Apple Harvests Thru The Years

Editor's note: The following articles are from publications listed below. Thank you to Contributing Scholar George A. Thompson for finding, cataloging and transcribing these articles. The language, spelling and grammar of the article reflects the time period when it was written.

https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~seck/medina_apples/medina_apples.html

Rockland County Journal (Nyack, N. Y.), July 15, 1871
The apple crop of our county is very limited.

Rockland County Journal (Nyack, N. Y.), October 19, 1878
Farmers from the interior of this county sell and deliver to the door of the purchaser nice apples for $1 and $1 25 per barrel.

Rockland County Journal (Nyack, N. Y.), June 5, 1886
Over 6,000 barrels of apples have been shipped from Coxsackie by one man since navigation opened this Spring. 

Rockland County Journal (Nyack, N. Y.), August 27, 1887
A Poughkeepsie cooper says that, this year, he will sell 50,000 apple barrels, and that 250,000 barrels will be needed to market that county's apple crop.

Rockland County Journal (Nyack, N.Y.), October 29, 1887
There are a number of fruit evaporating establishments in Dutchess and Columbia counties, which are now running on apples, and of these the one at Chatham evaporates 250 bushels of apples a day.

Rockland County Messenger (Haverstraw, N. Y.), November 9, 1893
The apple shipments from Dutchess county this year will be about 10,000 barrels.  Last year about 80,000 barrels were shipped.

Kingston Daily Freeman, April 21, 1903
AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL. ITS WORK HAS NOT BEEN ALTOGETHER ABANDONED.
The work of the Poughkeepsie agricultural school has not been altogether abandoned, notwithstanding the operations there have ceased and the school is not in session.  One of the plans of Director Powell was to send out students to the different farms and estates of Dutchess county and where insect pests were found to treat them.  Professor W. D. Hurd, the horticulturist, has been doing this since the close of the school, and assisted by two of the students, the pruning of orchards is being done about Poughkeepsie and the spraying of trees for diseases and insects is being done daily about that city.  There Is a great demand for trained young men for this line of work, and as fast as the school could have graduated them their services would hare been quickly taken.

The other day Director Powell made a critical examination of the Robert L. Pell farm at Esopus, upon which is the most famous Newtown Pippin orchard in the east.  Professor Hurd, assisted by one of the students, is to take up an extensive plan of improvement of the place, in culture, pruning and spraying.  The pippins from this noted farm have sold at times as high as $25 a barrel in England, and they are bringing $12 a barrel the present season.
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Kingston Daily Freeman, March 22, 1906
FORTY-TWO CENTS APIECE. Price for Which Robert Pell  Sold Newtown Pippins. 
How an Ulster county man sold Newtown pippins for forty-two cents apiece is interestingly told in The Tree Book, published by Doubleday, Page & Company, a long review of which appeared in the last issue of the New York Times' Saturday Review of Books. This is the story of the Newtown pippin:

Two centuries ago a chance seed fell near a swamp on the outskirts of the villas, of Newtown, R. I.  A seedling tree came up and was ignored, as such trees are, until some vagrant passing by saw and tasted the first apples it bore and the very golden apples of Hesperides they were for the village and countryside!  Cions [scions] of this tree became the parents of great orchards in the Hudson valley.  Up and down the coast among the colonies they were scattered.

In the year 1758 Benjamin Franklin, our representative in England, received a box of New-town pippins, and he gave some to his distinguished friend, Peter RoIlinson.  Thus were American apples introduced with éclat to the attention of the English.  The trees did poorly in English orchards, but the fruit in London markets grew in popularity.  In 1845 the orchard of Robert Pell, in Ulster county. N. Y.. which contained 20,000 pippin trees, yielded a crop which brought in the London market $21 per barrel.  The tables of the nobility were supplied with these apples at the astonishing price of a guinea a dozen — forty-two cents apiece!
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And yet, almost within the memory of men now living, the old tree still stood on the edge of the swamp, and men came from far and near — even from over-seas — to cut cions from the original Newtown pippin tree.

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