Rediscovering Lost Apples of the Pacific Northwest

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, host Erin Hoover interviews Dave Benscoter about the Lost Apple Project, which seeks to rediscover and preserve forgotten apple varieties in Washington and the surrounding region.

Dave describes how the project began with a curiosity about old orchard trees and evolved into a partnership with experts and the Whitman County Historical Society to identify and propagate rare apples.

The process involves community collaboration, careful mapping of old orchards, and grafting scion wood to ensure these varieties are not lost again. The episode highlights the historical importance of apples to early homesteaders, the reasons many varieties faded from memory, and ongoing efforts to conserve and share heritage apples with gardeners and the public.

• Temperate Orchard Conservancy
• Lost Apples Wiki
• The Lost Apple Project | Oakesdale WA
• Projects | Whitman County Historical Society
• Local Food: Cultivating Skills for Sustainable Food

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to episode 61 of The Evergreen Thumb. My guest today is Dave Benscoter. Dave is joining me today to tell us about the last Apple Project, a little bit about the apple-growing history in Washington, and his work with the Whitman County Historical Society and WSU to recover previously believed lost apple varieties.

[00:00:25] Dave, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the show. 

Dave Benscoter: Thank you. 

The Lost Apple Project

Erin Hoover: To start off, why don’t you tell us a bit about the Lost Apple Project and how it got started? 

[00:00:35] Dave Benscoter: 20 years ago, I had no idea that I’d be doing this, but I was retired and about, I want to say about, uh, 2012, I was doing some yard work for a disabled missionary that goes to my church and, and, uh, she asked if I could go pick some apples for her in her orchard.

[00:00:55] I knew she lived on her family’s property, or her great, great grandfather, I think she said, came to the property about 1915, and there was an orchard about 200 yards away from the house. It was on the side of a hill, so I knew she had an apple orchard. So I grabbed a ladder, I grabbed a bucket, and I went over and started trying to pick, and I came back five minutes later and I said, “I’m sorry I can’t pick a single apple. Uh, they’re all too high.”

[00:01:18] And so I said, “I know how to prune apple trees”. My dad taught me how, and I’d always had at least one apple tree wherever I’d lived. And, uh, over that winter that I was, uh, planning to prune her trees, but before I even pruned her trees, I got to thinking about it, and I, uh, those are, those are not going to be apples that I’m familiar with.

[00:01:40] So I gave her a call and I said, “Do you know what kind of apple trees are in your orchard? And she said, well, I know the very top ones, their name were, uh, Yellow Transparent. They’re uh, the very first apple that ripens in the year in July”. 

[00:02:00] And then she called her brother, and he knew that the second row of apples was an apple called, uh, Wealthy, which also has a unique history in the United States because it was the first bred apple in the United States, but she didn’t know the rest of the apples. So I jumped online and I just started, uh, basically started going down rabbit holes. It was amazing the information on apple growing in Eastern Washington.

[00:02:20] People are all familiar that uh, Washington produces the most apples of any state, but that’s all in basically Central Washington, where people have access to the Columbia River or the Yakima River. And out here in Eastern Washington, we live in rolling hills where, uh, basically nothing is irrigated.

[00:02:42] Anyway, I just became extremely interested and the internet, uh, opened up to me amazing, amazing, uh, books and newspapers and records of old apples were being raised out here. And finally, in 2013, I called or emailed, uh, uh, some friends who, uh, I knew were apple identification experts, and they live in Oregon. And, uh, they’re with the, uh, now with the Temperate Orchard Conservancy, a nonprofit in Oregon, and they, they identify apples.

[00:03:16] There are two people that work there, Joanie Cooper and Sean Shepherd. Only two of, uh, five experts in the whole United States that can actually identify apples that are sent to them. And, uh, to make a long story short, uh, the first year we found one, it was the Fall Jenneting, and then things kind of snowballed after that, and now we have found 30 once lost varieties.

