Stayman

As opposed to many other old American apples, there’s nothing confusing or

controversial about Stayman’s historical record. In fact, the only somewhat

confusing thing is its name, which originally was ‘Stayman’s Winesap’—and most

folks still call it that today. I’m not such a stickler for detail that I run around

correcting people (nobody wants to be that guy), but it is true this seedling from the

Winesap apple is its own unique variety, and not technically a strain of Winesap.

So lose the second part of the name and perhaps you’ll win a bar bet

someday—assuming of course you hang around in nerdy horticulture bars.

Dr. Joseph Stayman is the man who planted Winesap seeds at his home in

Leavenworth, Kansas, back in 1866. The variety that now bears his name bore its

first fruit in 1875, and by 1890 or so its fame had started to spread widely. In 1895

the Stark Bros. Nursery started selling it, which in the late 19 th century was the

ultimate call-up to the apple big leagues for many other old varieties, including the

now-reviled ‘Delicious’. And it’s a good thing, too, as there’s evidence that the

original Stayman tree was destroyed in a storm in 1899.

Stayman became an extremely popular apple in many parts of the US, but

especially the Middle Atlantic states, where many growers considered it even

superior to its progenitor Winesap. S.A. Beach in his Apples of New York praised

the apple, but didn’t consider the color and fruit size to be optimal when grown in

the North. Today, however, there are a few strains of Red Stayman available that

produce good, richly colored fruit even in our higher latitudes.

I first encountered Stayman while visiting my orchardist friend Roger Swain

in Greenfield, NH. In the late fall, after an especially large harvest, I happened to

notice a bushel of apples sitting regally in a unused bathtub in an especially cold

part of his stone house (aka, The Castle). They apparently hadn’t fit into the tightly

crammed walk-in cooler in his barn. And the Staymans looked very comfortable

hanging out there in the slightly above freezing temperatures, just waiting to be

eaten or used in the kitchen throughout the long New England winter.

Many years ago, I lived in the small hilltown of Nelson, New Hampshire

(population, then as now, around 600 souls, give or take). The place is full of lakes

and woods and ponds and even loons (both the avian and human kind). There’s an

old town common with the obligatory congregational church and a town hall

where folks have gathered to hold contradances almost every week since at least the

early 1930s. All in all, a bucolic and wonderful place to live.

One of the first things a newcomer to Nelson discovers is that a fair

percentage of the tiny population is comprised of Tolmans. Throw a pine cone in

any direction and you have a fair chance of hitting a Tolman. The early settler

Ebenezer Tolman moved here from Dorchester, Massachusetts, around 1780 (so

early that the town was still called “Packersfield”). And all of the Tolman

generations that have lived in Nelson since then are his descendants.

At the time I lived in the town I was a young man, fresh out of college, who

knew nothing about the equally rich history of the Tolman Sweet apple. It was only

much later, when I started making cider, that I discovered this useful old apple in

my research, and eventually in the flesh.

Most of the apples that have the word “sweet” or “sweeting” in their names

belong to the same general class of “sweets.” They’re called that because their

flavor lacks much of the acidity that characterizes almost all varieties that we think

of as elite “dessert” apples: It’s the balance of sweetness and acidity on the palate

that marks the best and most famous eating apples, from older classics such as

Esopus Spitzenburg to modern varieties like GoldRush and Zestar.

Back in the 1990s the great American cider revival was still in its very early

and experimental stages, and people were learning (or perhaps I should say “re-

learning”) which apples were best suited for blending and fermenting into high-

quality cider. The problem in those early years was that, if you fermented a cider

made from dessert apples fully to dryness, the sugars in the juice would provide

plenty of alcoholic strength, but leave most of the sharp acidity behind. Northeast

ciders, in particular, tended to be quite “zippy” on the palate: a cider maker I knew

from California once joked that my friend Steve’s cider would “take the enamel off

your teeth.”

This was also in the days before many American orchards had started

growing true European cider apples, especially the ones we call ‘bittersweets,”

which tend to have good sugars and quite a bit of tannin, but very little acid. So I

became interested in the American “sweets” as a potential way to buffer the acidity

of fresh-pressed apple juice and produce a more balanced and enjoyable fermented

cider.

