Look up the history of the Porter apple in almost any source and you’ll find the
following information: “first grown by Rev. Samuel Porter, Sherburne,
Massachusetts, circa 1800.” Seems clear enough. Except there is no town in
Massachusetts named “Sherburne”; it’s actually Sherborn, located about 18 miles
southwest of Boston in southern Middlesex County.
Okay, you might say, that’s a minor quibble you could easily chalk up to the,
shall we say, flexible spelling habits of the 17 th century. Sherborn has almost always
been spelled that way, but I’ve also seen variations like “Sherborne,” “Sherburne,”
and even “Shearborn” on a few old land grants.
However, calling the 1800 date of origin circa (Latin: ‘around’, ‘about’)
stretches the limits of that term. My own research indicates that the Rev. Porter
died in 1758. (Go and have a look in the Sherborn Center Cemetery if you don’t
believe me.) The idea that Rev. Porter grew the apple in his garden and shared
cuttings from it 30-plus years after his demise strikes me as, well, improbable at
best.
So what’s up then? How could even the most trusted sources have gotten
these basic details so wrong? Well, here’s a dirty little truth: Writers on old apples
(myself included) shamelessly copy from one another. As do a lot of historians in
general.
It’s true that many old apple varieties have murky dates of origin. In some
cases we give the date that the tree first bore fruit and was recognized as a unique
and useful new apple. In other instances we cite the date of introduction: when the
apple hit the market, when it was exhibited at a horticultural society, or when its
description appeared in some nursery catalog. Then again, we might set the
approximate date of introduction by the first description of the apple in print. This
is the case with a whole slew of varieties described by the great American fruit
writer William Coxe in his 1817 work, A View to the Cultivation of Fruit
Trees—which is why so many old American apples are today simply listed as
“before 1817.”
In the case of Porter, the first description appears in William Kenrick’s book,
The New American Orchardist, first published in 1832. (Kenrick operated a fruit
tree nursery in Newton, MA, only a few miles from Sherborn.) That’s considerably
later than the “circa 1800” date of origin, and in fact Porter is only mentioned as
being a widely known apple on the Boston market and elsewhere around 1850. It
seems odd to me that in a time of intense interest in new and worthy apple
varieties, and the proximity of Sherborn to the important Boston market, that no
one would have paid much attention to the apple outside of its local area for so
long. Although Stilphen in The Apples of Maine points to Porter being introduced
to Penobscot County, Maine, by 1828.
However, as the old saying goes: “What does this mean for the price of beans
in Boston?” Perhaps nothing, but I am belaboring this apple’s history to make a
point: that we should take “received wisdom”—even from the most trusted
sources—with a large grain of salt. History is, at the end of the day, an inexact art,
and we should be willing to revise and update our facts as we discover new and
persuasive evidence, rather than just parroting the details from a Coxe, Downing,
Kenrick, Beach, or any other author, myself included. And believe me, spending
the time required to do a deep dive into every single old apple out there is beyond
my own time, ability, and finances. In other words, I am as guilty of unconsciously
repeating errors as anyone.
That said, I found my information on Porter in the tricentennial town
history of Sherborn, written by Anne Carr Shaughnessy and published in 1974.
I’ve found that town histories are one of the best sources for doublechecking facts
about local apple varieties, partly because 19 th -century histories often contain lots of
data on agriculture and local exports. This was certainly true of the research I
conducted in Weare, New Hampshire, when I was researching the history of the
Granite Beauty apple in the early 2000s.
Shaughnessy gives the date of origin for Porter as 1750, and says that when
one of Rev. Porter’s neighbors admired the apple and asked for cuttings from it,
Porter offered him the entire tree. Fortunately for the tree, the neighbor only took
scions from the tree to propagate.
An even more fascinating fact from Shaughnessy’s history concerns apple
growing and cider making in Sherborn more generally. She writes that by 1870
there were no fewer than 20 cider mills operating in the town, and that in 1892 one
mill (Holbrook Bros.) shipped 1,000 barrels of “refined cider” to Europe. The
Holbrook mill reportedly pressed over 1.25 million gallons of cider at its peak
production in the early 1890s, and it was billed as the largest cider mill in the
world, exporting “champagne” cider as far west as Nebraska and Texas and as far
east as England and Belgium. It also appears that, with that much production,
Sherborn was actually importing apples for pressing from southern orchards. Who
knew all this industry was going on in a small, rather nondescript rural
Massachusetts burg?
Porter was long valued on the Boston market as one of the best late summer/early
fall apples for canning and making pies, with early editions of The Fanny Farmer
Cookbook singling it out for those uses. The slices hold their shape well in baking
or preserving. However, Porter is also a decent apple for fresh eating. Which raises
the question, why is it not more popular today?
Well, for one thing, the fruit ripens gradually over a few weeks in September,
which is not ideal for large-scale market growers, who value a one-and-done
harvest. Second, the tender skin of the fruit bruises easily so it isn’t ideal for long-
distance shipping and handling. Third, like many heritage apples, Porter tends to
bear biennially, but in the “on” years it does set a reliably large crop. In fact, a
large old tree at my friend Roger Swain’s farm bears quite heavily, and we have
often added the apples to our early cider press schedule. Porter is an excellent
choice for the garden or home orchard, where its extended harvest period is
actually an advantage, not a liability. Think of it as the Rodney Dangerfield of
apples (“I don’t get no respect”). It deserves to be better known and more widely
grown.