Partnerships That Helped Move the Lost Apple Project Forward

[00:03:44] Erin Hoover: Wow. So, what kind of partnerships besides the Temperate Conservancy, what, what other partnerships did you make that helped you to, to move this organization forward? 

[00:03:57] Dave Benscoter: Well, the following year, uh, I approached the Whitman County Historical Society, and I knew that they had projects under them. And I asked them if, uh, they would be interested in having a lost apple project, uh, as one of their projects.

[00:04:14] Uh, the bottom line was I made a presentation to the Historical Society, and they agreed that we could be a project under the Historical Society, but we would have to do our own fundraising. So we have been, it’s a great, been a great partnership because the ancient apples that once grew in Eastern Washington have a surprising early history to this area and were very important to the homesteaders that came to Eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and Oregon.

[00:04:40] Actually, all of Idaho, I shouldn’t just say northern Idaho, but all three states, uh, had benefits from the homesteaders planting fruit trees. 

The Process of Rediscovering Lost Apple Varieties

[00:05:00] Erin Hoover: What is the process like for rediscovering potentially lost apple varieties um, and how are the orchards located? 

[00:05:08] Dave Benscoter: Well, uh, the way we usually find them is just through, uh, podcasts like this, uh, people reading articles in newspapers, uh, about the Lost Apple project or magazines and getting in touch with the Lost Apple project. 

[00:05:30] And if the apples are in Washington, Oregon, or Idaho, we ask people, uh, if they’re not too far away for us to, uh, to travel to pick from their trees. We ask them to send us apples. If they’re near enough that, uh, we can drive there, we’ll drive, often drive to the orchards, and it’s amazing how many, uh, old orchards and old trees are still living. Most of the apple orchards that I go to.

[00:05:54] I would say more than 50%, you can tell there were spaces for apple trees, and the trees have died since they were planted in the, probably the late 18 hundreds. And when we’re contacted by people, we, uh, if we go out to orchards, uh, we’ll make a map. And, uh, the map is very important because apples are easy to see when there are apples on the trees.

[00:06:18] But once the apples are off the trees, pretty much every apple tree looks the same. So, what we do is we take GPS coordinates for each tree and draw a map. And that way if, uh, one of the apples is a possible lost variety, we can go back and we can gather grafting wood from that tree and uh, get that grafting wood growing on, on some of our trees.

[00:06:43] And perfect apples are produced that way; Apples that have access to irrigation, to pest control. And we produce much better apples than they can usually be produced in the wild. 

How Lost Varieties are Determined

[00:07:01] Erin Hoover: So, once you’ve grown those apples, how do you determine whether they’re a lost variety? 

[00:07:06] Dave Benscoter: Well, the first thing we do is, uh, we send the apples to the Temperate Orchard Conservancy and, uh, they, uh, we’ll usually send them about 200 bags of apples, which represent 200 trees, every year.

[00:07:25] And what they do is, they try to identify the apple. Now, uh, some apples, of course, are very easy. Uh, old heritage varieties like Rome and Winesap and things like that are, have never become lost. If they come across an apple, they think could be a lost variety, they’ll first of all, they’ll tell us. And then the following spring, we’ll gather grafting wood from that tree, send it to the Temperate Orchard Conservancy.

[00:07:54] We’ll also graft it to our trees. And then, uh, we’ll also then the following year we’ll also do a DNA test. We work with, uh, Washington State University, and Washington State University has a database, and the database has over 3000 apple cultivars in their database. And we use leaves, not the apples themselves.

[00:08:19] And so, uh, we’ll send them a leaf in a little tube. Once the DNA is extracted and analyzed, they can report back to me if the apple, uh, is in their database. Now, if it’s not in their database, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a lost variety. Most likely it’s an old apple tree that, uh, is very rare. At least it’s very rare.

