Is there a fruit more closely entwined with American culture than the apple? Soldiers in World War II told reporters they were fighting for two reasons: their mothers and apple pie. During a lecture in 1858, transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described the apple as “our national fruit.” Recall the tale of pioneer nurseryman John Chapman, son of a Revolutionary War minuteman, who voyaged down the Ohio River with a boatload of apple seeds, planting orchards throughout the early American frontier (a feat that earned him his storied nickname, Johnny Appleseed). Recall that very war, during which hard cider was consumed by the barrelful, because in the 1770s the average colonist knocked back more than 30 gallons of fermented apple juice every year.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the quintessential American fruit was also an immigrant. The ancestry of the large, edible apple traces back thousands of years to somewhere near present-day Kazakhstan. From there human growers carried these wild, distant relatives across the Caspian Sea, spreading them into Europe. From Europe, they were carried to the New World. The only apple indigenous to this continent is a cousin, the crabapple, Lilliputian in size and extraordinarily sour due to the presence of excess malic acid—the same compound which, in normal amounts, gives apples their sweet-tart taste. Wild apples, crabapples, and supermarket varieties are all members of the Malus genus; the ones available in grocery stores, as well as the heritage apples of old, are all varieties of Malus domestica.
American propagation of apples began as early as the 1600s along the eastern seaboard, but the apple’s golden age really started during the Civil War. With the 1862 passage of the first of several Homestead Acts, millions of Americans flocked west of the Mississippi River to stake claims to newly opened public land. There they put down roots, literally, usually by planting immature trees rather than sowing seeds. Such is the idiosyncrasy of the apple, which possesses the frustrating creativity of an unsupervised toddler with a box of crayons and a blank living-room wall.