How a little known New Brunswicker became a pioneer apple grower
Francis Peabody Sharp (1823-1903), from Northampton, NB, may be Canada’s answer to John Chapman, also known as America’s Johnny Appleseed, who introduced apple trees in several US states—and, thus, became a legend in his own time. Francis Sharp did bigger, better, and, arguably, more important work in the apple realm than Chapman—yet, until now, has gone virtually unnoticed.
Homemade horticulturalist
From an early age, Sharp subscribed to horticultural magazines and bought books about gardening and orchards. When he was 21, he bought his father’s farm, planted 100 fruit trees, built a small nursery and started to experiment with a scientifically controlled cross-breeding program. Knowing that New Brunswick had longer, colder winters than most states and provinces, he was determined to discover good quality, hardy varieties.
Daryl Hunter, of Keswick Ridge, NB, is a self-taught historian and horticulturalist who has spent years learning about the life and accomplishments of Francis Peabody Sharp. “From his research, Sharp knew that they were growing apples in Russia, where it was colder than New Brunswick,” says Hunter. “In 1849, he ordered some Russian apple seeds from R.B. Dunning & Company, a wholesale company in Bangor, Maine, that sold seeds suited to cold climates, and planted 1,000 seeds.”
To Sharp’s amazement, one of the trees bore fruit five years later. Usually, it took about 10 years (and, in some cases, 13 or 14) for apple trees to bear fruit when planted from seed. “Not only did it bear fruit early,” says Hunter, “it was a hardy, big, good-looking apple with red stripes. He called it the New Brunswick apple—which later became the New Brunswicker.”
But the apple still had two flaws: it lacked the flavour to be a dessert apple, and it did not store well. Sharp began crossbreeding New Brunswicker apple blossoms with Fameuse apple blossoms using scientifically controlled methods; this resulted in 1,200 seeds, which he then planted.
From this experiment, in 1866, the fruit of one tree caught his eye. It had produced the earliest-bearing, solid red apples known at the time; eventually this apple became known as the Crimson Beauty. Sharp then planted “the big orchard ”—70 acres, of which 40 were Crimson Beauty. The orchard had several innovative features, previously unheard of in North America: the 20,000 trees he planted were only six feet apart (instead of the customary 30 feet); and he used surgical techniques to dwarf the trees—including notching the bark above a branch, pruning the roots and training the branches to grow horizontally.
The changing apple industry
In 1975, Andy Wallace, of Yarmouth County, NS, bought five apple trees and planted them—just to see if he could grow apples. “I had Gravenstein, Cortland, McIntosh, Idared, and a Russet. That’s all I intended to plant, but a couple of years later, a friend called from the Yukon. He had ordered and paid for 100 apple trees from a grower in the Annapolis Valley, thinking he might start a small orchard, but he decided to stay up North and not to come back to Nova Scotia,” Wallace says. “He asked if I would buy them. I said sure!”
Now Wallace heads up Wallace Brothers Farm, a fruit orchard in Ireton, NS, and manages about 3,000 trees. He’s seen a few changes in the industry over the past 36 years. For starters, there’s a lot more competition from outside the province—and the country. Canada now imports apples from places as far away as China and New Zealand.
In order to keep up with the Joneses, many regional producers in Atlantic Canada have begun to grow new varieties, like the popular Honeycrisp. “Mind you, you need a jackknife to eat them or you’ll tear your gums to pieces, but they’re certainly crunchy and juicy,” Wallace says, with a grin.
He says he likes to try new varieties—one he especially likes is Prima: “You can smell the aroma a mile away. I just love it,” he says. He wishes that more of his customers would try those new varieties. He remembers giving a Prima to a visitor who came to buy apples one day. “He said he really liked it, but bought a bag of Macs, instead.”
His favourite apple? “It depends on the time of year. Red Astrachan is probably my favourite early apple. And you can’t beat a Gravenstein in September. I like Northern Spy and Idared for late apples. I only eat Macs if I’m thirsty.”
Always experimenting
Along with apples, Sharp grew plums, pears, peaches, grapes, gooseberries, currants, blackberries, melons and various vegetables. He had 100 pickers at harvest time, eight teams of horses hauling ashes and manure year-round, and 25 men working two shifts a day to make cider.
One day, A.T. Mooers, from Aroostook County, Maine, contacted Sharp, who was in the midst of harvesting tomatoes and putting them in storage upstairs in his father’s former home; his father had died some time before, and the home was now abandoned. At the same time, Sharp was also skinning and dressing a pig downstairs.
