Harrison

Ask the average person today what the city of Newark, New Jersey, is known for

and they would probably not say “the American cider industry.” Yet as early as the

1680s, not long after its settlement, Newark was already becoming famous for its

apple orchards and the exceptional quality of the cider made there.

In the early 1700s Samuel Harrison, a prominent citizen, identified what he

thought was a superior cider apple growing in his nursery near Orange Mountain.

It had grown from one of the sprouts he had obtained in 1712 from a Mr. Osborne

of South Orange, and once the variety caught on, it became the standard for

quality in cidermaking. The sweet, dark, and viscous juice from the apple ferments

into a strong cider, full of complex aromas and flavors and with a full, rounded

mouthfeel. In recent years, Virginia Tech and other universities have tested

Harrison juice and found it has one of the highest levels of phenolic compounds

(think astringency and soft tannins) of all American apples. This characteristic

contributes to Harrison cider’s famed complexity and wine-like structure.

In 1817, the early American pomologist William Coxe wrote glowingly

about Harrison in his landmark book, A View to the Cultivation of Fruit Trees:

“[I]t produces a high coloured, rich, and sweet cider of great strength,

commanding a high price in New York, frequently ten dollars and upwards per

barrel.” The most celebrated Newark cider was made by blending juice from

Harrison and Campfield (or Canfield) apples; in colonial New England Harrison

was often blended with the juice of the Graniwinkle variety. And this sort of

blending experimentation is still going on today: my friend Chuck Shelton at

Virginia’s Albemarle Ciderworks not only makes an excellent single-variety

Harrison cider, but has recently started blending Harrison with the juice of Yates, a

cider apple from the mountains of northern Georgia. This, I confess, is one of my

favorite blends, since friends of mine in New Hampshire grow both Harrison and

Yates.

The fortunes of Harrison declined, and revived, over the years in parallel

with the rise and fall of American cider. The 19 th -century urbanization of Newark

(and many other areas) and the loss of rural farms and orchards; the migration of

people to western lands after the Civil War; the arrival of immigrants from both

northern Europe (beer drinkers) and southern Europe (wine drinkers); and the

effects of the anti-alcohol Temperance movement (and, ultimately, Prohibition): all

of these factors combined to virtually eliminate cider consumption in the U.S.,

except on some isolated rural areas (cider refugias, one might say). Meanwhile,

since Harrison wasn’t a terrific apple for uses other than cider (eating or cooking),

by the early years of the 20 th century, this variety was well on its way to oblivion.

Fortunately, though, “apple time” does not always track with “human time.”

A standard-sized apple tree in some forgotten orchard can live on without our help

once it’s established, and might live another hundred years after it has been

abandoned, maybe longer. This is what ultimately saved the Harrison: the

longevity of the old trees and the sheer persistence of fruit explorers who set out in

search of an apple that almost everyone else considered extinct.

In 1976 a Vermont orchardist named Paul Gidez traveled down to Essex

County, New Jersey, to see if he could find any old Harrison trees. Near the Nettie

Ochs Cider Mill in Livingston he did locate a large tree and took cuttings to

propagate it in his New England orchard. A similar story played out in 1989 when

the Virginia orchardist and historian Tom Burford found another Harrison tree on

an estate in Paramus. The moment he first bit into the fruit Tom said he had to sit

down, as he at long last was able to enjoy the taste of “the most enigmatic apple

I’ve ever dealt with.”

From that moment until his death in 2020, Tom became an evangelist for

Harrison and he shared cuttings with growers all over the U.S., singing its praises

just as Coxe had done almost 200 years earlier. Diane Flynt at Foggy Ridge Cider

in southwest Virginia was an early adopter, as were the Sheltons at Vintage

Virginia Apples. Today Harrison is grown in orchards from coast to coast, and it

has regained much of its reputation as one of American premier cider apples.