It seems an enigma, perhaps a farfetched tale from the end of the frontier, but Johnny Appleseed did his magic in Fremont County in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Apples are the most popular invasive species in the United States. Apples were one of the first domesticated crops to thrive in the new world. People marvel at the incredible variety, distribution, size and fertility of the apple. There are no indigenous apples to the Americas, every single tree traces its ancestry to Europe or the Orient.
At the turn of the 20th century, Wyoming Governor Fenimore Chatterton was emphatic about the potential for apples to become a major crop in his young state. During the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis Chatterton said this, “It has recently been demonstrated that the Garden of Eden was not in Palestine but is still situated on the Shoshone Indian reservation in Wyoming and that the variety of apple with which Mother Eve was tempted is still grown on a ranch just outside the reserve.”
Chatterton was referring to an orchard planted by Ed Young in 1882 at the base of Red Canyon, the picturesque valley familiar to travelers for generations on South Pass.
Apples were big business in the United States in the 19th century. Their proliferation wasn’t from a desire for apple sauce or apple pies, and yes, apple juice was a popular drink in frontier America, but not the kind in those small boxes you put in a little kid’s lunch box.
Apple cider, the hard kind, the type that can exceed 20 or 30 proof was the reason John Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseed, originally planted trees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
It wasn’t until barley, hops and malt were grown in great quantities that beer took the front seat over cider in America’s quest for the perfect natural buzz.
Hard cider, better known as “Apple Jack” was popular in Fremont County as well, and Ed Young knew the recipe. Young sold hundreds of gallons of “jack” each year. It was the only way he could utilize his crop in a value-added way to pay for his operation.
In a hill near the orchard, Young carved out a hillside, put a timber-framed barn-style facade in front of the man-made cave and called it the “Dugout.” He stored bottles and kegs of Apple Jack inside the temperature-controlled cave. It was cool in summer, and never froze in winter.
Young worked dutifully to expand his orchard. By the turn of the century, he had over 2,000 established fruit bearing apple trees that were producing 60,000 pounds of apples each harvest. Ever the experimenter, Young eventually grew 38 different varieties of Apples.
In Wyoming, it was a common practice to name your town after some local commodity or unique feature, Laramie became the “Gem City of Plains,” Casper, the “Oil City,” Lovell, the “Rose City,” and Lander joined the ritual, beginning to refer to their town as the “Apple City.”
It wasn’t just Ed Young’s horticultural feats that led to the nickname.
On the opposite side of the mountain from Young’s orchard was another, older orchard planted by William Nichols on a homestead he established at the base of Sinks Canyon in 1873.
The location of both orchards are in canyons carved out of the rock by tributaries of the Popo Agie. The Little Popo Agie flowed near Young’s orchard and the Middle Rock cascades rapidly down Sinks Canyon flowing past the trees planted by Nichols.
It’s these canyon locations, with protection from Wyoming’s often violent wind and with ample water, that allowed these orchards to flourish.
A third apple pioneer started an orchard 45 miles east on Beaver Creek near the ghost town of Hailey. Eli Signor was an enterprising man, planting apples, pears, cherries and apricots on wide sagebrush flats in a draw along Beaver Creek. Signor won many state fairs with his apples, as did Young before him.
The trees planted by Signor have all succumbed to the harshness of the Wyoming winter and summer drought, but sizeable remnants of Young and Nichols’ work remain.
Here is an account of the orchards at Hailey from the October 11, 1911, edition of the Wind River Mountaineer in an original story first published in the Rawlins Times.
Some Wyoming Apples.
Eli Signor, who lives at Hailey, Wyoming, between Rawlins and Lander, this week sent Postmaster P. L. Smith four of the largest and best-looking apples we have ever seen. They were raised on his ranch at Hailey. Two of them are of the Alexander variety, the largest measuring 13 ½ inches in circumference and another 13 inches. The others are Greenings and are very little smaller than the Alexanders.
