Tom Brown didn’t expect retirement to lead to a new mission. But in 1999, just months after stepping away from his career as a chemical engineer, he stopped at a farmers market in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There, a display of heirloom apples caught his attention.
He was intrigued by the colors, textures, and names. The vendor, Maurice Marshall, told him about “apple hunting,” a search through backyards and abandoned orchards for rare or forgotten apple trees. When Marshall mentioned a variety called Harper’s Seedling, once common near Brown’s childhood home, Brown offered to help find it.
From One Apple to Thousands
To identify Harper’s Seedling, Brown studied the 1905 USDA publication The Nomenclature of the Apple, which listed thousands of varieties. During his search, he learned that the U.S. had once cultivated around 7,000 distinct apple types.
The research deepened his interest, and while looking for Harper’s Seedling, he discovered and documented many more. By the time he located that single variety, he had identified hundreds of others that were no longer widely known. Each apple had unique characteristics, and many had not been seen for decades.
Why Seeds Won’t Work
Preserving these apples required more than identification. Apple seeds do not grow true to the parent fruit. Instead, each seed produces a new variety. To preserve the exact apple he found, Brown needed to graft living cuttings from the original tree onto new rootstock.
He collected cuttings from remote trees and grafted them at home in North Carolina. This process ensured each variety remained genetically consistent. It also allowed him to replant and grow the same apple in his own orchard.
Traveling for Forgotten Trees
Over the next 25 years, Brown traveled across North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and West Virginia. He spoke with landowners, searched abandoned farms, and located rare apple trees, many of which still produced fruit.
Some trees were over a century old. By 2024, he had recovered more than 1,000 varieties once considered lost. Brown noted that in the 1800s, families often had several unique trees in their yards, each different from their neighbors’. The apples from those trees were used for cooking, cider, and eating fresh.
Growing a Preservation Orchard
Today, Brown manages Heritage Apples, a two-acre orchard in Clemmons, North Carolina. It contains over 700 rare and endangered varieties. He sells trees for around $20 each, encouraging people to plant their own collections. In the past three years, he received over 5,000 inquiries from interested buyers.
Brown continues to search for rare apples and provides grafted trees to others. Many of the apples he’s recovered are still grown in small numbers or appear at regional roadside stands, preserved through grafting from trees that have outlasted the people who once planted them.
Tom Brown didn’t expect retirement to lead to a new mission, but one visit to a farmers market changed that.
Fascinated by heirloom apples and a search for one lost variety, he began a journey through orchards, records, and backroads that uncovered over 1,000 forgotten apples.🧵 pic.twitter.com/ogKLj51m2p
— Detective Tiger's Stories (@TigerDetective) June 19, 2025