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Six Historic Apple Orchards You Can Visit

Trying to pick six historic apple orchards in New England may be a fool’s errand. As Maine apple expert John Bunker explains, the notion of a commercial orchard is relatively modern.

“At a certain point, everyone had an orchard,” Bunker told the New England Historical Society. “Everyone lived on a farm, and every farm had an orchard.”

In the 1920s, a New Hampshire farmer came up with the idea of bringing tourists from Boston to pick their own apples in the fresh air and sunshine. The idea took hold. Today, 200-year-old farms are weathering developers (if not the weather) by diversifying with farm-to-table meals, cider, kids’ play areas, ready-to-eat food, hayrides, sleigh rides, corn mazes and even seasoned firewood.

Agritourism today is just as much a feature of the New England landscape as history tourism. Here, then, are six historic apple orchards, one in each New England state.

Lyman Orchards, Middlefield

Lyman Orchards can trace its roots back more than 275 years to John and Hope Lyman, who bought 37 acres of land in 1741 to establish their farm. Today the huge farm covers more than 1,000 acres, with a big history to match.

In 1830 the farm was headed by William Lyman, who became a leader in the abolitionist movement and a supporter of the Underground Railroad. The original 1785 Lyman homestead still stands on the property (though it’s been moved – pulled to its present location by oxen). The family tree sprouted a host of entrepreneurs who helped incorporate the town and build railroads, washing machines and gun sights.

The farm itself took on many flavors over the years, producing peaches, lambs, cattle and even supporting a golf course. Today it’s one of the most popular family attractions in Connecticut.

Lyman Orchards is located at 3 Lyman Rd., Middlefield, Conn.

Jonathan Fisher House, Blue Hill

Parson Jonathan Fisher was the first Congregationalist minister in Blue Hill, Maine, serving from 1794 to 1837. He was also a jack of all trades, a scientist who farmed, surveyed, wrote, bound his own books, made buttons and hats, built furniture, painted sleighs, reported for the local newspaper and helped found Bangor Theological Seminary.

Today his homestead is a house museum on the National Register of Historic Places. Around 2010, Leslie Cummins and Tim Seabrook of 5 Star Nursery in nearby Brooklin replanted his orchard around a 200-year-old pear tree still standing. They planted three trees he wrote about in his journals: Ribston Pippin, Golden Russet, and Roxbury Russet. The heritage orchard includes a group of apple trees that existed in New England before 1800, including the Rhode Island Greening.

The Jonathan Fisher House is at 44 Mines Rd., Blue Hill, Maine.

Lookout Farm, Natick

In 1650, Natick, Mass., was founded by Puritan missionary John Eliot and a small group of settlers who paddled down the Charles River in canoes. The settlers established a farm on the banks of the river in 1651. They planted beans, turnips, strawberries, grapes – and of course grew apples. In 1761, Capt. David Morse bought the farm, and he and his family lived and worked there for nearly 75 years. It got the name Lookout Farm in 1894, when Charles Whittemore and his brothers took over.

After a series of owners worked the farm, Joan and Steve Belkin bought it in 2005.

Today the farm comprises 180 acres with 60,000 fruit trees, a pick-your-own fruit business and a hard cider taproom. The Belkins also sell holiday pies and seasoned firewood.

They grow 11 varieties of apples, Asian pears, pumpkins, peaches, plums, strawberries and nectarines.

Lookout Farm is at 89 South Pleasant Street, South Natick, Mass.

Applecrest Farms, Hampton Falls

In the late 19th century, the railroad came to New Hampshire’s seacoast. It let farmers ship milk, apples, potatoes and lumber to Boston. A Hampton Falls farmer had another idea. He brought tourists once a week from Boston via an ‘Apple Train’ – one that stopped near his farm – so they could pick their own apples.

