About

Between 1886 and 1942, USDA artists painted over 7,500 watercolors documenting America’s incredible fruit diversity. The paintings vanished into government storage for decades until digital activists freed them through a grant to digitize them in 2009, followed by Freedom of Information Act requests in 2015.

What This Collection Is

In 1886, the newly established Division of Pomology embarked on an ambitious project: hire artists to paint every significant variety of fruit in America. The watercolors served as technical documents that revealed what early color photography couldn’t capture — the subtle color gradations and textures that distinguished one variety from another.

The USDA distributed these as lithographs in bulletins that farmers used for identification, with some deliberately painted in states of decay to show what diseases to watch for, or marked as maturity tests or studies on the effects of cold storage. After the program ended in 1942, the paintings languished in government storage, surviving Washington’s humid summers by luck more than by design.

Who I Am & Why I Built This

I built this as part of a larger mission to preserve agricultural biodiversity. I’m starting a small (well, tiny) cidery in Oregon I’m calling Landrace, and I got obsessed with apple varieties through making cider. The more I learned about heritage apples, the more fascinated I became with their stories and unique character, the interaction with culture and relationship to place.

While the USDA collection is now freely available online, it remains scattered across predictably clunky government websites, Wikimedia Commons, and twitter bots. Finding specific varieties requires a lot of clicking and you have to know what you’re looking for.

My goal with this site is to make this treasure more accessible to growers, researchers, fruit hunters, and anyone curious about the diversity we’ve lost. I’ve tried to make it easy to browse by variety, understand the geographic origins of the fruit, examine how they changed over time. There’s also a Chrome extension that shows a random painting each time you open a new tab — I guarantee you will discover fruit you’ve never heard of.

I’m a software engineer by background, but what I really get excited about it is growing food, foraging, and turning all that goodness into alcohol. Frankly, I’m deeply skeptical of tech these days, but apps like iNaturalist and Merlin have shown how technology can deepen rather than diminish our connection to the natural world. That’s what I hope to do here.

Why It Matters Today

Apple hunters across the country use these paintings as field guides to identify “extinct” varieties that are actually still growing wild in forgotten orchards. Retired FBI agent David Benscoter used nine different Nero apple paintings spanning thirty years to confirm he’d found this lost variety still growing on Steptoe Butte in Washington, at the ruins of the original homestead where it was first planted in the 1880s. In North Carolina, retired engineer Tom Brown has spent twenty years tracking down over a thousand varieties that most had written off as extinct, often starting with clues from these paintings. The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project used the collection to match fruit from a lone tree to four paintings of the Colorado Orange, a variety that had once made Stark Bros 100 Best Apples of All-Time list before disappearing.

The collection serves as a visual baseline of what American agricultural diversity once looked like. In the late 1800s, botanist W.H. Ragan had catalogued fourteen thousand distinct apple varieties growing across the country’s seedling orchards. Today we’re down to a handful of commercial varieties that persist in mainstream consciousness. Every lost apple found and saved is a rejection of the modern disease of uniformity and scale, the reduction of our taste to whichever grocery store varieties have the best marketing.

The People Who Kept it Alive

I am incredibly grateful for the apple enthusiasts who refused to let the paintings die. First, Lee Calhoun discovered them in the late 1970s, and eventually published Old Southern Apples, which featured the watercolors and marked the first time these works reached the general public.

Then Dan Bussey, who spent 30 years making pilgrimages to the library doing research for his seven volume tome, Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, which he published in 2016 after Kent Whealy (founder of Seed Savers Exchange) formed a publishing house to bring it to print. Whealy himself joined the board of the Ceres Trust and led the charge to fund the digitization of the collection, which cost $300,000 in 2009.

And last to Parker Higgins, who got frustrated when he came across the paintings in 2015 and realized the USDA had digitized the paintings then locked them behind a paywall that had generated virtually no money. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request that exposed these embarrassing revenue figures, then wrote a viral blog post shaming the USDA into dropping their paywall later that year.

What’s Next

This project grew out of my work on RootSeller, a farm discovery platform where farmers can list the specific heritage varieties they grow. Building that system got me fascinated by the idea of mapping who’s growing what varieties where. This watercolor collection is the foundation for what I’m calling The Landrace Project: creating tools to help people find, grow, and share heritage varieties.

The goal is to connect with apple hunters, organizations like The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project and the Temperate Orchard Conservancy, and local seed swaps like the amazing Agrarian Sharing Network here in the Willamette Valley to catalog the conservation work that’s already happening. Many of these varieties exist in small numbers, maintained by passionate individuals who may not be connected to larger networks. By mapping this diversity and making it more visible, we can help ensure these genetic treasures don’t disappear when their current guardians can no longer care for them.

If you want to help out with this, have connections to people or organizations working on this already, or can support in any way, please reach out! My email is haupt.andrew@protonmail.com.