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If you ever wondered about the origin of the famous McIntosh apples, you are at the right place.
John McIntosh spent the spring of 1811 clearing land for the future town of Dundela in the woodlands of northeastern Ontario. He was unaware of his future importance at the moment.
McIntosh fled the cultivated Mohawk Valley for this hard area in 1796 to avoid his family's condemnation for committing the unforgivable sin of falling in love with an unsuitable bride.
Originally from Ireland, he relocated to a block of land near Iroquois on the St. Lawrence River and married Hannah Doran, the brother of the man with whom he had negotiated the purchase of the land.
When he purchased this "farm," just a quarter of an acre had been cleared, and now even that space was covered with young trees that towered far above his head.
However, he continued to uncover, among them, healthy, young seedlings that were unlike the rest. John McIntosh was astounded to see apple trees in the Canadian wilderness. The guy showed compassion and rescued them.
Soon later, he transplanted perhaps a dozen seedlings into his garden. By the next year, every one of them had died away. It eventually grew due to his attention. It produced red, spherical, and acidic fruit, which he sampled.
The McIntosh apple is currently planted in orchards across the world, with Canada and the northeastern United States producing the most. Every single tree, and by extension every single.
McIntosh apple that has ever been eaten, cooked into a pie, processed into juice, or used to produce cider, is a direct descendant of a single seedling that valiantly clung to life in the Canadian woods. John McIntosh found the lone specimen of its kind. No one has ever been able to explain how it came to be at that location.
Apples are mostly mysterious because of their capacity to reproduce without human assistance. Apple trees are not "self-fruitful," hence the seeds within an apple will not produce further apple trees.
Grafting a certain kind onto another tree's trunk is one of the few methods for preserving it. The orphan apple found by McIntosh in the bush on that day was a naturally cross-pollinated offspring with unknown ancestry; it presumably sprang from the seeds of an apple core that had been thrown by a passing.
Many individuals think that the Fameuse apple, sometimes known as the Snow apple in English Canada, is the Snow apple's parent. This is based on the Fameuse's common characteristics and its extensive renown in Quebec prior to 1811.
It makes sense that Quebecers traversing the woods near Matilda Township, 95 kilometres west of their border, would be carrying Fameuse apples, as there were no apples (other than crab) in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans, and apples had travelled west with settlers by the 17th century.
W.H. Upshall of the Vineland, Ontario Horticultural Experiment Station reported in 1970 that attempts to utilise the Fameuse as a progenitor had been fruitless. He suggested utilising the Fall St. Lawrence and the Alexander instead.
Others, such as 1994 Apples author Roger Yepsen, disagree, characterising the McIntosh as "a talented combination of Fameuse and Detroit Red." The Canadian Apple Growers' Guide from 1938 refers to the Mac merely as "of Fameuse sort," therefore identifying it as a hybrid.
Thus, the McIntosh mystery, which has thus far been investigated only via conjecture, endures.John McIntosh was likely just concerned with propagating his great new apple tree, regardless of whence it originated. However, new seed varieties continued to emerge from his experiments. If his last tree were down, he would be obliterated from history forever.
Olive McIntosh, the widow of John's great-grandson, resides in Morrisburg, Ontario, a little more than a century and a half after leaving the Dundela farm. She extracts a wooden casket holding irreplaceable family treasures, the most important of which is a portion of the original McIntosh tree.
She places it on the kitchen table and explains how John was able to handle the problem of reproduction: "About 1835, a travelling hired man happened to pass through, and he taught John and his son Allan how to graft. Thus, the McIntosh was successful.
Olive, whose descendants continue to carry on the McIntosh name in the area, often recalls Allan. It is obvious why. In addition to being a fascinating person, Steve deserves much credit for making the Mac what it is today.
In the late 1830s, he replaced his mother Hannah as head of the family nursery and orchard; she had been the apple guru of her day (in fact, the first Macs were named "Grannys" to honour her).
Soon, he had bushels upon bushels of apples that were known as McIntosh Reds due to his dedication to grafting. Bearded and resourceful, he also used fungicides (the Mac was susceptible to scabs), cedar troughs to drain the orchard, and cross-pollination.
It seems that he sold and even donated trees across eastern Ontario and the northern United States, even to his McIntosh relatives in Vermont, from whom he purchased apples.
He was well-known in the Matilda area as a physician and itinerant preacher. His heated, handwritten sermons include family treasures. One can readily see Allan yelling some of the warnings about "Satan and his horrible minions" in front of rather terrified listeners as one turns the pages.
