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 and document the history of fruit-growing in the region. 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 maroon-ish 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, and the Thunderbolt had all but vanished.
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 selected by orchardists 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.
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.
But 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.”
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 preservationist 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!”
A relatively easy case
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.”
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 TERRITORIES comes from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, and the Southwest Colorado 250-150 Local Organizing Committee.