Baldwin

History

The Baldwin came up as a chance seedling soon after 1740 on John Ball’s farm at Wilmington, near Lowell, Massachusetts, and for about forty years it was grown only in that neighbourhood¹. When the farm passed to a Mr Butters, the apple was called the Woodpecker, or Pecker, after the birds that visited the tree, and also the Butters¹. Deacon Samuel Thompson, a surveyor from Woburn, brought it to the notice of Colonel Loammi Baldwin of Woburn, a Revolutionary War veteran and engineer of the Middlesex Canal, who propagated it and was spreading it through eastern Massachusetts as early as 1784; the apple took his name^1,2. The original tree was alive in 1817 but dead by 1832¹. In 1895 the Rumford Historical Association put up a pillar to mark the site³, and a monument to the apple stands today on Chestnut Street in Wilmington, beside the William Butters II farmhouse².

In 1852 Hovey called it “the most popular apple of New England”¹. Little known in New York before 1850, it spread there with the commercial orchards, and in 1905 Beach called it “preeminently the leading variety” of New York and New England, as well as a leading export apple¹. In 1909–13 it was the most important apple in the United States⁴. In 1928 American commercial orchards held 5,519,000 Baldwin trees, 6.8 per cent of the total and the fourth-largest number of any variety⁴. The freezes of the winter of 1933–34 were estimated to have killed or ruined nearly 2,000,000 Baldwin trees in New York and New England, and by 1941 the McIntosh, the favourite for new planting, had replaced it as the leading variety of the north-eastern apple region⁴.

DNA evidence published in 2022 identified Reinette Franche, a French apple of the early sixteenth century, as either a parent of the Baldwin or possibly a grandparent⁵.

The fruit

The fruit is above medium in size or large, roundish and inclined to conical¹. The tough, smooth skin is pale yellow or greenish, blushed and mottled with bright red and faintly striped with deep carmine, and the general effect is bright red¹. The flesh is yellowish, firm, crisp, juicy and moderately coarse, with a lively, pleasantly subacid, somewhat aromatic taste¹.

In New York it normally reached picking condition between the middle and the end of October, but in Virginia between the middle and the twentieth of September⁶. It kept until March or April in common storage and until May or later in cold storage¹, though Magness rated its tendency to storage scald as medium to severe⁴. Brown flecks in the flesh, known as Baldwin spot, are a physiological defect most often found in overgrown fruit¹.

Growing

The tree is large, very vigorous and long-lived, with an upright, spreading habit^1,4. It is slow to begin bearing, taking 8 to 10 years, and then crops heavily but tends to bear in alternate years^1,4. Scab often damages its leaves and fruit¹. It is apt to be killed by hard winters in many parts of northern New York and fails for the same reason west of the Great Lakes; in the South it ripens in autumn and is of poorer quality¹.

The Baldwin is a triploid^4,7. Its pollen is sterile, so it cannot pollinate other trees, although they can pollinate it⁷; Magness classed it as a poor pollinizer and only partly self-fruitful⁴. Beach recorded russet-skinned sports and a darker, later-keeping strain, the Dark Baldwin; another sport, Olympia, has larger, better-coloured fruit¹.

Uses

Beach found it suited to market, dessert and kitchen alike, and its firm flesh and thick skin let it stand handling well¹. Fruit not good enough for barrelling supplied much of the stock of New York’s apple evaporators, and some went to canneries¹.

Where the sources disagree

• Its discovery. Beach (1905) has the seedling arise soon after 1740 on John Ball’s farm and reach Colonel Baldwin through Samuel Thompson, with Baldwin spreading it by 1784¹. The 1895 pillar said instead that Thompson “discovered the first Pecker apple tree” in 1793 while surveying the line of the Middlesex Canal³, nine years after Beach’s date for its spread. The Wilmington library observes that most versions of the story seem to agree that William Butters either found or planted the tree².
• Its quality. Beach rated it good to very good for dessert and kitchen¹. Bailey, writing in 1914 when Baldwin and Ben Davis held “the supremacy in American market apples”, thought it of “secondary quality”³. Magness rated it fair to good for dessert and good for cooking⁴, and Hogg, in England, treated it as a culinary apple that did not reach there the size or flavour it attained in America⁸.