| | by admin | | posted on 17th November 2025 in Quakers in 100 Objects | | views 32 | |
The Red Delicious apple tells a story of how a stubborn Iowa sapling linked to Quaker farmer became a world-famous fruit.
The Red Delicious is one of the most recognisable apples on earth, its deep colour and distinctive shape making it a supermarket icon for more than a century. But behind this commercial success lies a quieter, more personal story: that of Jesse Hiatt, a farmer in nineteenth-century Iowa, often described as a Quaker, whose orchard yielded a chance seedling that would reshape American apple culture.
The tale of its origin has been repeated for generations — part history, part folklore. To understand the apple properly, it helps to separate the legend from the documented facts, and then to consider why this fruit, of all fruits, speaks so readily to Quaker themes of simplicity, attentiveness and discernment.
According to orchard lore, the Red Delicious began as a sapling Jesse Hiatt did not want. He carefully planted his orchard in neat, ordered rows. Between two of these rows appeared an unplanned shoot — a rogue seedling. Hiatt cut it down.
The next year it returned. He cut it down again. A third year passed, and once more the sapling stood defiantly in its forbidden space. At this point, the story claims, Jesse paused. Instead of chopping the young tree again, he listened — perhaps to the land, perhaps to an inward prompting — and said the words tradition has preserved: “If thee must grow, thee may.â€
The tree matured, bore fruit unlike anything he had tasted, won a national prize, and eventually became a national icon. It is a beautiful, morally satisfying story — a parable of patience, humility and the willingness to see value where one had not expected it.
What is historically grounded is no less remarkable. In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt discovered an unusually promising seedling in his orchard near Peru, Madison County, Iowa. Apple seedlings are genetic wildcards; most produce poor or inedible fruit. A good one is rare. This one was exceptional.
Hiatt named the variety “Hawkeyeâ€, after his home state. In 1893, he submitted it to a contest run by Stark Nurseries, a major Missouri fruit company. It won. Stark purchased the rights, renamed it Stark Delicious, and around 1914 rebranded it as Red Delicious to distinguish it from the newly discovered Golden Delicious.
Through aggressive marketing, the Red Delicious became the defining American apple of the twentieth century. Its distinctive “coke-bottle†base — the gently flared and ridged lower half — made it exceptionally easy to pack and ship. By the mid-1900s, it dominated U.S. orchards and, at its peak, accounted for a very large share of American apple exports.
The original tree lived on in Iowa as a horticultural curiosity, visited by enthusiasts and protected by fences. It was finally destroyed in the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. Many decades of commercial breeding later, the Red Delicious in today's supermarkets is quite different from Hiatt's original miracle apple.
Whether or not Jesse actually uttered, “If thee must grow, thee may,†the story resonates because it sounds like something a Friend might have said. It reflects a disposition familiar to Quaker life: attentiveness to the unexpected, openness to signs of life where one's own orderliness might otherwise intervene, and the willingness to listen rather than impose.
The Red Delicious also invites reflection on the Quaker testimony of integrity. Its later history — bred for appearance rather than flavour, polished for markets rather than for truth — stands in contrast to the simplicity and honesty implied by its origin. The tension between outward show and inward substance is something Friends have long wrestled with in spiritual and practical life.
And then there is stewardship. Orcharding is an act of care, patience and relationship with the land. Hiatt's decision to watch, wait and trust the seedling aligns naturally with Quaker understandings of living gently with creation.
The Red Delicious apple becomes more than a piece of fruit. It is a story about observation, humility, commercial transformation and the risks of losing one's original flavour. It embodies the quiet truth that great things sometimes grow in the spaces we do not expect — especially when we pause long enough to let them.