The Oregonion newspaper in Portland, OR had an article on a group hunting for old apple varieties which is interesting.
https://www.oregonlive.com/.../apple-sleuths-hunt-northwest-for-varieties- believed-extinct.html
It made me think about all the old orchards found when chaining lines in unpopulated sections. If I remember correctly, the original GLO Oregon manual recommended planning fruit trees at section corners for accessories. I would joke about all corners being in orchards so start looking there first. It could drive you crazy in the Yakima, Wenatchee, and Okanogan areas.
That's a fun project. I love finding old, abandoned apple trees. Central MA had many 19th-century and early 20th-century apple orchards. Fortunately, some survive today.
?ÿ
The Oregonion newspaper in Portland, OR had an article on a group hunting for old apple varieties which is interesting.
https://www.oregonlive.com/.../apple-sleuths-hunt-northwest-for-varieties- believed-extinct.html
It made me think about all the old orchards found when chaining lines in unpopulated sections. If I remember correctly, the original GLO Oregon manual recommended planning fruit trees at section corners for accessories. I would joke about all corners being in orchards so start looking there first. It could drive you crazy in the Yakima, Wenatchee, and Okanogan areas.
can you repost that link in another format please?
it is broken in some manner
thanks, Peter
?ÿ
In Kansas the early settlers created orchards of certain varieties of trees to be used for slowing the wind via treerows along property or field boundaries.?ÿ Hedge/osage orange/bois d'arc/bodark was by far the most popular for that purpose.?ÿ Catalpa orchards were for firewood purposes.
Most of Kansas was grassland with very few trees at the time of the early settlements.?ÿ Most of the trees were along the rivers and creeks and not where 90 percent of the land for homesteading was located.
I believe so. I don't have any catalpas on any of my properties but there are plenty of them around. Most were planted close to houses, except for those in dedicated orchards. What is sort of funny is one developer of a small addition to a nearby city decided to plant catalpas along the boundaries of each lot. That was over 100 years ago. Those that survived/allowed to survive are monsters today. A surveyor can totally give up on the idea of sighting down a property line in that neighborhood.
Later day "Johnny Appleseeds".
John Chapman planted orchards of apple trees in western PA, Ohio, Ontario, Indiana and Illinois. They were tended and sold by locals and typical price was 4 trees for a quarter. Besides planting apple seeds in the early 1800s, John Chapman was a Christian missionary planting seeds of another kind. Perhaps it was he who inspired others to do the same throughout the 1800s.
Paul in PA
I caught a ton of bream and crappie on those worms when i was a kid. I remember one decent bass that took that bait. There were two man-made lakes, the upper dam and the lower dam, up in the Blue Ridge mountains that formed the headwaters of the Dan River. A six-foot or so diameter pipe fed water from the mountain lakes to a hydro station in the valley which then fed electricity to the city of Danville, VA.
We fished for bream, crappie and bass in the lakes and trout in the Dan River in the valley. Never fell out of a boat, but I've had hip boots full of water a couple of times. That'll teach you to watch your step.
If I remember correctly, the original GLO Oregon manual recommended plan(t)ing fruit trees at section corners for accessories.
?ÿ
From the 1851 Oregon Manual:
I think that very few, if any, pits/mounds were set under this manual. Western Oregon Territory was amply supplied with wood stakes.?ÿ
bream and crappie
Down South they're "bluegill" and "spec".?ÿ ???? ?ÿ
@holy-cow About a year ago I read a letter written by an engineer visiting tiny Tamaroa in Southern Illinois (population 599) in late 1800s-early 1900s. He told of locals hiring people to plant and maintain bois d'arc along their boundaries. I believe they would sign a 3 year contract to establish the hedge, at which time the engineer said the hedge was thick enough to keep in (or out) livestock. There are still a lot of bois d'arc treerows in the area.
(After writing that I found an article that mentions a Professor Turner, who brought the trees to Illinois. He described the hedges as "horse high, bull strong, and pig tight." The letter I read may have just been regurgitating Turner's opinions).
I have read the early idea was to plant them close, but either tie down the higher branches or lop them off so that they did not waste resources to grow tall. The mass of thorns would keep any sane mammal over two feet tall from attempting to find a way through to the other side. I have never seen them treated that way, as was apparently the style in France and other parts of Europe.
Colorado also has folks looking for ancient apple varieties with some success:
?ÿ
https://coloradosun.com/2019/11/28/colorado-heritage-apples-orchard-restoration-hard-cider/
?ÿ
https://coloradosun.com/2019/12/18/colorado-orange-apple-found/
?ÿ
Tracking down old apple varieties is a big deal in the hard cider business.?ÿ A local guy has used/is using 50+/- different varieties
https://distillerylaneciderworks.com/distillery-lane-ciderworks/the-apples-2/
?ÿ
The article is interesting because we believe quite a few people who traveled the Oregon Trail may have brought fruit/nut trees with them on the journey. While studying forestry in college and being a member of the Society of American Foresters, their magazine yearly published a list of big trees and at that time the largest American Chestnut was located in Lebanon, OR which was somewhere around 6' in diameter. We surmised it was brought along the trip and the chestnut blight couldn't cross from the east to west coast due to the lack of species in the Midwest. That year a logger cut down a 48" tree in an old second growth forest and brought a limb in because he had never seen one before. It turned out to be a coastal redwood. How it got there was a real mystery.
Doing corner recovery I see the GLO surveyors from out of the PNW didn't know some of the common tree species: Black Walnut-Oregon white ash; Caribou-lodgepole pine; Blue spruce-mountain hemlock.
I used to keep a tree identification book in my truck all the time.?ÿ As an aside, I was extending an existing street and pulled the old field books for offsets, benchmarks, etc.?ÿ One description was, "Nail in wooden tree, X feet left of station Y+ZZ".
Andy
Fedco Trees in Maine sells heritage varieties of apples and other fruit trees.
I purchased a couple of black oxfords for my mother.?ÿ It's a winter apple so it's best eaten a month or more after harvest. Much better than anything at the grocery store.