Deane

In October 2005 I went to Tory Hill in Franklin County, Maine to visit the Rothschild family with the goal of identifying four old trees in their orchard of Baldwins and Wealthy. I identified them as Deane, an old Maine variety introduced by Cyrus Deane in Temple not far from Tory Hill about 1858. Recent DNA profiling has thrown that into question. The tree grafted from the Tory Hill trees at the Maine Heritage Orchard DNA profiled as Milwaukee, an apple with no record of having been grown historically in Maine. Could Milwaukee have been grown here with no record of it having been so? Could the Deane apple have been taken as scionwood to Wisconsin by folks going to harvest timber in the mid-nineteenth century? It’s one of the mysteries we’re attempting to solve—one we may never solve.

The apple we’ve been growing as Deane, is all-purpose, large, striped and blushed red, juicy and subacid. The flesh is white, fine textured with the consistency of McIntosh but none of the scab. It cooks up pretty quickly into orange-apricot colored, coarse, slightly loose sauce. It ripens on about October 7 and keep for a month. (For more information, see Art of Detection, chapter 19.) Currently growing at Super Chilly Farm.

Fall. Unknown parentage. Cyrus Deane farm, Temple, ME, late 19th c. Also called Nine Ounce. A Maine all-purpose variety once popular from Orono to Bath, now all but vanished. The medium roundish oblate fruits even weighed 9 ounces apiece. Looks a bit like a cross between Northern Spy and Duchess. Maybe it is? Light yellow skin mostly covered with red blush and short “Spy”-pink stripes. Slightly lobed. Fine-grained white tender juicy subacid fruit. Melting with the consistency of a Mac but no scab. Our scionwood came originally from Michael Rothchild’s orchard in Phillips, just nine miles from Temple.