The Apple Orchard

At one time, the Elton Apple Orchard was New Hampshire's largest. It was in the town of Hampton Falls, a mile from our house in Seabrook. During apple season, we made frequent visits to Elton’s sales room to get apples and apple cider. One of my fondest memories of growing up is the smell of Mom's apple pies baking in the oven.

The orchard had a fascinating history. Its owner, Jim Elton, was a Mormon from Utah. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Mormon Church loaned him money to buy an existing farm in Hampton Falls and additional adjacent acreage for an apple orchard. Once the property was secured, the Mormons sent unemployed workers out by train from Salt Lake City to plant the trees and help build the storages, dormitories, garages, grading room, and other buildings. The laborers received a small salary, along with room and board.

Old-timers at the orchard liked to tell the story of how the apple trees were planted. After the surveyors staked out the location of the trees, teams of planters took over in an assembly line operation. The first man removed the surveyor’s stake and punched an eighteen-inch-deep hole in the ground using a steel pinch bar. The second man followed, stuffing a quarter-stick of dynamite into the hole, lighting the fuse, and moving on. After the blast, a two-man team shaped the hole with shovels and a pickaxe and tossed a handful of fertilizer into the hole. Finally, another two-man team planted the tree and backfilled the soil around its roots. For the first three years, until the trees began bearing fruit, Mr. Elton generated revenue by planting potatoes and other crops between the rows. Twenty-five years later, I came along.

A week after classes started at UNH in September 1958, I went looking for a part-time job. Since Elton’s orchard was close to home and harvest season was ramping up, I looked there first. Mr. Elton liked to hire college students when he could, but he was wary of athletes. In his experience, they were often unreliable and more likely to injure themselves or their fellow workers. When he asked whether I played football or any other sport, I assured him that I did not. I told him the hours I would be available, and he hired me.

My first job was on a tractor crew hauling apples in wooden boxes from the orchard to the cold storage. After loading a layer of boxes, we laid wooden sticks called "risers" across the ends of the boxes so that the next layer would not touch the apples in the layer below it. At the storage, we unloaded the boxes onto a roller track and rolled them inside. A crew of stackers inside stacked the boxes seven high, starting in the back of the storage. When the stacked boxes became eight feet deep, they started a second floor using risers and four-by-eight sheets of plywood. Thus, to stack a box on the second floor, a stacker took a box from the roller track, stepped up on a low stool, and raised the forty-pound box up to the stacker on the second floor. It was brutal work. The pay was $1.00/hour.   

During harvest season, we had only three or four local people picking apples. The majority of the pickers were from Florida. Elton had a contract with a broker named Monty who would send us a bus full of migrant workers up from the Indian River area. At the end of apple-picking season, Monty would take the workers north to pick potatoes in Maine. A husband-and-wife team also joined us every year. They were Mister Bill, who was the boss of the pickers, and Miss Hattie, the cook. They always addressed me as Mister Steve. I noticed that every once in a while, Mister Bill would take a small round can from his pocket, take a pinch of brown powder, and put it in his mouth. One time I asked him, “What is that, Mister Bill, is that cinnamon?” He gave me a big grin and said, “Yassa, Mister Steve.” I had heard about people using snuff, but I had never seen it done. It wasn't something we did in New England. Bill probably thought, “What a clueless white boy!”

Before we sold apples, they had to be graded. Mr. Elton employed women who excelled at this task. Since their pay depended on the number of cartons or wooden boxes they graded, they did not tolerate any delays or interruptions. In the cold storage, a man ensured a constant supply of apples on the track beside the grading stations, while another man in the grading room consistently assembled the cartons by unfolding the flats and stapling the bottoms.

