HISTORY OF RED APPLE FARM
Volume I
In the beginning, about 1740, Red Apple Farm was probably a subsistence farm with cows, horses, and chickens. But the main farm income came from raising grain crops like wheat, oats, and corn. Some of the grain was probably sold and the rest used for animal feed. The income also came from the straw from the grain crops that was sold to local wood shops that made buckets and containers. These wood factories used the straw as packing material for shipping their products during the Western expansion of the thirteen colonies.
Some apple trees were always planted on early New England farms for winter food. The making of apple vinegar was important for medicinal purposes and so was the preserving of fruits and vegetables. Another important use of apples was for making hard apple cider. Alcoholic cider was a normal beverage in England and New England in the 1700s and 1800s. Some hard cider, I was told was used as payment for farm wages.
My mother, Carolyn Rose said the small house addition off the back of the big house was built in 1730, soon after the land was purchased by the Richardson family. About 1750-1760 the main colonial house was built of post-an-beam with five fire places all connected to a central chimney. The main kitchen or cooking room, now a dining room, was the central focus of the family. The large fireplace had iron bars to hold cooking pots that could swing in or out of the fire. A Dutch oven for baking was in the brick fireplace. A door from the same room lead to the outdoor outhouse.
One day I found a large Portuguese brass coin that fell out of the central brick fireplace. I read that early people put coins in between the bricks so as to say “there is money in the house”.
The first McIntosh apple orchard for commercial sales was planted in 1912. The trees were standard or large size and planted on a spacing of 40’x40’. Mr. Warren Tyler was the owner who lived in the town of Athol. He worked at the Athol Savings Bank. Eventually becoming president. He planted other older varieties of apples such as; Northern Spy, Gravenstein, Baldwin, Blue Pearmain, and Winter Banana. He also planted Peaches in the Hollow area. The fruit was mostly sold in Athol from an old pickup truck with open sides and a wooden roof. The truck had the name of Red Apple Farm painted on the door.
The truck was stored in the barn and came with the farm when Harry and Cora Rose purchased it for their son, Spaulding and his wife Carolyn in the summer of 1929. My Dad, Spaulding and Mother Carolyn had just graduated from college. My father had majored in the study of apples, called Pomology. Both my parents were about 23 years old. Harry Rose had met Warren Tyler at the bank as he was a broker selling stocks and bonds to banks. And that’s when Harry found out Red Apple Farm was for sale.
In the summer of 1929 Spaulding and Carolyn visited the abandoned farm house and decided they wanted to become young farm pioneers. My mother fell in love with the old colonial house and its large country kitchen fireplace. She saw many possibilities.
The house had no electricity, only a hand pump from a surface well for water, and a cool outhouse out the back door. Frist new repairs for the house, were the roof that needed some shingles and some new windows for the house. Homeless people had been camping in the house as seen by the axe marks cut into the floor to keep the fire going in a fireplace. All the parents and relatives loved to come to the new family farm on weekends to help in projects and have a great picnic.
The next year rural electricity came to the town of Phillipston and down the dirt road to the farm. The dirt road was originally called Royalston Road, but since there were two Royalston Roads, Spaulding suggested in a town meeting to change the farm road to Highland Ave.
With electricity an artesian well was dug. The bathrooms were installed in the house. Plumbing and electric wiring was completed just like in the big city of Worcester where my folks came from.
The apple trees Mr. Tyler had planted were located in the Home Orchard, Spy Orchard, North Lot {mostly McIntosh trees}, South Lot {Mcintosh block or Mac Lot}. The Mac Lot of big trees was finally cut down about 1993 and I replaced it with all semi-dwarf trees of different varieties. Therefore, these big trees produced apples for about 80 years.
When Spaulding and Carolyn came to the farm in 1929 there was probably 20 acres of apples in production to start selling for some farm income. Soon my Dad started planting more trees. He cut some Birch trees down and that area became known as Birch Hill Orchard. He planted the one-quarter acre that he named Devils Quarter Acre due to all the big boulders.
A note on rocks and the New England land, Red Apple Farm is typical of New England farms with plenty of granite rocks and surrounded by stone walls. Red Apple Farm has very rich organic matter soil between the few rocks in the orchard. For almost a hundred years the abundant hay or grass had been cut two or three times a year and left to decompose back into the soil.
I can imagine that between 1750-1850 young farm boys would venture to the tall grass prairies of the mid-west. They returned to their New England farms and told their parents that one can plow a field all day without hitting a stone. That’s why many New England farms were sold or abandoned. That is why Red Apple Farm had many owners before 1929.