A Johnny Appleseed-esque tale:Random apple crop could be legacy of RR litter bugs

Thrown out remnants of decades of afternoon snacks are a common sight on the roadways of Whitman County.

A stray apple tree provides a burst of color against the stark steel-and-wood trestle of the old Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad at Tekoa.

Thanks in part to these bygone litterbugs, Whitman County residents every October are treated to a dazzling display of reds, yellows and oranges, as the blossoms of antique apple trees mature into full-blown fruit.

Many point to railroad crews and passengers as the biggest culprits of spreading apple trees throughout the county.

“That’s what we’ve always called them anyway, is railroad apples,” said Ken Kilpatrick, who farms in the Oakesdale area.

Random apple trees are most prevalent along the routes that railroads have long since abandoned. Engineers and crew members, as they rambled along in trains full of Whitman County’s bounty, would polish off an apple and leave the core behind, as the story goes.

An especially vibrant bunch of trees can be seen in a pasture owned by the Kilpatrick family’s RMK Farms along the remnants of the old Spokane & Inland Electric Railroad east of Oakesdale, last known as the Great Northern.

“If you think that’s something, you should go take a look at Lone Pine about this time of year,” advised Kilpatrick two weeks ago. “That place is just thick with apple and plum trees, and they should be putting out fruit right about now.”

Lone Pine is along the former route of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad which operated for about 70 years.

Travelers on the John Wayne Trail, on the former Milwaukee roadbed, do indeed run into a veritable explosion of apple and plum trees when they reach the Lone Pine, northwest of Tekoa.

“My dad used to be crazy about what we called railroad apples,” said Dick Warwick who grew up and still lives at Fairbanks.

Warwick said his father used to make annual autumn trips to Lone Pine to pluck a yellow-tinted green gage plum for a snack.

Dorothy Hansen grew up as a member of the McHargue family near the Lone Pine whistle stop. She too has often heard the story of apple trees growing from railroading refuse.

“That’s what my dad always told us, anyway,” said Hansen. “The engineer would sit and wait to get loaded and just toss his apple core out when he finished it.”

Hansen added she imagined some of those box cars dropped plums and apples onto the ground along the railroad, which could have spread the seeds.

So productive were fruit trees on the Palouse, that there was even a Palouse Apple.

Warwick said he read about the Palouse Apple in a two-volume set of books about the apples of New York published in 1904.

An article in the Oct. 15, 1909, edition of the Colfax Gazette told of the spreading fame of the Palouse apple, saying “It is a Palouser, and like all Palouse it is hard to beat.”

Whitman County was once a hotbed of produce shipments, explained Steven Bishop, an attorney and orchardist in Garfield.

“There were a lot of box cars hauled back east full of fruit from around here,” said Bishop.

The heyday of apples from the Palouse subsided in the 1930s, according to Bishop. Orchardists found that less extreme weather and greater access to irrigation in central Washington made for easier apple-growing.

Bishop was a bit more skeptical of the “Great Northern Appleseed” theory.

He noted more often than not rail beds were allowed to grow wild and have not been touched by tractors or pesticides. That allowed all seeds to grow.

“If you look at the fruit trees along the old railroads, they’re probably the same kind of fruit trees you’ll find in other undisturbed areas,” said Bishop.

He also noted that the various types of apple trees could have all come from the same source tree. Apples are like people, he said. Each combination of genes produces a different individual, and certain traits are exaggerated in some trees while dormant in others.

Bishop suspects tree seeds were spread by birds, deer or other wildlife who fed on the many orchards that were once in Whitman County and then “planted” the seeds elsewhere.

Which may explain why Hansen has a stray apple tree standing in her present-day field along a roadside.

“It’s a real good apple. And I try to grab a bunch every year,” she said. “Because – since they’re on the roadside – they’re kind of fair game, and I better get them before they’re got.”