Science  /  Dispatch

Meet the Peach That Traveled the Trail of Tears and the Tribal Elders Working to Save It

The “Indian peach” survived a genocide—but can it withstand climate change?

From China, peaches made their way to Europe, then to the Americas in the 1600s on Spanish ships—the beginning of a kind of crop exchange between the continents: potatoes and tomatoes from South and Central America went to Europe while peaches made their way to the Georgia coast, and quickly, into Indigenous diets

“Indigenous people were already caring for and managing forests and other kinds of tree foods,” said Jacob Holland-Lulewicz at Pennsylvania State University, who studies archaeology and ethnohistory. “That would have allowed them to adopt peaches super quickly and know really well how to create healthy peaches.”

Within a few decades, and with the help of a vast network of trade routes, peaches made their way across the continent, as far as the Southwest, where tribes like the Navajo sun-dried and stewed them. 

Around 1780, thousands of peach trees tended by the Seneca and Cayuga tribes along the Finger Lakes in western New York State were destroyed by President George Washington, in an attempt to ethnically cleanse Indigenous peoples from the region. Washington wrote in a letter to one of his generals that the goal was “to lay waste all the settlements.” He added, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.”

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act that led to the Trail of Tears—a death march that forced around 60,000 Indigenous people to leave their homes and move west, across the Mississippi River, to Oklahoma. 

Vernon Courtwright grew up eating Indian peaches. Now 75 years old, the Muscogee elder and veteran says his family brought Indian peach seeds and planted them when they were done walking The Trail. “That was the beginning of our life and the peaches’ life in Oklahoma,” he said. When he was a child, his grandmother, Emma Bruner, was the one who taught him about how to grow and tend to the fruit. “We grew up eating these peaches.”

Courtwright says in the 1970s, he began to see Indian peaches disappear. With each passing year, there was less on the landscape. “I just knew that our orchard had to be taken care of,” he said. When his grandparents passed, he took on the work of caring for the trees, and eventually, met John John Brown, who helped cultivate seeds and saplings to give out to other Muscogees.

“It’s our legacy,” said Courtwright. “It’s my family’s legacy to the tribe.”