Mr. Signor is well known in Rawlins, having lived at Rongis for many years when the Lander stage went from this city. When he began ranching at Hailey, he determined that it was possible to raise fine fruit in this state said he now has a large orchard filled with apple, plum, pear and other fruit trees, and is making a big success. It will only be a few years until progressive farmers like Mr. Signor prove to the world that Wyoming is a farmer’s paradise.
Nichols opened 127 acres along the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie, eventually planting hundreds of apple, pear, and cherry trees.
Soon after statehood arrived in July of 1890, towns across Wyoming began lobbying for institutions that were forming with the new state government. Lander businessmen pushed hard for a state agricultural college to be built in the Apple City. The University of Wyoming, set in high, windy, isolated Laramie near the Colorado border was distant from most of the state and a second university made sense.
In 1892, Lander purchased Nichols’s farm in hopes that the college would be built at Sinks Canyon. Though the farm produced ample quantities of fruit, the state legislature never allocated the funds to build an agricultural college. By 1910, the farm had 1,775 apple trees.
They did see the benefit of this highly productive area as a test site and Lander donated the farm to the University of Wyoming as a field station in 1917.
The University of Wyoming operated the experimental farm under the direction of John Steinbrech for 26 years, until it closed in 1943.
Called the State Experimental Fruit Farm, the site eventually had almost 2,500 fruit trees bearing apples, crabapples, cherries, apricots, plums and peaches. The site was purchased by Central Wyoming College in 1973 and is now known as the CWC Field Station.
The original orchard has shrunk to only 15 acres, but still produces fruit.
Perhaps more important than the number of apples produced were the cultivars created by Young and at the Experimental Fruit Farm.
A cultivar is a plant produced through selective breeding. It’s not a hybrid, and not a genetically modified organism, but simply a plant that is bred with another plant for optimal characteristics. In the case of the apples on the Popo Agie drainage, those characteristics were winter hardiness, late-blooming, fast growth, drought, disease, and insect resistance.
The Experimental Fruit Farm developed many cultivars, including Poposia, Mart, Roberts, Sundance, Washakie, Brechsteinia, Margaret, Wyoming, and Fremont varieties.
While municipalities and the state experimented with the apples at Sinks Canyon, Ed Young remained an independent farmer a dozen miles away.
Young’s orchard grew quickly. Lander kept hammering the name “Apple City” with proclamations that the newly approaching railroad would lead the area to surpass the better-known orchards in Oregon and upstate New York.
It was a dream rooted in reality, but the savage reality is that the winters in Wyoming are much more unpredictable than their milder cousins in the Northwest and Great Lakes. Harvests too often depended on fickle weather patterns that can offer sunny spring days with temperatures in the 80’s followed 12 hours later by two feet of snow and a temperature drop of 70 degrees.
Several hundred of those original trees remain in the area, and dozens, perhaps hundreds more, have found their way to surrounding communities and onto farms and ranches throughout the area.
Wyoming State Journal September 21, 1923
Ed Young Creates New Apple From
Seedling Which Will Be Called the Young Apple
Much credit is due Ed Young for his splendid lineup of apples. Mr. Young worked for days getting his apples ready and showing them. He won several ribbons on plates and boxes and besides walked off with first for the best home orchard collection in the state.
A double-edged problem limited the economic growth of the apple industry in Fremont County. All crops require markets to make them profitable. With apples, the distance from the foothills of the Wind River Range to eastern markets was insurmountable when Nichols, Young and Signor first began their orchards. Hauling apples on horse-drawn wagons to distant Rawlins over the stage and freight route was cost-prohibitive. The limited profit was eaten up by the freighting costs.
Fremont County was not heavily populated and the local markets weren’t sufficient to support large-scale orchards. Added to that was the tendency for every farmer to plant fruit trees on their property.
An example of this was a story written by A.N. Holmberg on his property at 308 North Broadway in present-day Riverton.