It was a novel idea back in the 1920s, but it worked. Four generations of the Wagner family have farmed the land, and today, Applecrest claims to be the oldest continually operated apple orchard in America. At the very least, it’s probably one of the oldest agritourist destinations.

Today, as many as 15,000 people visit Applecrest Farms on an autumn Sunday. There’s a 200-year-old barn on the 225-acre farm and buildings that date to the 18^th century. The farm offers pick-your-own apples, hayrides in season, apple cider and farm-to-table dining at its Farm Bistro. Their Idared apple dates to 1942, developed in Idaho as a cross between the Jonathan and Wagener.

Applecrest Farms is at 133 Exeter Rd. (Rte. 88), Hampton Falls, N.H.

Steere Orchard, Smithfield

Historic Smithfield, R.I., once had so many orchards it was known as ‘Apple Valley.’ Apple growing reached its peak in Smithfield during the 1930s, but the Great Hurricane of 1938 wiped out many trees. Real estate developers wiped out many of the orchards that the hurricane missed.

Steere Orchards in the Smithfield village of Greenville is Rhode Island’s largest orchard. According to its website, Arthur W. Steere with his son, Henry J. Steere, started the orchard around 1930. Arthur’s grandson John and great-grandson Jim now run the family apple business.

You can pick your own apples at the Steere Orchards, which offers 12 varieties: including Macoun, Honeycrisp, Gala, Cortland, Red and Golden Delicious, Macintosh and the famous Rhode Island Greening. The Greening was said to grow in only two places: heaven and Rhode Island.

They’re at 150 Austin Ave, Greenville, R.I.

Apple Barn, Woodford

Edward Hamlin Everett established Southern Vermont Orchards in 1910. He made millions in the glass business. Then he built a baronial mansion in his hometown of Bennington, and planted 75,000 apple trees, 3,000 plum trees and 2,000 quince trees. The orchards covered 10 miles. He planted 65 varieties of apples, cherries, quince, pears and plums. It was said to be the largest privately owned orchard in the world.

Everett died in 1929. He left most of his estate to his second wife and shortchanged his three daughters by his first wife, or so they thought. The daughters challenged the will after he died, and during the trial one of his daughters stayed at the family mansion. (He also had a house in Washington that is now the Turkish Ambassador’s residence.)

They’re at 150 Austin Ave., Greenville, R.I.

One night she heard weeping coming from her father’s study. She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim. At least that’s the story.

Bramley seedling apple

Today, Southern Vermont Orchards operates over 300 acres of orchard remaining from Everett’s original spread. Among the varieties they grow are Northern Spy, which originated in upstate New York in 1800; the 17^th-century Gravenstein; and the Paula Red, discovered in Michigan in 1960. The orchard’s Apple Barn offers beer, wine and cider tastings. They’re at 604 US Rt 7S, Bennington, Vt.

Are you looking for a book to help you explore apple recipes from yesteryear? The newly revised 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes includes recipes for traditional New England apple dishes, fun facts about the unique history of apples and a guide to making cider and cider vinegar. An Amazon #1 New Release.

Available now from Amazon.

Photos courtesy Library of Congress, except for Bramley apple By David Wright – Flickr: Bramley's Seedling Apples, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16594109.

This story about historic apple orchards was updated in 2023.

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Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Conductor on the Underground Railroad

Elizabeth Buffum Chace belonged to old and distinguished Rhode Island families, but she was distrusted and shunned because of her ardent opposition to slavery.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace

Her ancestor Daniel Gould came from England and settled in Newport in 1637. He became a member of the Society of Friends and married the daughter of John Coggeshall, the first president of the Aquidneck Colony who was also a Quaker.

Newport, which is on Aquidneck Island, was a slave market. Between 1709 and 1807, Newport merchants sponsored more than 900 voyages to Africa and brought more than 100,000 slaves to the Americas.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace had reason to believe her Quaker ancestors ‘were somewhat implicated in the African slave trade.’