[00:08:45] Uh, they have, of course, all, all modern apples, and I, I use post 1920 as my date for, for, uh, modern apples. Uh, we kind of established that because nursery owners were kind of told not to order a lot of apple varieties, uh, at least in the northwest in 1918. And they were discouraged from ordering some of the apple trees that eventually became, uh, lost trees.

[00:09:18] Uh, so, uh, when WSU lets me know what the result of the DNA test is, uh, if the apple matches an apple in their database, then we know we don’t have any more work to do. That’s not a loss variety, and they’ll have a name for it. But if it’s not in the database, then we have a little bit more work to do.

[00:09:38] And usually that means, uh, gathering the apple at least one more time. Maybe it could extend on, I’ve had apples that have taken through four years, uh, to identify. But, uh, yeah, then we send those apples once again to our apple identification experts and, and that job is so incredibly difficult.

[00:10:02] An apple has up to 50 different characteristics. Everything from the shape of the seed to how long the stem is. That’s all stuff that’s way over my head, and most of the Apple Identification Experts, in the recent past, and currently have basically studied under somebody else, and they have, have learned the process, uh, um, by working with someone who’s done it for many years.

[00:10:31] So it’s, it’s just an amazing, uh, skill that I wish I had. 

Why Were so Many Varieties Lost Over the Years?

[00:10:36] Erin Hoover: So, why were so many varieties lost or forgotten over the years? 

[00:10:43] Dave Benscoter: Well, uh, yeah, I think forgotten is probably the best word. You know, when the pioneers first came out, the homesteaders, apples were extremely important. 

[00:11:02] Because if you came out in, let’s say the 1870s, uh, you, uh, first of all, you, if you didn’t come and plan to become a store owner and there weren’t many stores because, uh, the only way, the only way you could get products from the East would be to come out on the Oregon trail, or you could also go, uh, under South America and come up that way. Uh, uh, some people came that way, went to San Francisco that way. Yeah.

[00:11:29] So when the first homesteaders came out, uh, they were granted 160 acres, had to live on it for five years, but everybody was, uh, was scooping up 160-acre parcels of land. And, uh, they had to live on what they either raised, like, uh, pigs or cattle or sheep or something like that, or grew. And that included, of course, vegetables, but it also included fruit trees.

[00:11:56] But the most important of the fruit trees was the apple. And the reason it was so important was, first of all, you could eat it fresh from July to May of the following year. You could do that, you picked apples off the first tree in July, which was the Yellow Transparent. And then of course, after that came other apples.

[00:12:21] Usually in July, that was about the first fresh fruit you were gonna have since, uh, you were eating apples out of your cellar. Uh, none of the other fruits would keep very long in your cellar, but, uh, you had all these different apple varieties that would ripen in August and September and October. But the most important apples were the ones in October, especially late October.

[00:12:45] And those were the, what they called winter apples, and one of them, probably the most important apple, was the Ben Davis. And the Ben Davis is a good apple, tastes good. Uh, nothing super remarkable about it except its storage ability. And you could put, uh, a bag of Ben Davis apples in your cellar in late October, and you could still go down to your cellar in April, sometimes even into May of the following year, and get fresh apples out of your cellar and eat them.

[00:13:17] And that made them extremely valuable. Uh, there are many ways to keep apples. You could dry them, you could can them, uh, um, uh, but one thing that you could do with them was to make apple cider vinegar, and for, uh, preserving other foods. 

[00:13:42] And that was, that was another benefit. It was just amazing how many benefits the apple had for these first homesteaders. 

How Certain Varieties Fell out of Favor

[00:13:49] Erin Hoover: So, how did some of those varieties kind of fall out of favor? 

[00:13:53] Dave Benscoter: You know, I think people just kind of forgot about them. The first farmers that came out here and this, uh, Washington, well, I, and I speak for where I live, but in Washington, we’re wheat growers up here.

