Fort Vancouver's Old Apple Tree, 1827–2020: The Pacific Northwest's Oldest

Admiring the Old Apple Tree in 2019. NPS.

The end of a landmark

On June 25, 2020, Charles Ray, urban forester for the City of Vancouver, Washington, announced with sadness that the "Old Apple Tree" had died. The nearly 200-year-old tree was a local landmark, the oldest living feature associated with Fort Vancouver, celebrated in The Morning Oregonian as early as 1911, and recognized as the oldest apple tree in the Pacific Northwest — few in the country had lived longer. Its long life came from its robust genes and from being a seedling that grew on its own roots.

Why a seedling lived so long

By 1827, when the tree's seed is thought to have sprouted, apples had been propagated by grafting for more than 2,000 years. Growers knew that only grafting could reproduce a tree with exceptional fruit — a variety — by joining it to the roots of a sturdier rootstock; but grafting also shortens a tree's life. In the nineteenth century a grafted tree on a seedling rootstock was an investment for three generations; today's dwarfing rootstocks give lifespans of under 50 years. The Old Apple Tree was no variety and bore no special fruit, but its own vigorous roots served it well.

Fort Vancouver in 1854, lithograph by Gustav Sohon. NPS / Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Archives.

A seed from England

The site, north of the Columbia River, belonged then to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), Britain's royally chartered fur-trading company. The seed may have come on the 17,000-mile voyage from England with Captain Æmilius Simpson, a cousin of HBC governor-in-chief George Simpson, who reportedly carried apple seeds in his vest pocket to plant in a country without apples.

It was planted in the company's employee village, in a hamlet of craftsmen a little above the average villager. The HBC kept a strict divide between its "Gentlemen" and its "Servants" — French Canadians, Métis, British, Scots, and Indigenous people from the Iroquois to Native Hawaiians. Archeology places the young tree in the yard of John Johnson, a Scottish cooper, by 1833.

The reconstructed orchard and fort at Fort Vancouver. NPS.

Two centuries of history around it

The tree grew as Fort Vancouver became the main colonial settlement between Russian Alaska and Mexican California. In 1846 the Oregon Treaty set the boundary at the 49th parallel, the HBC moved north to Canada, and the U.S. Army took over. As the Army burned or demolished the HBC's traces, the apple tree escaped the axe.

It lived through the post's years as a headquarters and supply depot in the Civil War and Indian War eras and a training post in the Spanish-American War; the railroad's arrival in 1906; a 1911 plaque naming it the "Oldest Apple Tree in the Northwest"; the world's largest lumber mill cutting spruce for warplanes in World War I; a protective railing by 1920; the Civilian Conservation Corps district headquarters in the Depression; the growth of a wagon road into the Columbia River Highway; and Vancouver Barracks as a staging area for the Pacific in World War II.

When highway construction loomed in the 1980s, planners took the tree into account: archeological digs in the old village followed, and a pocket park, Old Apple Tree Park, was created around it, home to an Old Apple Tree Festival every October, where cuttings were shared and some took root in neighbors' yards.

Clones and a new generation

Around 2000, the Park Service and the city worked with the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon, to clone the tree and conserve its genes permanently. The clones, planted in 2004 in a reconstructed HBC orchard, have far outgrown young trees grown from the seeds of old English cider varieties — proof of the tree's hardy genes. A volunteer's genetic testing, with Washington State University and the University of Wisconsin, suggests a possible link to the French variety Reinette Franche, from the 1500s.

The Hudson's Bay Company orchard at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, with historically appropriate varieties, tree forms and care. NPS.

The end began in summer 2009, when a windstorm down the Columbia broke two major limbs. The city's arborists operated and fertilized, and the Park Service tried bridge grafting — cuttings anchored above and below each wound to reconnect the tree. With a much smaller crown and an almost hollow trunk, the tree still put out new growth and root suckers, some of which were protected as replacement trees.

Removing storm-damaged limbs, winter 2009–2010. NPS.

It held on 11 more years, until part of the trunk gave way in June 2020 and the crown dried out. The root-sucker trees were unharmed. They lack the old tree's stature, but they share its genes — they are the Old Apple Tree — and it lives on in them at Old Apple Tree Park, in the reconstructed orchard, and in yards across Vancouver.

More: the Fort Vancouver Cultural Landscape Inventory; Fruitful Legacy, on historic orchards; the park's website.

Sources

Based on "Requiem for the 1820s Fort Vancouver Apple Tree, and a New Dawn," Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.