Canada’s orchard king, Francis Peabody Sharp.
Growing up in Northern New Brunswick I was surrounded by old abandoned apple orchards once faithfully tended by long gone pioneers. Year after year they silently endure winter ice storms, desperate droughts and the annual attention of black bears. Despite all these forces the trees continue to bear a wonderful variety of apples perfectly crafted for the climate. Many are over 100 years old and trace their lineage to a little known apple grower right here in Carleton County.
Francis Peabody Sharp was a man born in the right place at the right time. Largely unknown today, Sharp was responsible for the creation of countless fruit varieties along with the foundation of commercial apple growing in New Brunswick. From his birth 1823 in Woodstock, New Brunswick to his death in 1903 Sharp was devoted to the apple.
The remains of Sharp’s orchard in New Brunswick.
His interest in apple quality and production began while working in his father’s general store. Apple orchards were common in New Brunswick but most were only for kitchen garden use and no one was doing experimentation on improving quality. A keen reader and naturally curious with a scientific mind, he searched for everything he could find on fruit improvement. Sharp gathered books and subscribed to horticultural periodicals in North America and Europe. He educated himself on the principals of genetic improvement, methods of controlled cultivation and went one step better by his own experimentation.
Sharp was determined to create an apple able to produce and thrive in the climate peculiar to his region. This idea is worth examination. Today we are planting fruits developed in labs far from our orchards. Sharp was far seeing when he realized the only way to develop an apple that could be prosperous in New Brunswick was to do the experimentation in New Brunswick. Rather than accept that apples, pears or peaches couldn’t be grown he showed that hybridizing fruit could result in strains for specific areas even down to particular counties. For those who would like to see more food grown closer to home it would pay to re-examine this idea and look to older heirloom stock.
Beginning in the early 1840`s, Sharp experimented and employed techniques he read or heard about. Sharp kept careful notes of all the results in books each step. At the time most of the scientific community’s attention was towards improving pears and peaches. But Sharp took what methods he felt might work in the apple orchard and experimented. His early work was with apple trees he found in the local area or seeds from outside New Brunswick.
The methods he used for hybridization and crossing were part his own discoveries and part what he learned from research. After reading about apples grown in the Kazakhstan region of Russia he acquired seeds from a similar hardy Russian strain. Over time Sharp managed to grow a tree that produced good eating fruit. Pleased with the results he grafted it repeatedly to already established rootstock and by using controlled hand pollination methods a good producing apple resulted. Named the New Brunswicker it became the foundation for hundreds of experiments in propagation by Sharp.
The grafting tools Sharp used to develop new varieties.
With the success of the New Brunswicker, Sharp worked on developing other apple varieties. Most have long forgotten names like Crimson Beauty, Dudley or Peabody Greening. Many were developed for a particular desired quality. Some stored well, others were pie apples, made good cider or ripened extra early. Additional land was purchased or rented as more varieties of apples were developed.
Sharp planted orchards with multiple varieties a far cry from today’s commercial operations. Apples were his consuming passion but he also experimented with other fruits such as peaches, pears and plums planning thousands of them. By using his methods of propagation he was able to disprove the conventional belief that fruit of any kind could not be grown in New Brunswick and the resulting hardy stock was shipped across North America.
Besides apples that would thrive in the cool climates of the Maritimes, Sharp also devised planting schemes and worked out the correct spacing for maximum fruit tree production. He was able to encourage the specific qualities and true to form results by using careful meticulous hand pollination. Many of his controlled pollination experiments yielded the results he wanted quality fruit and good production being paramount.
Sharp trained his fruit trees to have low hanging limbs and his neighbours marvelled at the amount of fruit a person could pick just by walking around the tree. This of course is now commonly used by commercial orchards.
By the 1880’s the orchards were shipping train car loads of apples, pears and plums across Canada and down into the States as far as New York. Some of the figures are almost too fantastic to believe but as many as 15,000 barrels of apples were sold yearly and this doesn’t include the other fruit trees. Sharp created hundreds of jobs in the nursery, the orchards and all the spin off industries such as barrel making. Along with eating fruit the orchards also produced cider apples. Sharp constructed a cider press that was capable of pressing 30 barrels of apples at a time and shipped countless gallons of both cider and cider vinegar. The orchards boasted tree counts in the hundreds of thousands containing his many creations.
It would be nice to say the fruit kingdom Sharp creating in his beloved Carleton County is still there but fate and bad luck had other plans. Fire destroyed much of his processing equipment, buildings, nursery and even his home in 1892. All the carefully hand written records Sharp had saved, his tree by tree accounts of developing strains along with all the additional volumes he had collected on raising fruit trees was lost.
Then his American customers to the south suddenly put a crushing tariff on imported fruit. The American markets were a major part of his income and even after the tariff was lowered it hurt the bottom line. Almost 70 years old Sharp was exhausted and heavily in debt. More problems contributed to the difficulties and the pressures of trying to replace many of the older orchards that were run out proved impossible. After his death in 1903 family members attempted to keep the orchards producing but without Sharp at the rudder it was a lost cause. Like so many great minds Sharp kept much of his knowledge to himself sharing very little to keep competitors in the dark. Sadly all his orchards were sold off and today little exists of this incredible man’s work, his records or even his image.
Spring blossoms on apple trees grown by Sharp.
In today’s world it’s difficult to appreciate the importance our forebears placed on apples that would keep in cool root cellars, process into canning jars or even air dry hanging in the kitchen. But with renewed interest in heirloom or heritage fruit the appeal of old apple varieties is growing. Many old country acreages have heirloom trees that fill the spring air with blossoms and scatter their sweet fruit upon the autumn ground. Perhaps it’s time for you to raise a few New Brunswicker, Yellow Transparent or Crimson Beauties in your home orchard. Francis Peabody Sharp would be pleased.
Apples followed settlement: French colonists, Loyalists introduced stock
As early European settlements began to dot the Atlantic Seaboard the new arrivals brought with them apple seeds to supply fruit and more importantly cider.
Here in what became Canada the French colonists planted orchards very early on with records all the way back to the mid 1600`s mentioning apples being grown in Acadia. Hardy stock such as the Fameuse or pomme de neige are descendants from those first bold attempts. In New Brunswick Loyalists in the 1780`s brought apple stock from New England and many of these trees were still producing apples about the time Sharp began his experiments. Although very old these trees provided the roots for the thousands of grafts Sharp made during his early career.
- Cary Rideout