Quakers couldn’t sanction the practice, though, and by 1727 began to speak out against the slave trade. In 1780, New England Quakers abolished slavery among its members.

An Abolitionist Is Born

Elizabeth Buffum was born on Dec. 9, 1806, in Smithfield, R.I., to Arnold Buffum and Rebecca Gould Buffum.

She described how she came to be an ardent abolitionist in her book, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences, which she wrote at the age of 85.

When her father was a child, she wrote, it wasn’t unusual for slaves from New York to flee to Rhode Island. A slave family escaped and lived on her grandfather’s farm. Arnold Buffum’s opposition to slavery grew stronger as he aged, and he became the first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Though Quakers officially opposed slavery, they viewed the Buffums with suspicion. They avoided the Buffums because they argued for the immediate abolition of slavery. Many Quakers believed in the gradual abolition of slavery, and that slaves should go to African colonies.

Quaker ministers urged Elizabeth to keep quiet. Her Quaker brother-in-law told her slaves shouldn’t be free because, “I shouldn’t want to see a black man sitting on the sofa beside my daughter.”

The Chace house. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

At 23, she married Samuel Chace, the son of Oliver Chace, who founded several textile mills. Warren Buffett founded Berkshire Hathaway on the Chace mills. The Chaces were also an old Quaker family strongly opposed to slavery.

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace moved to Valley Falls, R.I. They then had 10 children after the first five died.

Jim Crow

The Chaces opened their home to abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Abby Kelley, Frederick Douglass, Lucy Stone.

Frederick Douglass

They didn’t just fight slavery, they battled racism. In her book, Elizabeth Buffum Chace described how they stood up to Jim Crow in Massachusetts. As she and her husband entered a railroad car in Taunton,

Samuel Rodman, an Anti-Slavery man from New Bedford, and a highly respectable, well-dressed colored man and his wife, from the same town, took seats therein also. The conductor came and ordered the colored people to leave the car. We all remonstrated, of course, but without avail. He called the superintendent, who peremptorily repeated the order. They got out quietly, and we did the same, (but not so quietly,) and retired to the waiting room, leaving the car empty.

The railroad officials added a car for the African-American couple, and the Chaces joined them. “We found them intelligent, agreeable companions,” she wrote.

Underground Railroad

Samuel and Elizabeth Buffum Chace also became conductors on the Underground Railroad as more and more people escaped slavery.

Often, she wrote, they were carried by small coastal vessels from Virginia at Norfolk or Portsmouth and carried to New England – Fall River, New Bedford and Cape Cod.

In Fall River, they’d find shelter with Nathaniel B. Borden and his wife — Elizabeth’s sister Sarah — and sent in a closed carriage at night,

…with Robert Adams, a most faithful friend as their conductor. Here we received them, and, after preparing them for the journey, my husband would accompany them a short distance, on the Providence and Worcester railroad, acquaint the conductor with the facts, enlist his interest in their behalf, and then leave them in his care, to be transferred at Worcester, to the Vermont road, from which, by a previous general arrangement, they were received by a Unitarian clergyman named Young, and sent by him to Canada, where they uniformly arrived safely.

She used to give them an envelope with her address on it so they could mail it from Toronto to let her know they’d arrived safely.

Midnight Visitors

They were once awakened in the middle of the night by a mother and her two boys. She had escaped slavery in Maryland, moved to Fall River and quietly earned a living as a laundress. A notorious slave-catcher started snooping around her neighborhood asking about her.

Her friends sent her to the Chace’s house in Valley Falls, where they awaited the arrival of her oldest son, who would bring their belongings.

We kept them three or four days, in hourly fear and expectation of the arrival of the slave-catcher; our doors and windows fastened by day as well as by night, not daring to let our neighbors know who were our guests, lest some one should betray them. We told our children, all, at that time, under fourteen years of age, of the fine of one thousand dollars, and the imprisonment of six months, that awaited us, in case the officer should come, and we should refuse to give these poor people up.