There were six stations where the apples were graded using USDA grading standards. Each apple was examined and placed in the appropriate container. Three different sizes of U.S. Fancy apples were packed in special white cartons. The apples were carefully packed with each layer resting in a molded tray that kept the individual apples from touching one another. These were sold mostly to wholesalers in Boston. U.S. No.1 apples were put in wooden boxes and either returned to storage or sold directly to retailers. The same was true for the drops which had stem punctures or bruises, and cider apples which were not USDA graded. Finally, there rots which were taken to the Hampton Falls dump. The grading room was busy all year.

Even in cold storage, apples have a limited shelf life. In February, their quality began to decline, and by May they were useful mainly for cider. In the early 1950s, to extend the season, Mr. Elton built two state-of-the-art Controlled Atmosphere (CA) storages, where the apples were “put to sleep” by removing most of the oxygen and raising the carbon dioxide level to four percent. Over time, other orchards adopted the same technology. That is why the apples we buy in August or September may have been harvested the previous autumn. Half the apple crop went into CA storage and the other half into standard cold storage.

In March, before the trees bloomed, my job was to run a bush hog over windrows of limbs and branches that had been pruned from the apple trees. I would make several passes through the rows of brush, each time lowering the bush hog closer to the ground until there was nothing left but chips. No one wanted the job because chips and chunks of wood flew out in all directions, often hitting me in the back of the leg.

The tractor was a Cockshutt 750 diesel made in Canada. The bush hog had a six-foot blade driven by the power takeoff, with a hydraulic cylinder to raise and lower it. Occasionally, a big branch would stop the blade. When that happened, something had to give. Either the clutch disks on the blade would slip and burn up, or a bolt through a fixture on the drive shaft would shear. We hoped for the latter. If the bolt sheared, I would disengage the power takeoff, get off the tractor, remove whatever had stopped the blade, then align the fixture with the hole in the drive shaft, and install a new bolt. I kept a handful of bolts and nuts in my pocket.

Half the apple crop was sold to two wholesalers in Boston. Simon Silk was one, and the other was called something like “New England Produce.” Once or twice a week we loaded Elton’s ten-ton GMC van with 300 to 400 boxes of apples, and I drove fifty miles down to the Faneuil Hall Market. The load was usually split evenly between the two wholesalers. I had keys to both businesses. At Simon Silk’s, I opened the doors and set up roller tracks from the truck into the warehouse. The truck bed was higher than the warehouse floor, so the boxes would roll inside on their own. I could load about twenty boxes at a time on the track, then jump down and stack the boxes on the warehouse floor. Sometimes a cop would come along and tell me, “Hey, you can’t park on the sidewalk. Move your truck outa there.” The gift of a bag of fancy apples bought me time enough to finish unloading. After unloading Simon Silk’s order, I would lock up and perform the same ritual at New England Produce. Mr. Elton gave me five dollars to hire help to unload the truck, and two bags of fancy apples to buy off the cops. I only used the five dollars one time. The only place to find help at that hour was in a bar up the street, which meant I had to abandon the truck while I tried to round someone up.

Dennis Gillman was Mr. Elton’s sales manager and second in command. Gill and I became good friends. Mr. Elton had back surgery some years before, which caused him to drag his left foot slightly when he walked.  If you were in the sales room at the other end of the loading dock, you could hear him coming as he dragged that foot; sush-bump, sush-bump, sush-bump. Sometimes when I knew Gil was alone, I would worry him by imitating Mr. Elton’s sush-bump as I walked through the loading dock. One time I was in the sales room with Mr. Elton when we heard Gill approaching, doing the sush-bump imitation, hoping to worry me. Gill didn’t know Mr. Elton was with me. I was mortified. I tried to think of some way to warn Gill, but there was nothing I could do. When Gill finally entered the sales room and saw Mr. Elton, the blood drained from his face. I was as embarrassed as Gill, but Mr. Elton never let on that anything unusual was going on.     

I learned a lot working in the apple orchard. I learned that there were very few things I couldn’t do, but very few things that I could do well.  Jack of all trades, master of none.  I left Elton’s in January of 1960 and went to Florida to seek my fortune.