Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer didn’t set out to be apple detectives.
Today, they run the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, an effort to find and save rare apple varieties. But 20 years ago, they were selling plants and trees in Cortez, Colorado, when a rare apple got under their skin.
That was when they first learned about a dark red beauty, almost maroonish in color, splashed across the top with flecks of golden brown: The Thunderbolt.
“They are such interesting-looking apples. Really different from anything you’d ever see in a grocery store,” Jude Schuenemeyer said. “There’s not a lot exactly like a Thunderbolt.”
They’d come across an archival document–an issue of a magazine published in 1909, by a Denver socialite named Lillian Hartman. Hartman’s Apple Show Edition showcased the orchards of Montezuma County.
“One of the apples they mentioned in the magazine was the Thunderbolt,” Schuenemeyer said.
To the Schuenemeyers, it seemed like a simple idea: if they could find an old Thunderbolt tree growing locally somewhere, they could take cuttings to graft and propagate new baby trees to sell in their nursery.
Thunderbolt apples had been common in southwest Colorado in the early 1900s, when the region had a flourishing apple economy and hundreds of thousands of trees.
But a century later, there were just a few hundred acres of remnant orchards left in Montezuma County.
The Schuenemeyers didn’t realize that the hunt for the Thunderbolt would change the course of their lives.
“We wanted to find one,” Jude Schuenemeyer recalled. “Truthfully, we didn’t have a clue what we were getting into. We didn’t know how deep this was going to go.”
The apple as a historic artifact
There’s something simple and straightforward about an apple. You can pick one up and eat it without a second thought.
But the apple you put in your mouth is anything but inevitable. Each one comes to us, slingshot across time, deliberately chosen by people who are far away and sometimes long gone.
Part of this stems from the biology of apples and how we cultivate them. Orchard trees are not propagated from apple seeds–they’re grafted from cuttings taken from mother trees that can be more than a hundred years old.
Consequently, the longevity of apple varieties is very much entwined with the apple ideals of the humans who decide whether or not to clone new trees.
More than most of the foods we eat, apples place us at an intersection between the immediate present and the deep past.
“Are they historic artifacts? Sure, they are. “But ‘artifact’ implies that they are something of the past,” said Jude Schuenemeyer, when asked about this duality. “When you take a bite out of an apple cultivar that’s been around for hundreds of years, you’re connecting to the past, but you’re also connecting to that very moment right then and there.”
Preserving heritage apples is an uphill climb against global forces: food commodification, consumer habits, and the erosion of agricultural knowledge and traditions.
As many as 20,000 different varieties of apples were grown in the US in the early 1900s. Experts say ⅔ of those varieties have gone extinct.
Nonetheless, apple trees live a long time, and some rare varieties still survive. It’s the lure of the chase and the endless complexities of apples that keep apple detectives going.
“Apple detective work is difficult,” Schuenemeyer said. “You’re having to combine remarkable, high-tech, cutting-edge DNA with deep historical research. And it's easy to guess wrong with apples, it's easy to look at an apple and say, ‘oh it must be this, oh it must be that’, and find out you're wrong.”
Fortunately for the Schuenemeyers, their first apple detective case was not a tricky one. The Thunderbolt is an unusual apple. It’s relatively easy to identify, and there were still people alive who remembered it.
They talked to old-timers who remembered the Thunderbolt. They scouted old orchards. Two years went by.
Eventually, someone introduced Jude to Conrad Hover. Hover is 67 years old, and he has a few acres of old apple trees on his property north of Cortez.
“(Jude) came out and he was kind of interested in the apples that I had,” Hover recalled. “And then I told him about this Thunderbolt.”
On a beautiful fall day, Hover brought Schuenemeyer to the edge of his orchard, to one very old Thunderbolt tree.
“Yeah, he was pretty excited,” Hover chuckled. “He said, as far as he knew, there wasn’t any left in Montezuma County, that this was probably the only Thunderbolt there was. But up until then, it was just another tree.”
The Thunderbolt and the Fruit Wizard
Hover’s tree allowed the Schuenemeyers to save an endangered apple. Later, they would take cuttings and graft new baby Thunderbolts.
But that fall, after 2 years of searching, they finally got to taste a ripe Thunderbolt apple for the first time.
“The Thunderbolts were just utterly amazing,” Jude Schuenemeyer said. “The most explosive flavor you have ever had when you bit into them. I mean, you take a cutting off and you bite it, and you’re just like, ‘holy cow!’ We were blown away!”
As they learned more about Montezuma County orchard history, the Schuenemeyers realized that the Thunderbolt was connected to a rich, complex history–a history that led them to an orchardist named Jasper Hall.
Hall was known as the Fruit Wizard of Montezuma County, and he migrated to Colorado from eastern Tennessee in the 1800s.
