Saving Southern apples

David Vernon wanted to preserve the apple trees on his great-grandfather's 200-acre Caswell County farm.

In the mid-1990s, Vernon found the man to help him to do it: Lee Calhoun.

A decade earlier, Calhoun, 75, a Raleigh native who retired to Chatham County, had undertaken a mission to save Southern apple trees. Calhoun spent years traveling to farms, grafting trees and creating an orchard and then a nursery to sell the trees. He also wrote the definitive work, "Old Southern Apples." The book's publication is credited with saving nearly 100 Southern apple tree varieties feared extinct.

After one phone call, Calhoun invited Vernon, 39, to his Chatham County nursery to learn how to graft the trees. As the men's friendship developed in the ensuing years, Vernon's project to save a handful of trees turned into a nursery with about 500 varieties for sale. Vernon opened Century Farm Orchards at about the same time Calhoun closed his nursery in 2005.

"I don't take credit for finding these varieties," Vernon says. "I'm providing people with trees that Lee has found and researched."

And that's how the next generation of Southern apple tree preservationists was grafted from the first.

Each Saturday in November, Vernon opens his orchard to the public. You can buy apple trees, taste 20 varieties of apples, drink cider and buy his Aunt Grey Smith's fried apple pies.

Apple trees were once a familiar sight on Southern family farms. The rule of thumb was to have six trees per person. Those trees bore fruit from June to December. Apples were stored, turned into cider and applesauce, even dried atop tin roofs. They had names like Sops of Wine, Royal Limbertwig and Summer Banana.

Each apple seems to have a story and a specific purpose: Hewes Crab is a cider apple that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew; Arkansas Black is a deep scarlet apple started in Arkansas in 1870 that stores well; and Magnum Bonum, an aromatic, juicy apple that originated in 1828 in Davidson County, is considered "the king of fall apples in the South."

"These heirloom varieties are part of our agrarian Southern heritage," Calhoun says. "These are the apples that our great-grandparents and grandparents ate."

Vernon, a high school chemistry teacher, lives in the house his great-grandfather owned, just past Apple Road east of Reidsville.

Vernon's great-grandfather, George Rice, was a tobacco farmer and an accountant at a tobacco warehouse.

Rice would return from tobacco auctions with apple trees - Rockingham Red, Sweetnin', Summer Banana, Yellow June and Mary Reid.

Vernon's aunt Grey Smith recalls snacking on Summer Banana apples during breaks from harvesting tobacco.

It was a desire to hold onto this piece of his family's past that spurred Vernon to save those apple trees.

Now his nursery allows him to help others do the same.

"I feel like I'm helping somebody out there preserve a little bit of their family history," Vernon says.

It's not uncommon at his open houses, Vernon says, to see someone with an elderly relative hobbling around the orchard talking about the apple trees of their youth. Or to have an elderly customer place an order for trees and family members come back to pick it up because their grandparent or parent has died in the ensuing year. They want the trees to remind them of their loved ones.

"After grandma's gone, the tree still reminds them of a time or a place that's important to them," Vernon says. "I have a heart for that."

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