Fewer varieties of fruit, pulses and vegetables are marketed and thus consumed. Across Spain, hundreds of varieties that existed a century ago have dwindled to only a few dozen that are widely known. This trend mirrors agricultural and cultural impoverishment and echoes the loss of wild biodiversity. In the United States, one man managed to safeguard at least 1,200 apple variants tied to local heritage.
Tom Brown, a retired chemical engineer aged 81, lives in Clemmons, North Carolina. Through persistent, long-term effort and a detective-like mindset, he has preserved a rich agricultural legacy that was on the brink of disappearing.
Brown explains how he helped recover the Junaluska variety, once cultivated by the Cherokee in the Smoky Mountains and named after the tribe’s principal chief during its last era of use. It had long been a southern favorite, yet faded away in the early 1900s without leaving a trace.
Brown began the search in 2001 after finding references to Junaluska in an old catalog. His inquiries led him to an orchard site that likely supported these apple trees, abandoned in 1859. A chance lead from an elderly woman then directed him to the forested remnants where the orchard had long since collapsed into history.
Tom Brown, pictured with one of the restored apple trees, has become a symbol of local biodiversity recovery.
Tirelessly, Brown returned to the Appalachian region during the apple season and located a single Junaluska tree. He cut back shoots to transplant them to an orchard and thus reintroduced a lost variety that had vanished for generations.
Brown has spent a quarter of a century pursuing lost varieties or those highly threatened in his region. He has recovered 1,200 varieties and holds about 700 in his private garden. Many have not been sold commercially for a century or more, and many are known only from a handful of surviving trees that were cloned to preserve genetics.
There may still be thousands of species that are endangered
As Brown notes, there could be thousands of varieties still unknown to the general public. The race to save them is urgent, because many sources of clues about their whereabouts reside in the hands of people in their 80s and 90s. Each year, storms, pests, and infrastructure projects threaten these living archives.
Curiously, Brown initially did not know what a traditional apple looked like. In 1998 he encountered a display at a historic agricultural market that showcased those old varieties. A small counter held apples with unusual shapes and colors, arranged in baskets. The colors ranged from bright greens to striped yellows, pinks, and deep purples. Some fruits were the size of a plum, others close to a baseball. They carried names such as Bitter Buckingham, White Winter Jon, Arkansas Black, and Billy Sparks Sweetener. Tasting them revealed a spectrum of flavors and textures unlike anything found in modern produce.
Brown sampled apples like Jonathans with flesh tinted by rosé, Rusty Coats—a pear-like texture and honey sweetness, Mammoth Twenty Ounces with a crisp, tart finish, Semi-firm Etter’s Gold evoking peony and grape notes, and Grimes Golden offering a sweet profile with hints of nutmeg and white pepper.
During that era, Brown thought that finding an apple no one had tasted for half a century would be a remarkable mission. He pressed on, driven by the idea of uncovering long-forgotten treasures.
There existed a remarkable array of apples in early America. The Appalachian region housed a diverse collection, and a scholar notes that about 14,000 unique apple varieties were grown in U.S. commercial orchards around 1905. Much of this diversity remains within Appalachia’s heritage, where researchers and historians continue to document the lineage of these varieties.
Further reading and references on heritage Appalachian apples can be found in scholarly and popular writings that trace the loss and revival of these varieties.
Note: This narrative builds on work and reporting about heritage Appalachian apples and the broader effort to preserve agricultural diversity.