Here are three of the four vintage apple trees at East Thornton Lake Natural Area. (No place to lean the bike; too many blackberry thorns on the ground.)
About a year ago I had heard about some old apple trees discovered in the East Thornton Lake Natural Area, a 27-acre tract east of North Albany Road. I finally made it out there on Sunday to take a look.
There are four of these trees, but I looked at only the three that are close together. What makes these trees special is that they are old and the apples they bear are no longer common.
“These are the trees we found to be of old varieties that are rare (and in one case they thought extinct),” Rick Barnett of Albany Parks and Recreation told me in an email last week. “We have been working with an orchard conservancy up in the Molalla area to preserve the current trees and also to propagate the species.”
I first learned of these trees from Albany resident Jill Van Buren, the retired longtime county election supervisor, first in Linn and then Benton County.
In late 2021 she applied to be named to the Albany Tree Commission, and in her paperwork she said she was trying to save some apple trees left over from an old North Albany orchard. When I read that, I asked her about it, and she gave me the details.
“Samples have been sent to be tested,” she told me at the time. “At this point we are sure that at least one of them is an Elder John, a vintage not planted here for many decades.”
The land where the trees stand was a farm and, apparently, an orchard until a Salem developer bought it and proposed to build a subdivision. The neighborhood strongly opposed this, and in 2009 the city council was persuaded to buy the acreage for $2.25 million.
Part of the money was a $559,000 state grant that obligated the city to develop the land for recreation by 2014. But then-parks director Ed Hodney indefinitely postponed development because his department didn’t have the money or staff to take care of yet another park.
Volunteers, though, have done quite a bit of work there, as I discovered Sunday when I pushed my bike back to where the apple trees are.
Lots of little oaks have been planted and cared for. Wood chips have been spread on potential paths, and there are more piles of chips. Brush and blackberry thickets have been cleared, including around the apple trees.
Though undeveloped, the area is open to the public. There’s no close and convenient place to park, though. So to get there, consider taking your bike. (hh)
As the sign says, you’re not supposed to park here, off North Albany Road.
Obviously it was too late Sunday to take a bite out of any of these vintage apples.
Where exactly off of North Albany Rd is this park?
Well, it’s on the south side of East Thornton Lake and on the east side of North Albany Road. On your right as you drive out North Albany and just before you cross the bridge.
Would that have been old Mr. Peacock’s orchard? I remember it being somewhere in that area. He was quite a character.
Remember the “haunted house” and the old vehicle that sat on the corner of Hickory and N. Albany Road? I remember reading that was Peacock’s house. All destroyed when they put in North Albany Village. I also wondered if these trees could have been part of his farm.
Before their deaths, a professor and his wife at OSU were the acknowledged experts on pioneer apple, pear, and crabapple trees in Oregon. I had several good conversations with them in the 1980s and 1990s regarding pre-1900 apple trees remaining on OSU properties at that time, including a large number in the general Albany area in the Soap Creek and Berry Creek basins. I thought there was an Oregon Pioneer Apple association of some sort at the time, but here is a new organization founded in 2012 that claims to have identified and grafted 5,000 varieties: http://www.temperateorchardconservancy.org
Thank you for all you do. I find your articles very interesting and informative.
Thank you for this post. My husband and I walk this area every day and noticed the apples this year. We picked some and discovered they are very good. To me they taste like an English cooking apple. I have not tasted one quite like this though. A lot of the apples were very large and had very little worms. I hope that this tree will be saved and propagated. I would very much like to buy one. I have a picture of two that I had left that I’ll email to you.