The precise origins of Tolman Sweet are not known. The date of introduction is

usually given as 1822, but it’s certain that the variety was already well known and

being propagated in the late 18 th century. One source says that grafts were sent to

an Ohio nursery in 1796, and Stilphen reports the apple being planted in

Hallowell, Maine, around 1804. By 1870, he writes, the apple had become one of

that state’s leading varieties. However, after 1900 the “sweets” were becoming less

and less popular, to the point where today very few varieties of the class are still

being grown or used.

All accounts give the probable place of origin as Dorchester, Massachusetts,

which is now an urban neighborhood of Boston. This makes sense, since Thomas

Tolman (Ebenezer’s great-great grandfather) emigrated from England and settled

in Dorchester way back in 1635. Tolman Sweet is often considered a cross between

two even older apples, the Sweet Greening and the Old Russet. 

So far as I know, Edward J. Wickson is the only person to ever have both a pome fruit (the Wickson apple) and a stone fruit (the Wickson plum) named in his honor.

Wickson was a very influential agricultural journalist and agronomist who moved to California in 1875 and worked for many years as a professor at the University of California. This was the same year that the famous plant breeder

Luther Burbank also settled in California, and the two men became friends, with

Wickson eventually writing a book about Burbank’s work that helped establish his

reputation. Burbank renamed his ‘Perfection’ Japanese plum and dubbed it

‘Wickson’ in 1894.

But Wickson was also a close acquaintance of a more eccentric plant breeder named Albert Etter, who bought farmland with his family in Humboldt County and went about developing many new varieties, especially apples. It’s said that Etter initially planted an orchard of around 600 American and European apples and then started madly working on crossing and growing out new apple varieties in the early years of the 20th century. Reportedly he had something like 10,000 unique varieties at his farm.

I call Etter “eccentric” in the most loving way possible, because one major

focus of his work was creating pink- and red-fleshed apples by making wide crosses between domestic apple varieties and various species crabapples. Of these, the most famous is probably ‘Pink Pearl’. In the mid 1940s the California Nursery Company introduced several of Etter’s new apples, including Etter’s Gold, Jonwin, Pink Pearl, Alaska, Crimson Gold, and, yes, Wickson.

So much for the back story. Yet Wickson—as highly regarded as it is today—didn’t really find much of a following until the Great American Cider Revival started back in the 1980 and ‘90s. For one thing, the fruit is small, around two inches in diameter—smaller than “lunchbox” size (if anyone today still knows what a lunchbox is). This is due to its parentage. For some time, writers have considered Wickson a cross between two connoisseur apples Newtown Pippin (aka

Albemarle Pippin) and Esopus Spitzenburg. I used to believe that as well, but in recent years I’ve come to believe that its parents were more likely Newtown Pippin and Spitzenburg Crab, which is a variety of the Siberian crab, Malus baccata. 

With the renewed interest in cidermaking in North America, growers were looking for apples that would make a quality product. And Wickson, underappreciated for years, seemed ideal. For one thing, it’s packed full of sugar; even in cooler northern regions like New England it can reach up to 25 percent sugar content during a good season. Yet all that sugar is balanced with a lively, racy acidity that makes an incredibly bright, fruity cider, either as a single varietal or in a blend. And the fact that the fruit is smaller isn’t a problem for cider producers; if anything, it’s an asset, since small apples have a higher skin-to-flesh ratio—usually considered a plus when pressing cider. So what’s not to like?

Well, one can always nitpick, even with the best apples. For one thing, the

small size of Wickson makes it rather laborious to pick; I’ve heard a few pickers in New England grumble about the time involved in harvesting the large crop of

smallish apples off of the trees. I personally find the tiny Hewes (Virginia) Crab more of a pain to pick, but perhaps that’s because Hewes is usually harvested earlier than Wickson, when the weather is noticeably hotter and sweatier.

Another personal observation based on the apple’s size is that a bushel box of them weighs considerably more than the average 42 pounds, because the small

fruit packs so closely together in the box (see photo). I admit I haven’t actually

weighed a bushel of Wickson next to a bushel of larger apples, but the “scales” in my lower back and other muscles moving heavy boxes around during harvest season tells me that I’m correct.