Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
Tom Brown, a retired chemical engineer from Clemmons, North Carolina, has spent more than 25 years tracking down and preserving heirloom apple varieties that were disappearing from the landscape.
He started this work in 1999 after seeing old apple types at a farmers market in Winston-Salem. Since then, he has located over 1,000 varieties that had been considered lost. He grafts cuttings from original trees found across North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and West Virginia. And he continues this effort well into his 80s to protect our unique national heritage.
Every couple of years, the internet reposts a supposed picture of Brown near a table of different apple varieties. People are rightly amazed by Brown’s dedication and work to preserve this part of our history. Some even go so far as to demand that Brown receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work, and I couldn’t agree more. Brown’s efforts directly protect our agricultural heritage, which is being forgotten and erased at a rapid pace.
To date, Tom Brown has reclaimed about 1,200 varieties, and his two-acre orchard, Heritage Apples, contains 700 of the rarest. https://t.co/5JPeBV4ANh
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) July 27, 2023
Industrial farming has replaced thousands of unique crop varieties, and people like Brown are stepping in to stop that erasure. Still, this is more than a story about saving apple diversity. Each historic apple variety has a particular historical and cultural record that narrates settlement patterns, trade, and daily life in early America. Brown’s work offers a different way to learn about our history and stay connected to our authentic cultural identity.
It’s like finding your great-grandmother’s old recipe book covered in dust in the attic. Everyone in the family had forgotten it was even there. And yet the pages are filled with opportunities to connect with your ancestors through cooking and eating the same meals as they did. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
Our modern world is completely obsessed with consuming the newest, to the point that it is willing to trade its legacy without a second thought. Brown represents the important cultural hero who stands in the gap, preventing this from being permanent.
This is particularly important when you realize that the erasure of heritage is not limited to apples or family recipes. There is a deliberate loss of critical cultural elements like buildings, languages, and region-specific practices, that disrupts identity and social cohesion. Communities lose shared references to their history as more and more people move in. The emphasis on tradition fades away.
America’s heritage is worth preserving for the simple fact that we are the greatest country ever formed. But it’s easy to control a population that lacks the important connection to the traditions that formed us.
Cultural heritage acts as a bridge. It allows younger generations to see themselves as part of a continuous line rather than detached from the legacy that built them. It’s no wonder we see a dramatic rise in their feelings of rootlessness. Instead of leaving our children a rich, living connection to their past, their inheritance has turned into one massive, homogeneous blob devoid of culture. (ROOKE: Stop Pretending US Soil Is Magical)
Brown’s approach demonstrates the scale of what one person can address. But we need more people like him who treat heritage preservation as essential infrastructure for cultural continuity and our ability to build a future on solid ground connected to the past, while maintaining advances. We cannot afford to continue losing the knowledge that made us great.
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