From the Living Museum
Northern Spy
- Origin
- East Bloomfield, Ontario County, New York, early 19th century
- Era
- Early 19th c.
- Type / use
- Dessert
History & Stories
Large red fruit with extremely firm, crisp, complex aromatic flesh and legendary storage life (often lasting into the following spring or longer). Unique as one of the very highest-quality and longest-keeping of all American dessert apples; a true connoisseur’s late variety, though it can be biennial.
Folklore & Name
Discovered in East Bloomfield, Ontario County, New York, early 19th century. Named for its exceptional keeping quality and quality — ‘Northern’ for the region, ‘Spy’ possibly for its watchful keeping or local usage. One of the great American late keepers.
Digging into the History
Below my own notes, here is what the old fruit books and today’s collections record about this apple, kept apart from the stories people tell.
What we know
Northern Spy began in a seedling orchard at East Bloomfield, New York. S.A. Beach's The Apples of New York (1905) records that Heman Chapin planted the orchard with seedlings "grown from seeds brought from Salisbury, Connecticut, about the year 1800." The original tree died before it ever bore. Roswell Humphrey dug up sprouts from its roots, and from those he raised the first Northern Spy apples 1. The UK National Fruit Collection gives the same account, with introduction in 1840 2.
For years it stayed close to home. Beach says it was "not till about 1840" that growers elsewhere took notice, and in 1852 the American Pomological Society listed it as worthy of general cultivation. By 1905 it ranked third among New York's commercial apples, after Baldwin and Rhode Island Greening 1.
It has had a second career underground. The National Fruit Collection notes that it resists woolly aphid, which made it a favourite parent for breeders seeking aphid-proof rootstocks and varieties 2.
What we think: stories & traditions
Why "Spy"? Nobody knows. The old books don't explain the name, and we have found no early source for any of the explanations that circulate today, so we leave it as one of the orchard's small mysteries.
A tree that started from a sucker. If Beach's account is right, every Northern Spy alive today goes back to root sprouts from a tree that died without fruiting 1. It is a reminder of how close many great apples came to never being known at all.
Sources
- S.A. Beach, The Apples of New York, Vol. 1 (Albany: J.B. Lyon, 1905), "Northern Spy," pp. 229–232. archive.org/details/applesofnewyork01beaciala/page/229
- UK National Fruit Collection, "Northern Spy." www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/full2.php?id=4286&fruit=apple
Curious about Northern Spy?
Email us at drgoss@honeytreeorchard.com.