Finding the Dyehouse Cherry
Sometime in 2014 chef Travis Milton was urging me to find some of the lost ingredients of Appalachia. Aside from Chestnuts, white Mammoth Rye, and Fulghum Oats, I didn’t know the sorts of things he was seeking. Of course there were apples—the limbertwigs in particular. But a crew of disciples of Creighton Lee Calhoun were scouring the hills looking for old southern apples. “Fruits—are there grapes, or pears, or apricots, or cherries?” Milton asked. I didn’t know, but I know how to do research. I began scouring the nursery catalogs.
In short order I learned that there was a southern cherry! Now cherries require a certain number of chill hours to flourish, and much of the South doesn’t supply sufficient cold. I reckoned if there were cherries in the region, they would be in the southern uplands, in western Virginia, North Carolina, or in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. I knew if there was a cherry, it would be a sour “pie” cherry, since they require fewer days of cold. And sure enough, there it was . . . in the pages of southern nursery after southern nursery . . . the Dyehouse.
The sour Dyehouse Cherry came into being in Lincoln County Kentucky just after the Civil War. It was a Montmorency type cherry, with soft body, light red skin, yellow flesh, and clear juice. It was a seedling cross between an Early Richmond or May Duke Cherry and a Morello. And this seedling didn’t need as much chill as its relatives in the Montmorency family of sour cherries. It could be grown as far South as middle Alabama. So by the turn of the 20th century it became the most popular and widely cultivated cherry variety developed in the South, thriving commercially through the Great Depression sold by Stark Brothers nursery and others. The mid-twentieth century spelled its doom as cherry production became industrialized, sweet cherries being grown in the Pacific northwest, sour in Michigan and Wisconsin. Local varieties languished. And by the end of the 20th century it had disappeared.
The key to finding something is knowing that it is truly lost. It is relatively easy in the age of google to determine whether a fruit tree variety is commercially available. I checked North America suppliers, sellers in the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and New Zeeland. Nada, zip, zilch, zed. Then I checked the USDA GRIN, the germ plasm repository. I called up Dr. Amy Iezonni, in Michigan, the savant of sour cherries in the United States. No leads. So when I determined the Dyehouse Cherry was truly lost, I marshalled a campaign to find it. I first determined that I would be most likely to find the cherry in the state of its nativity, Kentucky, and began calling county ag agents. I put together a Most Wanted flier. But my breakthrough occurred when I enlisted local media.
Alan Cornett of the Eat Kentucky podcast and a writer on local foods in the Bluegrass State agreed to assist me in 2015 and distributed information on the Dyehouse. I posted repeatedly on Facebook. This is the sort of information we distributed—thick descriptions:
“ In 1870 Henry T. Harris submitted a description of a new sour cherry discovered circa 1860 in Lincoln County Kentucky in the orchard of George W. Dyehouse II. He believed it to be a seedling produced by the fertilization of Morello Sour Cherry by a May Duke or Early Richmond. It had the fruit style of a Montmorency type cherry, such as the early Richmond. And the tree configuration “is of a very decided Morello type. The tree is almost a semi-dwarf; or rather, not a full standard, growing bushy, stocky, and the branches not so pendant and willowy as the common old red Morello. The fruit is a clear, transparent dark pink; the skin and pulp almost opaque, and begins to ripen, in this latitude, about the first days of June; and the crop is fully gathered before the old Morello red is fairly blushing. . . . Both tree and fruit are exceedingly hardy, and enormously prolific—rarely failing to mature a full crop even when all other varieties fail. . . . The tree is a rapid and handsome grower and begins to bear very young. It reproduces itself (but not so abundantly from its roots or suckers) like the common Morello.”
“U.P. Hedrick supplies further detail in his 1915 description in The Cherries of New York: “Leaves numerous, three inches long, one and one-half inches wide, slightly folded upward, obovate to long-oval; upper surface very dark green, smooth; lower surface light green, with a few hairs along the midrib; apex acute, base variable in shape; margin finely serrate, with small, dark glands; petiole one-half inch long, tinged with dull red, with a few hairs along the grooved upper surface, with from one to three small, globose, greenish-yellow glands at the base of the blade. Buds small, short, obtuse, plump, free, arranged singly and in clusters on short spurs; leaf-scars prominent; season of bloom intermediate; flowers one inch across, white; borne in dense but well-distributed clusters, usually at the ends of spur-like branches, in twos, threes or fours; pedicels one and one-half inches long, glabrous, greenish; calyx-tube green, obconic, glabrous; calyx-lobes tinged with red, serrate, glabrous within and without, reflexed; petals roundish-obovate, entire, almost sessile, with entire apex; filaments one-fourth inch long; pistil glabrous, nearly equal to the stamens in length.”
We excited interest by reproducing the reports about the taste of the Dyehouse. “It is exceedingly juicy, tart and pleasant when fully ripe, but is much too acid to eat from the tree. As preserves, and for tarts, however it has no equal in the cherry king” [Harris, 1870] While the final claim may be hyperbolic, the broad adoption of the fruit as a “pie cherry,” attested to a strong following, particularly in Appalachia and the American South. The notoriously prickly U. P. Hedrick was favorably impressed with the taste: “flesh light yellowish-white, with pinkish juice, tender, sprightly, tart; of very good quality; stone nearly free, ovate, slightly flattened, with smooth surfaces; somewhat ridged along the ventral suture.” Southern nursery catalogs insisted on the superiority of flavor to the Early Richmond, Duke, and Morello: “"In hardiness and general appearance resembles Early Richmond, but is of finer quality and several days earlier; it produces very regular annual crops; fruit medium; skin bright red, darkened by the sun; flesh soft, juicy, tender, sprightly, sub-acid, rather rich partakes of both he Morello and Duke in growth, wood and fruit; it is very productive. We consider it superior to Early Richmond." Richmond Commercial Nursery Catalog, Richmond, VA 1897.
In 2015 these efforts paid off. Artist Dan Dutton of Somerset KY believed he had a surviving tree on his family land. I contracted Dr. Archbold of the University of Kentucky to go examine the trees, which he did. In early June of 2016 I visited myself and saw the tree, ate a slice of pie, and popped some sour cherries in my mouth.
It had the signatures—the Morello like slenderness of branches, the Early Richmond/Montmorency style fruit, and the excellent flavor. There was no doubt, the Dyehouse had been recovered. To alert the world to this endangered treasure, the Dyehouse Cherry was boarded on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, the global register of the most historically resonant, flavorful, and imperiled foods. Dutton himself took pains to ensure that the Dyehouse didn’t perish. He planted an orchard of saplings, and these young trees were sold to orchardists and collectors throughout the South.
On the 5th year anniversary of the discovery of Dutton’s tree, Alan Cornett invited me to participate in a Eat Kentucky podcast celebrating the find and alerting listeners to other lost Kentucky fruit such as the Red Kentucky crabapple. A listener contacted Melanie Hutti of Lincoln County, KY, asking if her yard tree might be a Dyehouse. Melanie send me photographs and sure enough, a second Dyehouse survivor was confirmed. Because Melanie is a photographer, the images of her Dyehouse created a sensation when posted. The demand for trees now outstrips supply . . . but there is little doubt that the South’s signature cherry will have a future and a tasty one at that.