It was Hall who brought the Thunderbolt to Colorado from Tennessee. He grew and marketed fruit, ran a nursery, and wrote columns about apple cultivation in the local paper, The Montezuma Journal.
Hall and a few other growers believed southwest Colorado could become an apple Mecca.
They situated their orchards in the arid hills north of Cortez, close to the Denver and Rio Grande’s new railhead in Dolores. By 1904, Montezuma County brought home several gold medals from the World’s Fair in St Louis.
“If you had ridden your horse across here in the early 1900’s, in May, you would have been riding through blizzards of apple blossoms,” Schuenemeyer said.
Jasper Hall planted apple varieties we wouldn’t recognize today: a golfball-sized sweet crabapple called the Transcendent Crab, and a yellowish apple called a Winter Banana. There was the Chenango Strawberry, which ripened in the middle of summer, and there were winter apples, like the Thunderbolt, that got better in storage and would last for months in a root cellar.
“The Thunderbolt will get better in storage,” said Scheuenemeyer. “Thanksgiving is the earliest you’d want to start eating it, and it can keep until April, May, June with just ordinary refrigeration.”
For decades following Jasper Hall’s death in 1915, apple production in southwest Colorado continued to expand. Growers reoriented toward commodity markets and focused on just a few varieties–the Jonathan, the Golden, and the Red Delicious.
Initially, they prospered, but ultimately, Montezuma County couldn’t compete with the capacity of Washington State and apple producers overseas. According to Schuenemeyer apple production declined in the 1970s.
A lost world of taste and desire
These days, most consumers have no idea there’s such a thing as a winter apple.
The apples we eat are so-called “dessert apples”, which ripen in the fall and are produced to be eaten fresh. We know only a few varieties, which are kept in cold storage and delivered to supermarkets year-round.
This approach may work well for commodity markets, but pomology nerds across the country know it offers consumers a very narrow slice of what apples can be.
“Apples are so diverse,” said John Bunker, an apple preservationsist based in Maine. “The apple that doesn’t taste very good when you take a bite of it might be the best pie apple in the world. Or it might make the best cider, or cook a perfect sauce.”
Bunker has been an apple detective since the 1970s. He’s the author of Apples and the Art of Detection, which chronicles the difficulties of finding and identifying rare apples.
“There are apples that I have growing because I love them so much,” Bunker said. “I grafted them and planted them in our orchard 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. I still don’t know what they are, but I’m working on it!”
Bunker has found apple trees in Maine that are documented to be more than 220 years old.
“That’s twice as old as any person on earth,” he said.
After decades of this work, Bunker has come to view these old trees and the apples that grow on them as historic artifacts, often invisible to people who walk by them daily.
“This is not like looking at a painting,” Bunker said. “Or sitting in a chair that you’re not supposed to sit in. This is like eating the exact fruit that Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson ate. And in some cases, the same fruit from the same bloody tree!”
Montezuma County’s apple-loving earth
Today, the apple economy in southwest Colorado is gone. There are no parks, schools, or streets named after Jasper Hall. It’s tempting to view the apple-growing history of Montezuma County as a dead end, a historical footnote.
But the apple-loving earth is still here, and some old trees are hanging on, waiting to be found again. The Schuenemeyers see possibility in this history for the future.
“If this place sucked, these trees would not be alive here a hundred and something years later, ok? But they are here,” said Jude Schuenemeyer.
It’s been 20 years since the Schuenemeyers went hunting for the lost Thunderbolt. Since then, apple detective work has become more challenging.
“It is still so thrilling,” Jude Scheuenemeyer said, “But you’ve got to understand–most of what we find, we may never be able to put a name to. It doesn’t mean they weren’t valuable cultivars. The names just may be too far lost.”
These days, they use genetic data sets and map the geography of every old tree. They care for nurseries and orchards full of rare varieties of nameless apples, and they work with a national consortium of scientists, historians, and apple nerds.
“When we started doing this, we didn’t know how hard or how complex or how long this project was going to be,” he laughed. “It was like, ‘well let’s see if we can find a few trees!’”
They did find a few trees, then a few more, and then many more. Along the way, they learned that a heritage apple isn’t just a piece of fruit; it’s a historic artifact, a time machine, a portal into a lost world of taste and desire.
“We’ve had apples that taste like wild honey, like curry… like butterscotch… like vanilla. You get some that taste like sweet tarts. So many different subtleties,” said Schuenemeyer. “Consumers have gotten themselves to settle on a few very basic varieties, and they miss out on so much of what’s out there.”
Support for this story also comes from Southwest Colorado’s 250/150 Local Organizing Committee, working to commemorate Colorado's 150th anniversary of statehood.
Find out more online at colorado150southwest.org.