Finally, the 17-year-old son arrived with their belongings and money raised by their neighbors in Fall River.

Once, a light-skinned African-American stayed at their house for 10 days pretending to be a fugitive slave. He was actually an escaped burglar. The Chaces found him very well-mannered and entertaining.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Buffum Chace fought against racial discrimination in the schools and for women’s rights and prison reform.

Elizabeth Buffum Chace died on Dec. 12, 1899. Today , the Elizabeth Buffum Chace House in Warwick, R.I., shelters and aids victims of domestic violence.

Her son Arnold Buffum Chace became a famous mathematician and chancellor of Brown University. Her daughter, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, became a prominent author. Two of her grandchildren became renowned professors and another grandson was a U.S. Collegiate Tennis champion and is credited with bringing ice hockey to the United States.

This story about Elizabeth Buffum Chace was updated in 2023.

Image of Elizabeth Buffum Chace PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13709459.

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Boston’s Miracle 1914 Braves Most Improbable Comeback Ever

On July 18, 1914, the Boston Braves were in last place as usual. But that season the madmen from Boston made the most stunning comeback in baseball history after a humiliating 10-2 loss to a Buffalo farm team.

The team went from last place to first in two months and then swept the heavily favored Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Their last-to-first rally still stands as one of the greatest reversals in baseball history.

Boston Braves, 1914 World Series at Fenway Park. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

The 1914 Braves

The Braves had languished in the cellar for a decade, averaging 100 losses a year. They played in a rickety little ballpark that seated 5,800, not that they needed that many seats. The team was sold in 1912 to former pitcher John Montgomery Ward, and John Gaffney, a Tammany Hall alderman. Until then they’d been known as the “Beaneaters,” the “Doves” or the “Rustlers,” but Gaffney named them the Braves after the New York political machine’s symbol, Chief Tammanend.

George Stallings. in 1914. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The new owners hired George Stallings, a crusty, some said sadistic, plantation owner from Georgia. Stallings could fly into a schizophrenic rage over a dropped fly ball. Even by baseball standards Stallings was extremely superstitious. He hated yellow signs and yellow clothing. Yellow ballpark advertisements had to be painted over before he’d let the team play. He would freeze in position when his team started a rally. Once, the Braves rallied as he picked up a pebble in the dugout. When the rally ended he had to be helped off the field.

But he knew baseball.

In 1913, Stallings’ first season, he managed the hapless Braves to only 82 losses and 69 wins. By the start of 1914, though, Stallings had begun to assemble his unlikely champions. He later described the team as having “one .300 hitter, the worst outfield that ever flirted with sudden death, three pitchers and a good working combination around second base.”

They also had game, and they would do anything to win. Once, shortstop Rabbit Maranville let himself get hit in the head by a fastball so he could walk in the winning run. In that tough, raw era of the game, Stallings’ 1914 Braves were the toughest, rawest team in baseball.

“Don’t end up in jail”

Stallings told his players “Do what you want but don’t end up in jail and come to play every day.” They did exactly what they wanted. Maranville once dove into a hotel fountain after a few cocktails and emerged with a goldfish between his teeth.

Rabbit Maranville famously swam with the fishes in a hotel fountain. (Courtesy Boston Public Library)

Stallings’ most astute move was to buy the contract of Chicago Cubs player-manager and Hall of Famer Johnny Evers before the 1914 season. Evers, the best second baseman in the National League, had an almost psychic ability to position himself right where the ball would be hit. Stallings also chucked a few veterans. Five rookies on the 26-man roster hadn’t played a day in the majors.

The Braves lost their Opening Day game to Brooklyn, then went on to lose some more. Pitchers were wild, or their arms were sore. Maranville came down with tonsillitis, Evers got sick. They lost game after game by one run. They seemed stuck in the cellar, 15-1/2 games behind the first place New York Giants.

