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 placement 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. Some 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 occasionally hired college students, but he was cautious 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 involved working on a tractor crew transporting apples in wooden boxes from the orchard to cold storage. After loading a layer of boxes, we placed wooden sticks known as "risers" across the ends to prevent the next layer from touching the apples below. At the storage facility, we unloaded the boxes onto a roller track for them to be rolled inside. A team of stackers then arranged the boxes in stacks seven high, starting from the back of the storage. Once the stacks reached eight feet deep, they began a second level using risers and four-by-eight sheets of plywood. To stack a box on the second level, a stacker would take a box from the roller track, step onto a low stool, and lift the forty-pound box up to the stacker on the second level. It was grueling work, and the pay was $1.00 per 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 busload 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 dumbass white boy!”

Before we sold apples, they had to be graded. Mr. Elton employed local women who excelled at this task. Since their pay depended on the number of cartons or wooden boxes they graded, they didn't tolerate any delays or interruptions. A man in the cold storage ensured a constant supply of apples on the track beside the grading stations, while another man in the grading room continually assembled the shipping cartons.

There were six stations where apples were graded according to USDA standards. Each apple was inspected and placed in the appropriate container. Three different sizes of U.S. Fancy apples were packed in special white cartons. The apples were meticulously packed, with each layer resting on a molded tray to prevent the apples from touching each other. These were primarily sold to wholesalers in Boston. U.S. No.1 apples were placed in wooden boxes and either returned to storage or sold directly to retailers. The same applied to the drops, which had stem punctures or bruises, and cider apples, which were not graded by the USDA. Finally, the rots were taken to the Hampton Falls dump. The grading room was busy throughout the 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 a state-of-the-art Controlled Atmosphere (CA) storage, 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's 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 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 off 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.

Most of the apple crop was sold to wholesalers in Boston. Simon Silk was one, and the other was called something like “New England Produce.” Once or twice a week we loaded the ten-ton GMC van with 300 to 400 boxes of apples, which I drove fifty miles to the Faneuil Hall Market in Boston. 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 20 boxes at a time on the track, then jump down and stack them 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 performed the same ritual at New England Produce. By this time, it would be 9:00 PM, and I still had to drive back to New Hampshire.

  I learned a lot working in the apple orchard. I learned that there were very few things I couldn’t do, but even fewer 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.