Mooers had previously bought some Magnum Bonum plums from Sharp, and had taken his recommendation to plant the pits. One of the trees that had come from those plantings proved to be a hardy one, which bore fruit abundantly; Mooers wanted Sharp to check this out.
Sharp visited Mooers right away, and became so excited that, when he returned to his home, he proceeded to graft scions from Mooers’ tree—scions being the twigs from the ends of branches that had grown during the previous year—onto rootstocks from the wild plum trees that grew in the forests of New Brunswick.
Eventually, he had propagated 60,000 plum trees—and had forgotten all about the tomatoes and the pig. (It’s said that two years went by before someone discovered that the tomatoes had rotted and dropped through the ceiling, and that the pig had dried up.)
“Sharp experimented in many ways—building windmills to grind bones into bone meal and inventing a new design for maple sugar evaporators. He was our Department of Agriculture, decades before we actually had one,” says Hunter. Sharp also created a new technique of laying young trees down for the winter and pinning them to the ground so snow could protect the young trees from winter kill.
In 1881, a devastating fire destroyed most of the nursery buildings, and Sharp’s home, but he soon rebounded from the disaster, despite his lack of insurance.
Largest in Canada
Over time, the orchard breeder’s work caught the imagination of American and Canadian scientists; many came to visit and consult. At one point, a group of scientists travelled to Russia and brought back scions from 350 varieties of Russian apples; they gave Sharp 50 of the best for testing. Some of those Russian varieties—including Yellow Transparent, Alexander and Red Astrachan—can still be found in old orchards throughout the Maritimes.
By 1890, Sharp’s orchards and nurseries were the largest in Canada. The nursery comprised over 900,000 trees; he shipped 18,000 barrels of apples a year to the US; another 7,000 barrels went to local markets.
Yet hard times closed in. That year, the McKinley trade tariff was imposed on Canadian trade. Two years later, Sharp’s son and business partner, Franklin, died of tuberculosis. In 1893, Sharp lost most of his plum orchards (which were not hardy varieties) due to severe cold and a lack of snowcover during the winter. Gradually, the family assets dwindled away; his properties went on the chopping block.
“Sadly, Francis Peabody Sharp died in 1902, having lost his personal fortune and most of what he held dear,” says Hunter. “But his pioneering work in scientific hybridizing earned him the distinction of being named ‘Canada’s first fruit breeder’ by the renowned Brogdale Horticultural Trust in England.
“Even today, Sharp’s Crimson Beauty apple is found in the Trust’s National Apple Collection at Brogdale.”
Sharp’s legacy
In 1998, Hunter discovered that, between 1989 and 1996, Phil Forsline and a team of scientists from Cornell University had made four trips to Kazakhstan. They had visited several wild apple forests, brought back apple seeds and scions, and performed experiments similar to Sharp’s.
“I sent Forsline an e-mail and explained—tactfully, of course—that this was a great thing, and noted that Francis Peabody Sharp had done the same thing over 100 years ago in New Brunswick!” says Hunter. The team at Cornell was genuinely surprised to learn this.
Hunter then asked if Forsline would send him some of those seeds. The timing was perfect, as Hunter had been asked by the people at Kings Landing Historical Settlement in Prince William, NB, to do an assessment of their existing orchards and to provide advice on how to rejuvenate the trees, or how to replace them with historic varieties. “As part of my report, I recommended that they replicate a tree nursery like Mr. Sharp’s and start growing their own historic trees.”
Forsline sent 10 seeds from each of the dozen locations where they had collected apple seeds in Kazakhstan. Hunter invited several friends to contribute their horticultural skills, both for the planning of the nursery and to help propagate the seeds from Cornell. They germinated the seeds in batches two years apart; all of those trees are now bearing apples.
The grand opening of the nursery at Kings Landing was in 2003, and has developed into a going (and growing) concern. Hunter has been teaching David Corey—an animator who plays the role of Mr. Sharp—all about grafting and growing apples. Says Corey: “I get a lot of questions about the different varieties and how to graft trees. I show people how Mr. Sharp used the whip and tongue method. People are amazed by his story.”
“It’s high time we recognized Mr. Sharp’s legacy,” says Hunter. “I remember growing up with an old Yellow Transparent tree behind our house, and my mother making the first apple pies of the season with those apples. I had no idea back then that Mr. Sharp was the first to propagate that apple in New Brunswick.”