Then they lost in Buffalo to what Evers described as “a soap company team.” What happened next isn’t clear. Stallings may have chewed them out. Evers may have inspired them. Stallings may have told them to go out and tie one on. Whatever it was, it worked.

Suddenly, They Got Hot

They won 12 of the next 16 games on the road and rocketed to fourth place. In mid-season. During the streak, Stallings traded for new players.

1914 Braves left fielder, Joey Connolly, the pride of North Smithfield, R.I. Photo courtesy the Library of Congress.

The light-hitting team started to get hits when they needed them and coming from behind to win. Joey Connolly, the 5’7” left fielder from Rhode Island, started to hit, ending the season with a .306 average. Maranville hit a clutch homerun in one game; the Springfield, Mass., native admitted he was so hungover he didn’t see the ball.

They scrapped for every win. The players researched the opposing teams to come up with the best insults. Evers argued with umpires, Maranville mimicked them. More importantly, they transformed the infield into a hitters’ Death Valley.

With first baseman Charlie “Butcher Boy” Schmidt, they turned more double plays than the famed Cubs’ Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance infield.

The pitching solidified. From July 9, sophomore pitcher Bill James went 19-1 with a microscopic 1.51 ERA. The only game he lost was 3-2 to the Pirates in 12 innings. Pitcher Dick Rudolph, a clever curveball-spitball pitcher, went 26-10 that season. He had talked his way onto the team after a chance encounter with the third base coach. Lefty Tyler, a native of Derry, N.H., with a peculiar motion, rounded out the big three pitchers with a 16-13 record. Even George Davis, rarely used as a starter, pitched the National League’s only no-hitter that year in September against the Phillies.

Laying Waste to the League

As the team caught fire, Boston got caught up in the excitement. Their ballpark, the South End Grounds, could only hold 5,800 fans. The Red Sox offered them the use of Fenway Park. On their first home game at Fenway the attendance was 20,000. Among the fans were tavern keeper Michael T. “Nuf Ced” McGreevey’s small army of sports fanatics, the Royal Rooters, who happily transferred their loyalty from the Red Sox. (Nuf Ced got his nickname by pounding his fist on the bar and exclaiming “Nuff Said” when he’d won a sports argument.)

Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevey

From July 19 to the end of the season, the Braves lay waste to the rest of the National League, winning an incredible 51 of 67 games. On Sept. 29, they clinched the National League pennant.

The team was expected to lose the World Series to the dominant Philadelphia Athletics, who had a Hall of Fame pitching staff and a $100,000 infield. The A’s ace, Chief Bender, called the Braves “bush league.”

The Royal Rooters

The Royal Rooters followed the team to Philadelphia for the first two games. Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, his daughter Rose and her new husband Joe Kennedy went along. The Braves took the first game, shocking the Athletics with a 7-1 victory. They won the second game, too, 1-0.

Back in Boston, the Royal Rooters paraded to the field in Indian dress. They sang their fight song “Tessie” throughout Game 3, unnerving the A’s pitchers. Braves catcher Hank Gowdy won the game with a 12^th inning walk-off homerun, the only dinger of the series. (Gowdy, by the way, was the only Major League Baseball player to fight in both World War I and World War II.)

The Braves 3-1 victory over the A’s in the fourth and final game of the series inspired the wildest celebration ever. Fans swarmed the dugout, demanding Stallings give a speech on top of it. Maranville was dragged from the shower, and half-dressed he too gave a speech on top of the dugout. The Rooters’ band played “Tessie,” 5,000 fans marched around the park through the Fens and down Huntington Ave. where they serenaded the A’s at the Copley Plaza.

The losing manager, Connie Mack, was gracious in defeat. “A great team,” he said. “One of the greatest. It had great spirit and just wouldn’t be beaten.”

With thanks to The Boston Braves, 1871-1963, by Harold Kaese. Find out more about the Braves at the Boston Braves Historical Association. This story was updated in 2022.

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