For the last couple of weeks, whenever I could find time, I have been harvesting apples. Sometimes I am imagining that I am living in 1910, and apples are still the biggest thing around as a money crop for rural people in Benton County.

My dad was born in 1914, during the time when apples were still a major, major crop around Pea Ridge.

Dad’s family had tried to establish an apple orchard on their farm between Garfield and the Elkhorn Tavern in the 1920s, but they weren’t very successful with it. So, Granddad Scott Nichols decided to buy a different farm, north of Pea Ridge, abandoning the apple orchard business and getting into growing corn and hay and feeding hogs and cattle. He did pretty well farming that way in the 1930s and 1940s.

Even in the 1940s when I was a boy, one could still find many apple orchards and peach orchards around Benton and Washington counties. Many of my ancestors, including my greatgrandfather John W. Nichols, had apple orchards. My Holcomb relatives at Elm Springs had peach orchards.

It was the apple industry which brought the Frisco Railroad to our area, and resulted in the establishing of new towns like Rogers, Avoca, Garfield and Lowell.

Pea Ridge missed getting the railroad through town, but at least Pea Ridgers could haul their apples by wagon to Avoca and put them on the train for shipping. The best apples were shipped all over the country. The not so good apples went to vinegar plants like the Speas Vinegar Plant on N. First Street in Rogers, or Rogers Vinegar Company near the railroad crossing on Arkansas Highway 12.

My dad always liked having apple trees. So when he and Johnnie bought their place in Pea Ridge across Arkansas Highway 72 fromHallack Lane, they set out several varieties of apple trees - Yellow Delicious, Red Delicious, and Arkansas Blacks. Some years their apples have done really well, especially when Dad sprayed them to stop the worms and bugs. In 2008 we had a bumper crop.

Although there are only a dozen trees, we had bushels and bushels of apples that year. Dad and Johnnie made apple butter by the gallon, as did Nancy and I, and we gave away more apples than we used ourselves. We had plenty of apple pies in the later part of that year. Apple pies are true American delicacies, and patriotic, too, like Mom and home and country.

Apple Bettie is great too - (I’m not sure if that’s the way you spell it). And these days, they even make cakes out of apples - and pears - and bananas!

Last year, the March freeze killed the buds on the apple trees, so in 2009 we had almost no apples at all. Through 2010 we were expecting another bad year. Dad passed away in February and hasn’t been around to care for the trees, and this summer has been excruciatingly hot and dry.

Amazingly though, this fall we have bunches of apples.

We have many more than the family is willing to work up into apple butter and so on. I love to give apples to some of our friends. They make apple jelly and apple pies and apple cakes, and they often share back with their friends. By the way, if anyone needs some apples, and doesn’t mind if they are a little small, a little wormy, and so on, you might get some apples from us, free.

Yesterday I was picking up some of the apples which had fallen from the trees near the driveway. Some of them were spoiled, so I was separating the good, which went into my basket, from the bad, which I was tossing through the fence into the field. Have you ever tried tossing a handful of bad apples through a barbed wire fence? If you were standing back from the fence and tossing bad apples, trying to hit the strand of fence wire, how often do you suppose you could hit it? I haven’t done a scientific statistical analysis on this, but my expectation is that when I am trying to hit the wire with an apple I will hardly ever hit it! On the other hand, suppose you are trying to toss the apples THROUGH the fence, between the wires.

How often do you suppose you will hit the wires then?!

It seemed to me yesterday that for every other toss, my bad apple which was supposed to fly through the fence into the hay field would hit the fence wire and bounce back, or hit a post and bounce back. I would pick it up and toss it again, and half the time it would hit the wire again! Go figure!

I had better success when I began bouncing my bad apples under the fence.

Maybe there is a parable or a wisdom lesson in that, like reverse psychology.

Like maybe if we are more focused on living well and responding well to what life presents us, and are not too obsessed with success, maybe we will still do pretty well, and be happier and more appreciative besides.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Community, Pages 5 on 10/06/2010