McCorkle’s orchard the apple of his eye
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The fruits of the McCorkle’s labors are, of course, apples. The McCorkles have been making their living selling these marvels of nature for quite a few years now, since the early ’90s.
Apples have had a long and interesting history. According to the Perfect Apple Web site, the first trees to produce the sweet, flavorful apples like the ones we love so much today were located, many thousands of years ago, close to the site of the modern day city of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. When European settlers crossed the ocean, they brought apple seeds and trees with them to the New World.
Apples also appeared in the Bible, most famously tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and of course Americans are familiar with the story of “Johnny Appleseed,” actually a pioneer apple farmer named John Chapman from Leominster, Mass., who became famous when he distributed apple seeds and trees to settlers in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
Today, apples are enjoyed in pretty much every country in the world and are considered the world’s most popular fruit.
James, who originally ran a nursery on his property, eventually decided an orchard might be a bit less labor intensive and also require a lot less travel, since he was personally trucking nursery stock around the area.
“I told my wife, ‘I know what I’ll have as a good retirement business is an apple orchard,'” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t realize how much work I’d get myself in. It’s all the time.”
James planted his first trees around 1991.
“And then I’ve been planting them every year since,” he said. But now, though he’s a very robust and industrious 72 years young, he says the orchard is plenty big enough.
“I’m through. I’m not going to plant any more,” he said. “I’ve got more now than I can wiggle with.”
Pa’s Apple Orchard, a name suggested by the couple’s grandchildren, features a wide variety of apples, including Lodi, a patent apple called Ginger Gold, Gala, Jona Gold, which is his bestseller, Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Fuji, Arkansas Black, Grimes Golden, Virginia Winesap and Granny Smith.
James also produces cider from a cider mill he built himself, and Georgia dries apples for pies and other uses, making their orchard pretty much a full service operation.
James and Georgia’s story wouldn’t be complete with mentioning another striking feature of the McCorkle homeplace, the couple’s log house which James constructed almost totally with his own hands, along with much of the furniture inside it. In addition, all the logs in the home were cut from the McCorkle property.
James said he researched log homes for five years before deciding to finally start his own, but once he bought the plans and started construction, things went pretty quickly. They started the house in February of 1991 and finished it somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas the same year.
Not being the kind of man to waste anything, James even took some of the paneling on the walls from an old barn his grandfather Morgan McCorkle had built in 1915.
“It’s all chestnut,” he said, and then added with a grin, “I told my wife he’d turn over in his grave if he’d seen how I’d torn up his barn.”
James does most of the work at the orchard himself, including the picking of the apples, which amounted to a lot of work this year, since the orchard had a bumper crop.
Even so, James says he finds the work very rewarding.
“What I get out of it is seeing the end product after you do a good job,” he said. That, and the look his customers get when they bite into one of his apples.