The Magazine Edition of the Riverton Chronicle
February 12, 1926
Fruits and Flowers
A.N. Holmberg
This space contains about thirty-five apple trees, about ten different kinds, most of which are of the crab variety. I have found that the “Florence”, “Hyssop”, “Shields, “Whitney”, “Martha” and “Siberian” are all thrifty and seem to stand the climate here fine and nearly all of these have furnished enough fruit already, although the trees are young, to satisfy me that they will do their part with proper care. Have not put out many standard apples and the few I have are too young to bear, so will not venture a statement on them.
I have tried out about twenty-five different kinds of plums and at present have about twelve varieties which I think will make good, at least, have had samples of the fruit from that many. Some of these, such as the Opata, Sapa, Surprise, DeSota and about two other varieties, the names of which do not know, have been excellent bearers of fine fruit. The Compass cherry also has done fine here. Have set out Opata plums that matured fruit the same year as planted and the following year were loaded with fruit. This plum is also the first to ripen.
Red currants have been a sure crop, have picked 150 to 200 gallons from about forty bushes each year since they began bearing six years ago, and they have had no care whatever except watered regularly during the growing season.
Strawberries are one of the most popular small fruits and are very easily grown here. The everbearing variety, of which I have about two hundred plants, have furnished us with more than enough berries for our own use during the summer and fall and also, for canning purposes. They require very little care and will bear abundantly until heavy frosts. There is one thing that I have observed in raising strawberries and that is they require water frequently and at regular intervals.
I am of the opinion that we will see the time when we can grow several of the more hardy varieties of standard apples here in the Riverton valley just as easily as we now grow the crab apple and many varieties of plums and nearly everything in berries. The trouble here is that the farmer and the man with the home garden has not taken the interest along this line that he should. Trees require considerable care, just the same as anything else that you would plant and expect to be successful, only they require more patience on your part, as in most cases it takes years to get results. This not only applies to fruit trees but shade trees as well.
I do not mean to say that we can raise a sure crop of fruit here every year as we have the late and early frosts some years to contend with just the same as every locality not in the banana belt, however, I think that our chances for raising fruits here are good. A few years ago, we would not believe that we could raise as good corn here as they do in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, but each succeeding year we find ourselves a close contender.
The solution to reaching greater markets arrived with the Chicago Northwestern Railroad in 1906. The railroad was the double-edged sword for apple production. It allowed growers to sell their products to greater markets, but it also brought those greater markets to Lander, Riverton, and Shoshoni.
Refrigerated rail cars allowed produce from as far away as New York and Washington to reach Fremont County. The first sale of New York State apples came in 1908, just two years after the rail line was completed to Lander from Casper.
With Lander the terminus of the Chicago Northwestern Railroad, a shipment of apples from Oregon or Washington had to travel east on the Union Pacific to Chicago or to Minneapolis from Seattle, get transferred to the Chicago Northwestern then travel back west. But the shippers did it.
Meanwhile, Ed Young kept producing championship apples that repeatedly won at the state fair and in regional competitions. He just didn’t have the marketing, or consistency to battle with the corporate apple producers in states with climates better suited to growing apples free of frost and drought.
When the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad became a coast-to-coast line, stretching from Seattle to New Orleans in 1914 marked the end of local apple growers in Fremont County. Bonneville became a major shipping and passenger terminal on the line and it was just 50 miles from Lander.
Trucks replaced horse-driven freight wagons, and transportation of not just apples, but grain, sugar beets, corn, and livestock became much easier to haul to the nearest railhead.
The era of apple orchards in Fremont County came to end with the passing of Ed Young in 1930. Ed was 86 years old. Ed lost the orchard in his later years, unable to compete with out-of-state apples arriving on the railroad, and prevented from making “Apple Jack” by the provisions of the Volstead Act that created prohibition from 1918 to 1933.
In 1966, the late Henry Slingerland purchased the property. His wife Nan is beginning to move off the place. In 1993, Slingerland’s donated the land to the Nature Conservancy. It remains a productive orchard, with gardens growing produce for local markets. Ann and Karen Mott are frequent sellers at Lander Farmer’s Markets.
Views of the “Apple Valley” started by Ed Young and nurtured by Henry and Nan Slingerland. – h/t Randy Tucker 
