400 Years After Its First Apple Farm, Boston Remains an Urban Orchard

Urban canners and tree-planting groups are maintaining an heirloom tradition.

By Reina Gattuso
Atlas Obscura
July 8, 2020

Excerpt:

Boston’s reputation as an epicenter for heirloom fruit dates back to 1623. That was the year European settlers planted their first apple orchard on the land of the Massachusett tribe, in what is now Boston’s posh Beacon Hill neighborhood. There were apple relatives in the New World before European colonization, but the ancestors of the fruits we eat today originated in Central Asia, entered Europe through the Silk Road, and were brought to North America by Europeans. Settlers developed dozens of new fruit cultivars, but apples were the most important, offering colonists cider and sustenance through the brutal New England winters. Settlers in Boston developed several unique apple varieties, from the sandpaper-skinned, acid-fleshed Roxbury Russet (the first American colonial apple, developed in the mid-1600s) to the bluish-maroon, melon-musky Blue Pearmain (developed in the late 1700s).

The legacy of these orchards remains inscribed in Boston’s landscape, in place markers like the giant bronze pear statue in Dorchester’s Everett Square, and in residential names, like Roxbury’s Orchard Park. By the mid 1900s, however, the heirlooms had been mostly decimated by the encroaching city, and by the rise of industrial monoculture, which focused on intensive farming of fewer, supermarket-optimized varieties, which displayed qualities like shiny red skin, virtual indestructibility, and often-bland taste. This near-erasure of centuries of agricultural history inspired Bunker, who came of age during the budding environmental and anti-capitalist movements of the 1970s, to begin his campaign to save New England heirlooms.

In the past decade, Boston community groups, such as the Boston Tree Party and the League of Urban Canners, have found creative ways to bring the city’s history of heirloom orchards alive. Inspired by activists like Bunker, the community-garden movement, and the rising popularity of urban foraging, they’ve planted new urban fruit trees, mapped hundreds of old ones, and created community by re-imagining one of colonial Boston’s first food traditions: picking and processing fruit.

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