Photography courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
Group of apple pickers on a wagon at Eckert's Apple Farm in Grafton, Illinois, 2 October 1970. 1970.10-8.1.3. Photograph by James M. Carrington, 1970. Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collection. NS 38616 (scan). Scan © 2008, Missouri History Museum.
In 1964, Eckert’s launched an experiment. The company planted 25,000 dwarf apple trees, then hitched up wagons and rumbled people into its orchards to pick their fruit: beauties but also small, knobby, hail-pocked apples, some blushing on just one side. “People will pick things off a tree and think they’re beautiful,” Vernon Eckert explained. Odd apples that didn’t stand a chance at the supermarket went home in the bags of people like this bunch, piled into a wagon in October 1970. Pickers saved a dollar or so on a bushel, but that’s not why people drove, and still drive, to Calhoun County—or why, by 1977, dozens of U-pick farms had popped up, offering not just apples but also peaches and pumpkins and hand-pressed cider. There’s a faint old memory, like the wee pip of an apple, that we chase. A memory that’s all sky and rolling hills and horses. A memory of a time when there were 17,000 varieties of apples, not 4,000, with such names as Gloria Mundi, Old Fred, and Hollow Log. A time before superstores stocked with pyramids of shiny red apples. A time when an apple could come from anywhere, look like anything, and we could call it beautiful.