[00:14:11] And if somebody came from back east on the Oregon trail and came out and got their 160 acres they were in, and let’s say they were in the 1870s, even the early, early 1880s before the, the trains arrived, you were basically farming with, uh, maybe a mule and, and you had farm equipment like a plow, and 160 acres was fine for that.

[00:14:41] After the trains came out and after the farm equipment started getting better and better, farm equipment also became more expensive. And, uh, for example, today you wouldn’t be much of a wheat grower if you only had 160 acres because a combine can set you back close to a million dollars. 

So as equipment got more expensive and uh, and then you had, uh, the railroad where you could sell your wheat back east, people started either becoming bigger or getting out of the business totally. Uh, basically, uh, get big or go home.

[00:15:19] And a lot of the places that I go to, these homestead orchards, uh, were once 160 acres, but people sold them, and then no one knew the name of the trees that were there. 

By gosh, uh, yeah, by 1920, there weren’t very many 160-acre farms left. And all the apples, apple trees that grew there, people just kind of forgot about.

[00:15:51] And a lot of times these homesteaders were very smart. Uh, almost every homestead that I go to, the apples are planted, uh, very similarly. And that is, they were planted on the lowest spot on the property, or spots that the farm equipment couldn’t make it into. So, when they left if it was an area that farm equipment couldn’t get to, those trees were just, have just been unattended for or were unattended for a hundred, maybe 120 years.

Apple Conservation Work

[00:16:24] Erin Hoover: Wow. So what kind of work is happening to conserve or preserve these rediscovered varieties? 

[00:16:33] Dave Benscoter: Well, the first thing after, uh, an apple is, I’ll say rediscovered, uh, the following spring, uh, we gather scion wood and make sure that the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon has, uh, has scion wood to graft trees.

[00:16:49] What they do is they will graph two trees, and those trees will be forever in the Temperate Orchard Conservancy, so they’re never lost again. Uh, we, members of the Lost Apple Project, will graft that onto our own trees, and the reason for that is that we want to produce grafting wood for other people.

[00:17:12] And every, uh, spring we sell both grafting wood and we also sell, uh, baby trees, and we’ll graft those trees in March, and people can usually pick up their trees. We don’t ship trees and so people have to pick up the trees. Uh, but uh, in the spring we usually graft, oh, 150, 200 trees on orders from people. And uh, and we send a lot of grafting wood to people also.

[00:17:40] The Lost Apple Project has a Facebook page, and if people follow that, they’ll, uh, and, and they’re interested in getting either grafting wood or if they’re interested in picking up a tree, uh, they, if they follow us through our Facebook page, the Lost Apple Project, they can be notified when the sale, uh, has started in the spring.

Lost Apple Commercial Availability

[00:18:08] Erin Hoover: Great. Okay. We’ll put a link in our show notes to your Facebook page so they can find you. 

So, have any of the rediscovered varieties, um, become commercially available on a larger scale? 

[00:18:24] Dave Benscoter: No, they haven’t. Although I think I have one particular apple that I think could be, uh, commercial. Well, they all pretty much all taste very good.

[00:18:38] Some of them are, first of all, too small for them to ever become a commercial variety. Um, I’m thinking of one apple in particular. Kittageskee is a very good apple, but it’s just, uh, it’s not something that you’d ever get in a grocery store because it’s just, uh, too small of apple. Although I must say Stark Brothers and uh, and I think some other nurseries, online nurseries now sell, uh, I think they call ‘em, uh, lunchbox apples.

[00:19:07] Uh, I think Pixie Crunch is an apple that uh, is smaller. You don’t see Pixie Crunch in a store. But, uh, that, that’s marketed to, uh, I think for moms to put in the lunch of their children. But, and then some of the apples also, uh, don’t produce every year. They produce every other year.

So, you know, there are different reasons for apples falling out of favor,

[00:19:35] But, uh, I think the one apple that I think could actually be a commercial success would be the Shackleford. And the Shackleford is it’s got everything going for it. It’s very good tasting. I’ll call it a large apple. It’s medium to large, it’s not too large.

