Planting Heritage

Maurice Cunningham's great-great-great-great-grandson plants
one of his heirloom Newtown Pippin apple trees

We decided to plant apple trees this year. I was looking on-line for Honeycrisps (because, yum) when I came across this entry at a heirloom tree site. The Newtown Pippin? That sounds familiar. It's a tree with heritage. My heritage.

The Newtown Pippin was, as the link will tell you, the first apple grown commercially in the United States, and it was developed in New York in the mid-1700s. This webpage has a history of the Newtown Pippin. The apple was first exported to Europe in the late 1700s, but this paragraph is what really stands out to me:

In 1845 it is stated that Newtown Pippins from the orchards of Robert Pell, Ulster county, New York, sold in London at $21 a barrel.  The nobility bought them at a guinea a dozen, or 42 cents an apple.  Mr. Pell's orchard of 20,000 trees of Yellow and Green Pippins became famous on account of the high prices received for the fruit, and in consequence the varieties mentioned were planted and grafted throughout the apple regions of the country.  They did not prove successful elsewhere, except in the Piedmont and mountain regions of Virginia and North Carolina.

Robert Pell, of Ulster county New York, did not, of course, work the orchards by himself. He employed a large staff, and his head gardener was Maurice Cunningham, my third great-grandfather. Maurice and his wife came to New York from Cork County, Ireland, in 1828. It's not clear when he began working for Robert Pell, but by 1843 he is mentioned in New York state records as having won multiple prizes for his winter apples and vegetables (1). Pell's Newtown apple trees were described as 40 years old in 1872, so they had been planted in 1832, more or less, perhaps around the same time as Maurice began working there (2). 

An article about the suicide of Robert Pell's son, James, pasted
in the scrapbook of Eliza Cunningham, Maurice's daughter.
(photograph courtesy of Mike Cunningham)

Maurice and his family left New York before 1860, for Wisconsin, where they owned a farm. The relationship between the Cunninghams and the Pells is an interesting topic for speculation. Maurice's daughter, Eliza, left a scrapbook in which she pasted a newspaper article about the suicide of Robert Pell's only surviving son. She disfigured the article by crossing it out in ink. Out of grief? Anger? Denial?

Minnesota is on the edge of zone hardiness for Newtown Pippins, but once I saw they were still for sale, I had to buy one. We planted it today, and I said a little prayer for my great-great-great-grandfather. I hope it makes him smile to know that his descendants are still tending the apples he so prized.

Our new Newtown Pippin.
Long may it reign.

References:

1) 1843 Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, Volume 3. pp. 74, 75, and 47.

2) 1872 ''Gazetteer and Business Directory of Ulster County, NY for 1872'', compiled by Hamilton Child.