Apple Evaporator

As the apple blossoms flutter to the ground in our Pennsylvania orchard, we wonder will there be apples in the fall - will the fruit set, avoid insects and disease, and the ravages of unpredictable weather?

My newspaperman grandfather, plying his trade in Coudersport from the 1920s until his death in 1969, wrote often of his experiences as a youth in nearby Whitesville, N.Y. This remembrance of the apple industry of the late 19th Century deserves to be shared.

W.D. "Golly" Fish writes:

Are there apple evaporators in this year of the 1965! I doubt it. Who would want dried apples in these days? And could anybody be so hungry he would eat dried apple pie?

Every farmer had an apple orchard a half century or so ago but there are few orchards in this area at present. The old trees are gone and young trees have not been planted. It is probable that if small trees were planted now deer would eat and ruin them. If they were in a valley, if the deer did not destroy them the beavers would.

I had a job in the evaporator at Whitesville about 1895. It was built by Merz Brothers of Webster, N.Y. Since it was a boost for the village, volunteer help was solicited. It was sort of understood that those who lent a hand in erecting the building, some 30 x 72 feet, would be favored in employment when apple drying started.

Golly, a youth, anxious for a job, worked ten hours a day, one week, for nothing and boarded at home when he did get the job. He worked nights, keeping the furnaces hot, and three or four times a night he had to go to the second floor and turn the apple slices that they might dry evenly. The pay – memory fails but it was about one dollar per night. A dollar was real money in those days!

A building I imagine to be similar to the
Merz Brothers structure in Whitesville

In his youth, Golly worked at a variety of jobs – farm hand, sawmill worker, made honey boxes, worked in a cheese box factory, shoveled earth in gas line ditch and many other activities – but printing intrigued and fascinated him above all else.

The old apple dry house disappeared years ago and apple orchards are scanty in Whitesville area. They have departed with the blacksmith shops and the sawmills.

Change! Change! Change!