[00:19:57] It, uh, stores well, and it produces every year, and it’s very consistent. So I’m kind of hopeful someday somebody might grow it. 

I do have one of our committee members, uh, lives in Potlatch, uh, Tim Steury of Steury Orchards, and he actually grows, oh, a handful of the once lost apples and sells them.

[00:20:24] Erin Hoover: Have you explored partnerships with nurseries or other heritage groups to make the trees more widely available? 

[00:20:33] Dave Benscoter: We haven’t, uh, explored partnerships with, uh, other nurseries or, uh, other nonprofits. So far, we’ve done this basically on our own. 

Tips for Growing Heritage Fruit Trees

[00:20:45] Erin Hoover: Do you have any tips then for gardeners who might be interested in heritage varieties of fruit trees?

[00:20:53] Dave Benscoter: Yeah, just, you know, reach out to us. Uh, we still have trees for this year, and all our profits, of course, go into the Lost Apple Project, which keeps us going from year to year. And, uh, you know, there’s just, uh, a wealth of knowledge that we’ve gained over the last 15 years from this project that, uh, you know, we know what apples are good for, you know, what purpose.

[00:21:24] And, uh, we encourage people to come and try these new apples and, and, uh, you know, it’s a part of our history and we want to keep that history and we don’t want these apples to be lost again. 

An Apple With a Fascinating Discovery Story

[00:21:40] Erin Hoover: So, is there a particular apple you rediscovered that the story of it kind of stands out as above the others?

[00:21:47] Dave Benscoter: Uh, well, you know, I’ll tell you what. Kittageskee has a fascinating history. Um, there was a nursery down in, I believe it’s Arkansas, and the nursery owner, uh, posted online probably, uh, 10 years ago that he was going to be retiring soon and his one regret was that he had spent his whole life hoping to come across the Kittageskee, uh, that was grown in Arkansas, and unfortunately, he’d never found it.

[00:22:19] And it wasn’t, I don’t think it was even a year or two years later that we found the Kittageskee, and it was in southern Idaho. There were several Kittageskees in southern Idaho in an orchard. And, uh, our, we have, uh, a branch of the Lost Apple project has members down in the Boise area, and somebody, uh, picked those apples and sent them in and, uh I know it made him incredibly happy. It was an apple that he thought he’d never be able to taste, and so that kind of stands out for me. 

What’s in The Future For the Last Apple Project?

[00:22:55] Erin Hoover: So, what’s in the future for the Last Apple Project? 

[00:23:00] Dave Benscoter: Well, you know, we always have, uh, a pretty good backlog of apples that need to continue in testing. For example, we have apples from last year that, uh, might possibly be lost apples.

[00:23:16] And so what we’re doing is, uh, let’s say an apple from last year, uh, is a possible lost variety. Then this year, we want to make sure we get a leaf from that tree, send it in for DNA testing. We want to make sure we don’t identify a lost apple incorrectly. And then, uh, John Bunker, who lives in Maine, he’s an Apple identification expert. We’ve got, uh, we now send him apples to take a look at, too.

[00:23:39] And, uh, so yeah, we’ve got, every year and every, gosh, this year I bet I’ve been to 20 orchards I’ve never been to before. So, uh, and that’s all the result of people, you know, letting me know that there are orchards that, uh, you know, tucked away, hidden, the orchards and still producing fruit after all these years.

Apple Genetics

[00:24:08] Erin Hoover: I think I remember when I heard you speak before you were, when you were talking about DNA, about being able to tell if one of the parent apples of this, if it was like a crossbreed. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

[00:24:20] Dave Benscoter: Yeah. Yes. Apples are, uh, apples are kind of like people. You get half your DNA from your mom, and you get half your DNA from your from your dad.

