Growing up overseas as the child of missionaries, Amanda L. Van Lanen recalled hearing people in Saipan north of Guam speak nostalgically about the joy of biting into a crispy, juicy fresh apple, but she didn’t understand.
“Every apple I had was one of those Red Delicious apples that had been in storage way too long,” she said. “It’s a kind of apple that you bite into, and it feels like you’re eating wet cardboard.”
Then she visited her grandmother near Walla Walla, bit into an apple fresh from the orchard, and finally understood.
Thus began her fascination with the apple, which led the history professor at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, to write “The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture.” She shared the history of the apple in Washington State earlier this spring in a Humanities Washington online presentation called “Big Apples, Big Business: How Washington Became the Apple State.”
I wanted to know, so I tuned in.
In 2024, Washington exported $845 million worth of apples, making it the state’s third-largest export, with Mexico and Canada the largest trading partners. Washington, the largest producer of domestically eaten apples, grows nearly 70 percent of the nation’s apples, Van Lanen said, and 90 percent of its organic apples.
Despite Washington’s reputation for rain and greenery as the Evergreen State, the primary growing areas in North Central Washington and Yakima receive less than 10 inches of rain a year, she said.
Apples, which originated in Kazakhstan, were transported to Europe and then across the Atlantic Ocean to North America with early colonists who planted orchards to grow their favorite fruit. Families enjoyed the tasty varieties and fed less flavorful fruit to hogs. They made vinegar from apples and even hard cider.
After the Hudson’s Bay Co. established settlements in what became Washington, a British Royal Navy lieutenant, Aemilius Simpson, planted the first apple tree at Fort Vancouver in 1826 from seeds given to him in London — possibly by a woman sweet on him. The original tree in what today is known as the Old Apple Tree Park died in June 2020, but a new sapling is growing from the roots.
Fort Vancouver’s Chief Factor John McLaughlin decided to establish a farm and sent to the London Horticultural Society for seeds. He and his staff planted a huge garden with 25 varieties of grapes, apples, wheat, alfalfa, vegetables and other plants, Van Lanen said. He shared cuttings with early American missionaries who visited Fort Vancouver such as Jason Lee, Dr. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and Henry and Eliza Spalding.
“So, these cuttings from Fort Vancouver start to spread around the Northwest,” Van Lanen said.
In the spring of 1839, Hudson’s Bay established the 5,000-acre Cowlitz Farm near Toledo to cultivate crops through the Puget Sound Agricultural Co.
The Oregon Trail brought more pioneers to settle in the Willamette Valley and parts north, including Henderson Lewelling, a Quaker and nurseryman who crossed the trail in 1847 with his wife and eight children hauling two extra wagons filled with 700 fruit trees. Half survived the journey, and he sold those for $1 to $1.50 each. People were desperate for fruit, Van Lanen said.
In the early 1850s, Lewelling decided to sell apples to California miners searching for gold. He packed up two boxes of apples, wrapped them in iron straps to prevent people from stealing the fruit, and shipped them to Sacramento, where they sold for high prices.
“So this starts a bit of an apple rush, as those in Oregon who have apples to ship to California decide this is a good idea,” Van Lanen said.
But Henderson Lewelling moved to California, established Fruitvale, and planted orchards closer to the thriving market. Another Lewelling brother started grape production in the Napa Valley, and a third stayed in Oregon and developed the Bing cherry.
Today, Washington is the nation’s largest producer of apples, blueberries, hops, pears, spearmint oil and sweet cherries, according to the state Department of Commerce’s Choose Washington.
“So why Washington?” Van Lanen said. “Washington is not a logical place for a fruit industry to develop.”
Walla Walla produced apples in the 1860s to sell to miners in Idaho and growers in North Central Washington grew apples to supply mining booms in British Columbia. But, Van Lanen said, “these mining booms are pretty short-lived.”
“We’re far away from the major population centers in the United States. We don’t have a lot of big cities. It doesn’t make the most logical sense.”
In the 19th century, Van Lanen said, most Americans lived on farms, eating food grown within a hundred miles from home. It wasn’t until 1920 that more Americans lived in cities rather than the countryside.
“So there is consumer demand,” she said. “There are people to buy these apples if we can get the apples to them.”
A convergence of factors in the early 1900s shaped the course of the state’s future. Although extension of the railroad increased access to large metropolitan areas in the east, such as Chicago and New York, Washington remained a long distance from consumer bases. But railroad officials with the Northern Pacific and Great Northern seeking to maximize profit looked for economic activities along the lines. Van Lanen said the railroads helped finance irrigation projects in Eastern and Central Washington so farmers could produce thriving high-value crops to transport to other regions for sale.
