![]() ![]() Peaches required so much capital to grow that few African-Americans could afford to start their own orchard. In addition to the cost of the trees and horticultural education, it took three or four years of expenses without income before trees would reliably produce fruit. What was once freely available to African-American became "a white fruit," Okie says. A laborer working in a city at that time made less than $1.50 per day on average, making it likely that, for a black family in the South, those three peaches amounted to roughly a full month's wages. By the end of the 1800s, Okie writes, a landowner who caught three black children pilfering little more than a handful of peaches charged the father of one $21 for three peaches, threatening the children with a chain gang if he caught them in his orchard again. But once peaches were part of the agricultural economy, they became off limits to all but those who could afford them. Black labor was essential for the success of the peach crop, even if African-Americans were rarely credited for the importance of their work.īefore peaches became an important crop, they hung low on branches throughout the South and landowners who saw them as without value were happy to give them freely to slaves. Both required literacy, as well as a certain level of education that was still out of reach for many newly freed men and women.Īn undated photo shows peach pickers being driven to the orchards in Muscella, Ga. To succeed, peach farmers had to be able to access horticultural literature and the latest scientific findings. "Growing peaches for market required expertise that seemed unnecessary with corn and cotton, which any dirt farmer could grow," Okie writes. This cultured crop fit in with the narrative white Southerners were eager to tell about themselves after the Civil War. Gentleman farmers saw fruit cultivation as something particularly refined and European, and a craze for all things "oriental" gave peaches an even greater allure. ![]() "Tellingly," Okie writes, "the only role mentioned for Black southerners in the great Georgia Peach Carnival was as members of the opening procession's 'Watermelon Brigade' " - about 100 African-Americans who marched with the racially laden fruit balanced on their heads. While King Cotton was still an important part of the Southern economy, town councils began sponsoring peach festivals and spreading marketing materials that sung the praises of Georgia-bred peaches like the famous Elberta Peaches. "Cotton had all these associations with poverty and slavery," says Okie, an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Though the story of the post-bellum South is often one of industrialization and urbanization, it was also a time of redefining what agriculture would mean without the enslaved labor plantation owners had relied on. By the 1880s, Fruitland had grown so large and essential that it mailed 25,000 catalogs every year to horticulturists in the United States and abroad.įreedmen now needed year-round employment, and the labor requirements of the peach season - tree trimming and harvest - fit perfectly with the time of year when cotton was slow. After the war, "fruit growing, which to the cotton planter was a secondary matter, one of great solicitude to the farmer," Prosper Berckmans wrote in 1876. But it wasn't until the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery that the sudden availability of labor gave peaches the perfect opening. Horticulture slowly became accepted as a gentleman's pursuit. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Yet, as historian William Thomas Okie writes in his book The Georgia Peach, the fruit may be sweet but the industry in the South was formed on the same culture of white supremacy as cotton and other slave-tended crops.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Georgia Peach Author William Thomas Okie So why is it that Georgia peaches are so iconic? The answer, like so much of Southern history, has a lot to do with slavery - specifically, its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself. But despite its associations with perfectly pink-orange peaches, "The Peach State" of Georgia is neither the biggest peach producing state (that honor goes to California) nor are peaches its biggest crop. At the beginning of the Georgia peach boom, one of Atlanta's major roads was renamed Peachtree Street. Year-round, tourist traps sell mugs, hats, shirts and even snow globes with peaches on them. So why are its peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery - its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.ĭuring peach season, Georgia's roads are dotted with farm stands selling fresh peaches. Georgia isn't the biggest producer of the pink-orange fruit. A vintage postcard from the Peach Tree State. ![]()
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