A basket of Whippoorwill Beans sits on Lee Calhoun’s Chatham County North Carolina kitchen counter alongside the last red peppers from his backyard garden. More than forty years ago, that same garden inspired Lee and his wife Edith to plant apple trees and begin a journey into an unexplored corner of the South’s agricultural history. My annual fall visit to Lee coincides with bean shelling but centers on a big bowl of apples, many that exist today because of Lee and Edith’s research and writing.

By the mid-1990s, the Calhouns’ fieldwork intersected with my own search for cider apples for Foggy Ridge, the orchard and cidery I was building in Southwest Virginia. Like a skilled folklorist, Lee identified the history of his subject as well as the context. “We knew these old apples existed in the South but we didn’t know anything about them.” In his book, Old Southern Apples, I found an authoritative story-filled resource that taught me about southern apples that would flourish in my mountain orchard and provided clues about ways to use them.

“We knew these old apples existed in the South but we didn’t know anything about them.”

The history of the South is an agrarian story that’s been explored through the histories of ingredients like Bloody Butcher Corn and Carolina Gold Rice. But Lee Calhoun speaks the truth when he says, “Southerners don’t know we have our own apples.” Apples in the South joined three traditions—apple seeds brought to North America by Spanish and European settlers, seedling orchards planted by Native Americans in the Southern Appalachians, and over 250 years of farming in this region, including orchards maintained by enslaved people. As Lee says, “We have forgotten that apples were grown on farms in every part of the South for centuries and the South developed hundreds of unique apple varieties.”