Horticulture slowly became accepted as a gentleman's pursuit. But it wasn't until the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery that the sudden availability of labor gave peaches the perfect opening. After the war, "fruit growing, which to the cotton planter was a secondary matter, [became] one of great solicitude to the farmer," Prosper Berckmans wrote in 1876. By the 1880s, Fruitland had grown so large and essential that it mailed 25,000 catalogs every year to horticulturists in the United States and abroad.
Freedmen now needed year-round employment, and the labor requirements of the peach season — tree trimming and harvest — fit perfectly with the time of year when cotton was slow. Though the story of the post-bellum South is often one of industrialization and urbanization, it was also a time of redefining what agriculture would mean without the enslaved labor plantation owners had relied on.
"Cotton had all these associations with poverty and slavery," says Okie, an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
The peach had none of that baggage.
While King Cotton was still an important part of the Southern economy, town councils began sponsoring peach festivals and spreading marketing materials that sung the praises of Georgia-bred peaches like the famous Elberta Peaches.
"Tellingly," Okie writes, "the only role mentioned for Black southerners in the great Georgia Peach Carnival was as members of the opening procession's 'Watermelon Brigade' " — about 100 African-Americans who marched with the racially laden fruit balanced on their heads.
Gentleman farmers saw fruit cultivation as something particularly refined and European, and a craze for all things "oriental" gave peaches an even greater allure. This cultured crop fit in with the narrative white Southerners were eager to tell about themselves after the Civil War. "Growing peaches for market required expertise that seemed unnecessary with corn and cotton, which any dirt farmer could grow," Okie writes. To succeed, peach farmers had to be able to access horticultural literature and the latest scientific findings. Both required literacy, as well as a certain level of education that was still out of reach for many newly freed men and women.