Slide Rock Apple Orchards

Orchard Tractors from the 1950s

We packed up and headed west a couple of weeks ago for a visit with daughter Kate's family in the mountains of Arizona. Always drawn to Farmers' Markets while traveling (we visited Flagstaff's on Sunday), we also seem to find our way to farms. 

Slide Rock State Park was our target that day with plans to soak up the sunshine, hike and bask in that cosmic energy unique to the red rocks of Sedona. And so it was that we discovered the Pendley Homestead.

 

Frank and Jane Pendley's offspring carried on their family's farming heritage until the mid-1980s when they sold the orchard to the state of Arizona and it became Slide Rock State Park, incorporating a popular swimming spot (in the Coconino National Forest where our daughter is Watershed Program Manager) with natural water slides and icy-cold water even in the height of summer.

Reimagined sites, with their carefully crafted descriptions and found objects pieced together send me on a journey to know more, to really imagine with my own sensibilities, the lives lived and lost in those spaces. Twenty-first century research tools at my fingertips can offer me a glimpse of the trials and tribulations of a family making their way in the early twentieth century - making their way in a western landscape so very different from our gently rolling Potter County hills.

But they faced the same kinds of vicissitudes of farming as we do, even with our 'modern' methods. Hailstorms, late spring freezes, deer damage, insect damage, injury, accidents, finding markets for the fruit - it's all there in the records of old newspapers from the era.

From 1970,  the headline screams "Oak Creek Fruit Crop Wiped Out By Cold Snap" and the story goes on to report: "What appeared to be one of the largest deciduous fruit crops in many years in Oak Creek Canyon is now only a dream."

1934: "An experiment in Oak Creek Canyon to help control insect pests was underway by the agriculture experimental station of the University of Arizona. Frank Pendley, prominent fruit grower in the district, asked for help with reference to the wooly aphis in his orchard." 

This from 1963: "What would you do if you had a thousand boxes of apples and nowhere to sell them? That's the position in which Tom Pendley finds himself in this fall and he frankly is at a loss as to what to do about it." And in 1971, it was "Oak Creek Orchard Men Battling Deer ... Antlered Invaders Love Fruit." 

The Pendley home today

With a backdrop of the red rocks, fruit trees along Oak Creek

Read more about the Pendley Homestead here.