“Refrigerated rail cars at this point are still pretty rudimentary,” she said. “So if we’re going to sell something to people in Chicago, it needs to be something that we can put on a rail car, and it will be okay for a week until it gets to those consumers and still be intact. That’s where apples come in, because you can ship apples with the technology of the time, get them to consumers, and they’re okay.”
In the 19th century, New York, which had grown apples commercially since before the Civil War, was the nation’s top apple producer.
“Irrigation costs money, transporting your apples across the continent costs money,” Van Lanen said. “A Washington apple would cost three times as much as an apple grown in New York. So how do you convince that consumer to pay three times as much money for an apple that is an apple?”
In the early 20th century, railroads offered land grants to middle-class Americans willing to grow apples to ship on their rails. They advertised opportunities to lure people to Washington to start orchards.
“People are told that they can’t lose, that this is just as easy as sitting on your porch and watching the money roll in,” Van Lanen said.
But it wasn’t easy. Farmers needed to irrigate and fight insects, fungus, and the coddling moth that led to wormy apples.
With pesticides in their infancy, people tried sour milk, whale oil, nicotine, and sulfur sprays to kill the coddling moth. “They can lay up to four broods a year and can wreak havoc on your crop,” Van Lanen said.
“Consumers back east might put up with a wormy apple, but if you’re going to get someone to pay three times as much for your apple, you better not have any worms in it,” Van Lanen said. “It better look perfect to be able to demand that higher price.”
Farmers relied on scientific expertise in agricultural colleges to develop pesticides to control insects, which set Washington apart from other apple-growing regions. Spraying lead arsenic killed the moth, but it was dangerous to humans, and wearing protective gear proved hot and uncomfortable.
“We really are kind of on the cutting edge of science as we’re developing orchards in this state,” Van Lanen said.
Washington shipped its first apples in 1904 and 1905, she said.
“From the time that Washington became a state in 1889, we had state laws that required people who had orchards to spray for insects, and if you didn’t spray for insects, the state would come out and do it for you,” Van Lanen said. “Because if you don’t spray, you’re endangering your neighbor’s crop.”
Britain had limits on arsenic in food, and in the mid-1920s, American apples in Britain contained more than 100 times the allowable amount of arsenic, creating international headlines. British authorities threatened to stop American apple imports. Washington exported 20 percent of its crop at the time. When the US Department of Agriculture threatened to impose limits, scientists at the Oregon and Washington agricultural colleges developed a solution — soak apples in mild hydrochloric acid followed by brush washers that cleaned off the arsenic. In the 1950s, they switched from arsenic to DDT but phased that out in the 1970s. Today, a different variety of chemicals and pheromone traps are used.
The Washington State Horticultural Department recommended picking four or five varieties to grow in the state rather than thousands, but growers planted all different kinds of apples. But then they needed to figure out what consumers wanted. They didn’t like multicolored apples; they wanted their apples red. So Red Delicious became popular in the 1950s. They grew the Ben Davis, which had a thick skin, making it good to ship, but it didn’t taste great.
Washington individually wrapped apples rather than packing them tightly into barrels for shipment as they did on the East Coast, following the advice of Cornell horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey. Washington apples arrived in pristine condition without bruises or worms, justifying their higher prices.
Advertising of Washington apples ramped up, using color illustrations and fewer words to persuade people in large cities to pay more for their product. The Northwest Fruit Exchange targeted consumers who then asked grocers to carry Washington apples. Using a Skookum Indian mascot created in 1916, the exchange advertised Washington apples in magazines, newspapers, and on apple boxes. Others focused on selling to wholesalers.
In the 1920s, Van Lanen said, “Washington becomes the primary apple-producing state in the nation because we really are targeting those urban consumers.”
At the time, Washington had more than 230 brands of apples. A survey in 1926 by Northern Pacific Railroad showed few people knew the brands, but 15 percent identified Skookum. Most simply bought red apples.
The International Apple Shippers Association organized and advertised National Apple Week the last week of October as an opportunity to celebrate the fruit. In 1927 in Yakima, the industry, still reeling from bad press over the arsenic scare, baked a one-ton apple pie in a 10-foot-diameter pan.
A cannery processed two tons of apples and precooked them for the pie.
“It took 400 pounds of sugar, and on the day of the event, girls from the local home economics class came out and helped roll out the crust for the cameras,” Van Lanen said. “At the end of the day, it was a success. The newsreels were there from all of the major news services.”
Although apples remain the state’s top crop, competition has changed.
“Apple growers in the 1920s were concerned about Americans eating more bananas or more oranges and other fruit being a competition,” she said. “Today, anything can really be a competition. You could pick a granola bar. You could pick a bag of chips. There’s all kinds of convenience foods.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