Despite the efforts of Allan and his brother Sandy, it took a long time for the McIntosh Red to achieve popularity. In actuality, it was not "introduced" and named until 1870, over a quarter century after John's death; it made its first appearance in literature six years later (in Fruits and Fruit Trees of America); and it began selling in really large numbers around 1900.
Despite the fact that the Mac's resilience, appearance, and flavour made it a contender from the beginning, its enormous economic potential did not become a reality until improvements in the quality and availability of sprays at the turn of the century addressed its scabbing problem.
At that period, changes had already started to occur in Dundela. The 1894 home fire that destroyed the family's property badly damaged the original tree. Nearly a century after it was discovered in the woods, and despite Allan's best efforts to nurse it back to health, the tree produced its last crop in 1908 and fell over two years later. Allan died in 1899 and Sandy in 1906, so their grandson Harvey (1863-1940) oversaw the family apple business when it became internationally recognised.
This kind of apple accounted for more than half of Canada's yearly apple output of 17 million bushels at the close of the twentieth century. Ontario is the biggest producer with 130,000 metric tonnes, although adjacent provinces such as Quebec, Nova Scotia, and British Columbia are also extremely successful (where it was introduced in 1910).
It is so popular in the United States that a personal computer is named after it. It is third only to the two Delicious varieties.It is difficult to imagine a more distinctly Canadian food crop than the McDonald's. In the little village of Dundela, however, where the original McIntosh apple tree was planted, the tree is now only remembered symbolically.
You can see it for yourself if you go 45 minutes south-east from Ottawa or 10 minutes north off Route 401 and onto County Road 18. But if you lose focus for for a moment, it will be gone.
The orchard has long since disappeared from the McIntosh property, which now consists of a few decaying homes and a few abandoned structures.
Falsely stating that John McIntosh found the seedling in 1796, the Ontario Archaeological and Historic Sites Board has put a sign just off the road next to a monument from 1912 that incorrectly provides this information. The latter notifies anybody who happens to be there that the original tree stood "20 rods" (about 100 metres) to the north.
You can observe how we treat our national treasures if you round the property and enter the backyard. Even if the locals will tell you to investigate, you shouldn't since after you pass the knee-high grass, you're on private land.
The owner, who professes to be irritated with visitors but is happy to provide tours if asked, lives in Ottawa, almost 80 kilometres distant. If you pass through the huge breach in the rusty fence, you'll be searching for a golf ball or a needle in a field of tall grass.
There it is at last: a little stone marker concealed nearly totally by overgrown foliage behind a dilapidated barn. From 1811 through 1906, the original McIntosh apple tree stood here.
Since the mid-1800s, Sandra Beckstead's family has grown and sold Macs by the tonne at Smyth's Apple Orchards, just a minute's drive east on the county road. Sam Smyth was Allan McIntosh's neighbour and buddy.
The tree in their front yard was grafted from the original McIntosh. She is an easygoing champion of apples and apple consumption, as well as a cheery and pleasant person. Only when we bring up the state of the McIntosh property does her disposition deteriorate.
She continues, "They have signs on the 401 for the marina and the golf course, but nothing for something that is a part of our history, something we should all be aware of and proud of."
She is devoted to rectifying this injustice. Her store serves as a history lesson because to the abundance of information on the walls and the presence of life-size dolls of John and Allan McIntosh; also, she invites local schoolchildren to her orchard annually. Many other well-known apple types, including as the Cortland, Lobo, Joyce, Melba, Macoun, and Early Mac, are named as descendants of the Mac to further emphasise the importance of the Mac and its heritage.
In the summer of 1996, many other, louder voices joined Sandra's. Since provincial funding has dried up, the township lacks the funds to acquire the land, and the county's roadsign campaign has been derailed (or at least delayed) due to bureaucratic changes, the Ottawa Citizen published an editorial lamenting the political evasion and apathy that has rendered this potential symbol invisible among weeds.
In the same month, the Toronto Star ran a front-page feature titled "Rotting to the Core" and including a photograph of Olive's son Harvey in the same place. In 1996, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of John McIntosh's arrival in Canada, rather than the year he found the tree, the Canadian government released a silver dollar portraying the Mac.
Despite its humble origins as a solitary seedling in a northern bush, the story of how it went on to produce millions of apples and became a worldwide sensation is both romantic and captivating. Nevertheless, despite the Canadians' apparent fondness for national symbols, this one has been abandoned by the side of the road.
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