The clearing of about an acre suggested that a small house was to be built in the thick woods that line the driveway to the Islesboro island school. Until Labor Day, when the stumps were hauled away, logs lay stacked at one end of the lot and a long pile of stumps and roots dominated the center of an otherwise pleasantly contoured landscape.
But this was no house lot: school faculty, students and community volunteers are planning an apple orchard for this clearing and the stumps, logs and excavation are the result of two years’ effort that will take as many more years to bring to fruition.
The idea to create this island orchard came to John Pincince, the school’s horticulture teacher, as he considered ways to incorporate agriculture into his plans for his own property in Lincolnville. Pincince, a part-time horticulture teacher and resident of Lincolnville, is employed by the Regional Mid-Coast School of Technology in Rockland but teaches on Islesboro. Though some of the funding for the orchard project comes from the School of Technology, he is adamant about sparing the school and town of Islesboro any cost for the project.
The orchard project is a community effort that has included school board approval, faculty and student participation, volunteer labor, grant support and a logs-for-labor agreement that was an effective means for clearing the acre of thick woods.
After Pincince received school board approval for the project he applied for a grant from Maine Initiatives, a non-profit group that encourages the development of models for sustainable agriculture, and received $2,000 from its Harvest Fund. Students at all grade levels have been involved in planning the project and their future participation will be crucial to building a fence to keep deer out of the orchard, planting fruit-producing trees and shrubs, grafting apple trees and generally maintaining and operating the orchard as it becomes an integral part of the school’s horticulture program. Tom Tutor’s pre-calculus class used traditional methods to survey the piece of school property where the orchard would be located. An architect spent several days with students of all grade levels, discussing the layout of an orchard and encouraging students as they drew plans for an energy-efficient classroom dedicated to the horticulture program.
Ryan Grindle volunteered to excavate and stump the lot. Paul Hatch, Jr., and Paul Grindle hauled the stumps to Rodney Leach’s stump dump on Labor Day. Hatch said that he wanted to “get the work done before the kids got back.” The stumps will be inoculated with a fungus that will, it is hoped, produce edible mushrooms. Elan Rolerson, a recent school graduate, volunteered his time and effort to the project. Jack Leach brought a ten-foot wide steel gate to the island. David Friedrichs, a licensed Maine forester, taught students how to recognize the variety of tree species in the lot and how to judge the number of board feet of lumber that might be realized in harvesting the trees. A science class analyzed the soil. Steve Miller offered to clear the lot in return for whatever commercial value the logs might bring, an arrangement that he and Pincince agree probably benefited the orchard project more than the woodcutter.
Pincince’s goal is to create an ecologically sound orchard environment that utilizes plants that control – naturally – potentially harmful insects. He also hopes to plant disease-resistant American chestnuts by the school driveway. Standard-sized apples would be planted next to those, semi-dwarf apple trees next, and finally dwarf apple trees that Pincince hopes will fruit in 2005 if they are planted next May. This planting scheme allows trees of each size to take full advantage of southern exposure to the sun. John is particularly interested in restoring what he calls Islesboro’s “heirloom” apples that were eaten and used to make cider on the island in former years.
Linda Achorn’s grandfather, Lee McCarson, operated the ferry that brought the first automobile to the island. He also made cider that was enjoyed by many on the island, including his extended family, local sea captains and even ministers, it is told. Achorn’s cider was a staple at woodcutting bees. Many people enjoyed his cider, said Linda Achorn, and they enjoyed it even more when it became hard.
Contemporary historians seem to agree that the earliest apple orchards in North America were planted to grow apples to press for cider, because hard cider was a convenient and inexpensive source of alcohol and sometimes cider itself was safer to drink than water. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that apple growers began producing tasty eating apples, because temperance advocates threatened to cut down their orchards as a way of preventing people from making and drinking hard cider.
Barbara Elwell, Lee McCarson’s daughter and Linda Achorn’s aunt, agrees. She said that the apple trees on Islesboro are almost certainly descendants of orchards that the earliest settlers planted to produce cider. “Let’s face it, ” Barbara said, “it was hard cider.” She recalled that her father’s cider “looked like champagne.” Lee McCarson would retrieve empty liquor bottles that wealthy Dark Harbor people threw away and he would bottle his best cider in those. Ellwell’s mother did not appreciate her husband’s enterprise. “She was as straight as a laced shoe. But she was a lovely lady and as long as things didn’t get out of hand she would tolerate it.” She believes that she still has a bottle of her father’s cider though it is certainly undrinkable.
Linda said that her grandfather harvested apples from all over the island, “He basically stole them. No, he must have gotten permission to pick them.” He lined the base of the press with cheesecloth and cut the apples in half before he fed them to the press. The pulp was piled behind the shed and the deer would eat it. Barbara recalls that the deer would eat the pulp even after it became hard, creating a type of catnip for deer – “deernip”. Lee McCarson also made dandelion wine and maple syrup and kept honeybees. “When you live on an island,” said Barbara, “you have to learn how to do things for yourself.” She and her husband, George, still have Lee’s cider press, though they can’t find apples that haven’t been chemically treated so the press hasn’t been used in a long time.
Every October, Islesboro resident Tom King makes cider using an antique press. Tom blends island apples with sweeter apples that he buys on the mainland. Depending on rainfall, it takes at least four bushels of apples to make about the same number of gallons of cider. This year, Tom made 25 grafts on an apple tree in his front yard, eight of which were successful and which will yield sweeter apples than the ones he finds in the wild. He also makes cider wine that has a pretty amber color.
Trees that grow from apples that have fallen to the ground are not duplicates of the parent tree. John Pincince says that the only way to begin to regenerate Islesboro’s original orchards is to search for the island’s oldest apple trees and graft their branches to trees in the new orchard. If there was an Islesboro apple that was preferred for cider, that apple will have to be found and encouraged to proliferate. On one thing John, Linda, Barbara and Tom will certainly agree: horticulture is island culture.