Historicizing Heritage

Growing up in 1970s California, I didn’t much care for apples. While my grandparents grew luscious plums, peaches, and figs, and citrus was literally everywhere, the apples we had were mostly the uniform, bland Red Delicious from the supermarket.

But I got into apples in a big way after reading Michael Pollen’s Botany of Desire and finding a range of different varieties at the Morgantown Farmers’ market: Winesaps, Grimes Goldens, Arkansas Blacks, etc. Apples are one of the few fruits that really grows well in this region. New ciderworks like Hawk Knob are trying to work with the local crop and are part of a socio-economic investment in microbreweries and distilleries in WV (the stereotypical association of “hillbillies” with moonshine haunts and sometimes animates this endeavor). Sadly, however, historic apple orchards are being lost. I read some time ago that one of Hawk Knob’s local providers couldn’t afford to keep the orchard going, and that the trees would be bulldozed to make way for a turkey farm. Although I had never been to the orchard, I felt sick at the news.

I recall, too, Beth Stephens (dir. Goodbye Gauley Mountain) showing pictures of fruiting yet neglected trees in a WV ghost town—where a mining company had abandoned the site and residents had to leave to find work elsewhere. The culture(ing) of apples here is intertwined with both immigrant heritage and extractive industries. It mobilizes desires for preservation, melancholy, anger, entrepreneurial endeavor, historical memory, and delight.