[00:24:30] And apples are sort of the same way. You’ve got a mother tree that will have a blossom on it, and then let’s say a bee goes over to uh, and your mother tree is a Yellow Delicious, and a bee goes over and he lands on a Red Delicious. And then he comes over to the Yellow Delicious and pollinates the apple on the Yellow Delicious.

[00:24:51] Well, every apple that is created on that tree and every seed in every apple on that tree has 100% different DNA than any other apple in the world. And that’s, I mean, that’s kind of like people, you know, nobody, you don’t go around seeing a clone of you. 

[00:25:14] Unfortunately, you’d think, well, Yellow Delicious and a Red Delicious, that probably would be a pretty good-tasting apple. Uh, probably 95% of the apples that come from seedling trees, so like an apple tree that you just happen to run into out in the woods or something that maybe, uh, you know, came from a bird dropping an apple or a seed or maybe some manure from a wild animal and started a seed.

[00:25:37] 95% of the time, that tree’s going to produce apples that taste horrible, and they’re called spitters. You just want to spit ‘em out as quick as you can. But, once in a while, there’ll be an apple that turns out great. But, but that’s what the DNA does.  It doesn’t just tell you if the apple is a known variety.

[00:26:03] It also tells you the mother and the father of the apple. And that’s really cool because, uh, I’ve had instances where the parents turn out to be Gold Delicious and Red Delicious. Well, I know immediately that that’s not a lost apple. And the reason I know it’s not a lost apple is because Red Delicious was introduced in 1895.

[00:26:27] Yellow Delicious was introduced in 1915, so the window there, and by 1918, 1920, people were not buying varieties that we now consider lost varieties anymore. So it helps us to say, okay, well, that variety, we’re going to forget about it because its parents tell us it can’t be a lost variety.

[00:26:52] But there are other times when the parents tell us we’re on the right path. Maybe that was an old heritage variety back in New England or something like that, or both parents were, uh, from that area, and we know we’re on the right track if we’ve got that. 

How to Support The Lost Apple Project 

[00:27:09] Erin Hoover: So, how can listeners get involved or support the work that the last Apple Project is doing?

[00:27:16] Dave Benscoter: Uh, well, first, follow us on our Lost Apple Project Facebook page. And, we’re just like any nonprofit, and we rely a hundred percent on people to donate money to our cause. We’re able to do DNA tests and we’re able to send apples, uh, to experts. And, you can even do, uh, Google.

[00:27:45] There are plenty of articles on our search. Uh, if you just, uh, put in Lost Apple project and, uh, and Google that. 

How to Get an Apple Identified

[00:27:57] Erin Hoover: So if someone wanted to get an apple identified, uh, that they have on their property, would you recommend that they send it to the Temperate Orchards Conservancy first, or contact the Lost Apple Project?

[00:28:13] Dave Benscoter: Contact the Lost Apple Project. Actually, can I give my email address? 

Erin Hoover: Um, sure. 

Dave Benscoter: Okay. It’s dbens23@gmail.com.

[00:28:31] Uh, what we’ll do is when we get apples, we’ll take their picture. We’ll also put a little, uh, and in the picture, we’ll be a little tag with the name of the person who sent it, and, uh, some kind of identification so that, uh, as we go along the identification process, uh. We’ll have a record of what was sent to us, and then the results usually come out by March of next year, and we’ll know, uh, especially for the common, uh, old heritage varieties.

[00:29:06] We’ll find out rather quickly if, uh, those are any of the apples that have been sent in. 

Final Thoughts

[00:29:13] Erin Hoover: Thanks so much for being here, Dave. Do you have any other final thoughts? 

[00:29:16] Dave Benscoter: Thank you very much for letting me talk with people today. I really appreciate that. 

[00:29:24] Erin Hoover: Well, we enjoyed having you here. Thanks for coming. 

[00:29:27] Dave Benscoter: Thank you. 

[00:29:28] Erin Hoover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

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