim’s. Since the Ketter fruit has thus far eluded me, it would be a boost to my sleuthing esteem to at least track down something.
I find them, a massive pair, each thirty or forty feet tall, reaching above the power lines, and more or less right where she said they would be, their leaves a deep green fading to yellow at the top of each pyramidal shape. They’ve managed to make a Bradford pear and black walnut look small in comparison.
I stand in the grass taking photos when a neighbor calls out to me from her porch across the road. “Some people want to cut those trees down,” she says. I ask why, and who. Just some neighbors on the block, she says. “They just want them gone. Don’t want them anymore.” I tell her I don’t see any sense in that, that they are good trees. “Tell me about it!” she says. I’m confused by all of it. But at least it offers some explanation as to why some things disappear: whims of the obstinate.
Taking my time back to Pittsburgh I drive north through beautiful hill country. Often the only car on two-lane byways, I wind around the edges of farms, through crossroads towns and shaded hollers, over tiny creeks. Time after time I spot telltale leaves at the woods’ edge, and the quiet and lack of traffic make it too easy to just pull over, walk through fields of goldenrod and, listening to the sound of crickets, on into the woods again to hunt down that lost, best pawpaw. If Ketter’s tree is indeed gone, maybe there is another waiting to be found. Soon I come to Athens County, and the original patch where I had my first pawpaw. Just before the sun sets, I find a medium-sized tree, small enough to shake, with one good, visible cluster of fruit. One piece falls, ripe. It’s delicious: notes of caramel without any bitterness, a bit melony. Perhaps not the next best cultivar, but it will do for now.
— CHAPTER SEVEN —
PETERSON’S GAMBIT
In 1988, Neal Peterson’s Wye orchard produced its first substantial crop. He had waited eight years for his trees to mature, and now he could see what they were made of. It was an incredibly exciting period for Neal; he was about to literally taste the fruits of his labor.
Neal had long considered the seediness of pawpaws to be the main impediment to commercial development, a trait to be bred out. So for each seedling he determined the seed-to-pulp ratios by separating seeds and pulp, and weighing each. As he expected, there was a consistency to each tree. Neal collected every bit of data possible: He recorded the weight of fruit from each tree, the flavor profiles of each seedling, as well as overall visual beauty, color, texture, and more. The data went into tables. He determined averages and standard deviations, and later performed statistical analysis.
In the second year of production, Neal was surprised to find that not a single tree he’d identified the year prior as outstanding now ranked in the current crop’s top tier. It was highly unexpected. Reflecting on this, Neal tells me, in an email: “Trees are incredibly complex, sophisticated organisms. We must admire them. Even on a single tree, fruit can vary in flavor from branch to branch. And certainly flavor varies from year to year. And flavor is but one dimension of tree quality.” Tree selection takes time.
Neal kept at it for two more years, narrowing the field for the very best. He wanted trees with a large yield, and whose fruit tasted great, was large, and contained relatively few seeds. Fleshiness, as Neal terms it—the seed-to-pulp ratio. Three future cultivars—trees he would later release to the public—were discovered in those first three years: the Shenandoah, Susquehanna, and Rappahannock.
At the end of three years Neal selected nine trees, the best according to the data, and cut the rest to stumps. “It was pretty ruthless,” he says. The following spring, he grafted those best varieties (as well as cultivars he’d received from other hobbyists), which accounted for little more than 1 percent of the original orchard, onto the stumps of the former trees. He was following standard scientific protocol—and those nine trees (or genotypes) would now need to be evaluated by other scientists in other locations.
A few years after planting the Wye orchard, Neal arranged to plant a second orchard in Keedysville, at UMD’s Western Maryland Research & Education Center. In Keedysville, he conducted the sa
me trials of observation—data collection and taste testing—with another unique batch of six hundred additional trees.
In September there was time for nothing but pawpaws. Neal stayed with friends on the Eastern Shore and each morning he would arrive at the orchard, pick all day, measure data, eat dinner, sleep, and repeat. His vacation allotment from the USDA was consumed each harvest season, and he would need to take additional unpaid leave to complete the work.
At its peak, Neal’s program included fifteen hundred trees in two orchards. “Ten thousand would have been ideal,” he says, “But to evaluate ten thousand trees, you need a staff. It’s beyond one person.” Still, the effort was unprecedented: Previous breeding efforts from Buckman to Zimmerman to Davis never exceeded thirty or forty trees. Further, Neal believes that had he been affiliated with a university, his work would not have been supported. Grant-funded research requires a quick turnaround; most funding agencies or university administrators do not have the patience to wait the decades needed to conduct a proper breeding program. And grants tend to operate on two-to-three-year cycles, not twenty-year intervals.
Neal did not have a staff, a salary, or any compensation for his work. But he did have friends. The first year at the Wye, Neal did everything himself—taste testing, evaluation, seed cleaning, and so on—and he had had enough. In Septembers of subsequent years, Neal was joined by the friends he could convince and, through correspondence, whatever willing pawpaw nuts that were able to travel.
Jim Gilbert, renowned plant explorer and operator of One Green World, an Oregon-based nursery, remembers his first meeting with Neal at the Wye orchard. “He’s a very magnetic guy,” Gilbert says of Neal. “He’d get all these guys to come out and help do things.” Those tasks included picking and hauling fruit, tasting, recording observations, and perhaps the most dreadful of all pawpaw jobs, seed cleaning and processing. Neal had borrowed a seed-cleaning machine, so it wasn’t quite done by hand, as many do today, but it still required handling and sorting pawpaws in various stages of rot and fermentation. The uniform for the job included rubber boots and yellow rain suits.
