Professor Apple: How Tom Burford sowed the seeds of the Virginia hard cider revival

Professor Apple
After a disappointing run as a ferryman on the York River, Daniel Burford came up the James River to Lynchburg in 1713 and planted apple orchards. Since then, Burfords have been growing apples in Amherst County. Tom grew up on a working farm where his family had over 120 apple varieties and drank cider and apple toddies at the table.

“It was cold. You’d been out working in the orchard or the sawmill. The 7-year-old system knew how to handle it,” Tom said of the cider.

The Newtown Pippin apple is known locally as the Albemarle Pippin and was the dominant apple in the Virginia piedmont in the early part of the 20th century.

Tom’s parents home-schooled him, his mother insisting on his learning Greek, Latin and Hebrew and his father encouraging him to experience the farm.

“From my earliest recollection, the quest for experience and learning was overriding everything else. It was a demon of sorts,” Burford said.

When he was 16, Tom boarded a train for Charlottesville and enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he studied philosophy. His father, wanting his son to avoid the heartache of farming, had urged him to study a practicable trade. Tom’s interests were far-ranging and limitless, but his connection to his family farm was unshakable.

With his brother Russell, Tom started Burford Brothers, an umbrella company for enterprises that included a sawmill, a forestry business, and a construction company that specialized in passive solar construction. The company designed and manufactured a solar domestic hot water system that they eventually sold to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Tom describes Russell as a “primordial” tool maker and inventor. The two men built replica World War I bi-planes and flew them around Amherst County. But the family farm and agriculture continued as an important enterprise. In the ’80s Tom ran a nursery with between 10,000 and 15,000 trees, selling them nationally to people looking for heritage apple stock.

You have to experience Tom to understand his gift. He can tell you the story of American apples from 1600 to the present in a breezy way, touching on the vast seedling orchards that populated the James River Valley before the dawn of leisure time in the 1750s that led to the cultivation of valuable varieties. Then on through the cider heydays to the dawn of the steam engine and an agricultural revolution that industrialized and regionalized local economies. Access to other forms of alcohol and sugar made cider less important. The apples gathered in surplus piles, attracting insects that devastated crops. Chemical companies invented pesticides and perfected DDT, which killed all the honeybees. By World War II apples were being grown for motorists touring the countryside in autumn and for grocery stores, where they were shined and stacked to be eaten with the eyes.

Talk with Tom once and you understand why people are drawn to him, and, in turn, how he draws people to apples. You get the sense he has discovered many things about life along the way, but his love for apples and trees are among the simplest and most satisfying.

“Every day I learn something new when I walk through an orchard. At 76, when somebody says, ‘Well you know it all,’ I say, ‘I wish I did.’ I’m just beginning. Particularly as the world changes around us,” Burford said.

But lest you think old Tom is just a storyteller, take his quest for the Harrison apple as proof of his punch. The New Jersey variety, which William Coxe identified as a superior cider production apple in his 1817 catalogue, was one that Tom’s father had actively searched for during his life, in part because it was said to yield 25 percent more juice per volume and sold for four times the price of other varieties.

According to Tom, he discovered a Harrison apple tree in a derelict orchard at the home of a friend of a friend in Paramus, New Jersey. After dinner the elegant octegenarian said he thought he might have a rare apple tree and sent Tom out to inspect it with a groundskeeper.

“I just about fainted. It was the gut feeling: This is a Harrison. So I was mute for a while and I went back and told him I think you have a very rare apple out there that’s one I’ve been looking for and one my father looked for for many years,” Burford said.

He took a cutting on the condition he would never tell anyone where he got it and after growing the tree, announced he had found the long lost Harrison. He has since worked tirelessly to convince people of its virtue––namely the perfect balance of sugar, acid and tannin for cider––with a certain amount of success.

Johnny Appleseed
Diane Flynt was the first commercial dry cider maker in Virginia’s new era. When she and her husband bought their farm between Floyd and the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mid-1990s, there weren’t any footsteps to follow.

The farm at Foggy Ridge was the result of a committed search she conducted with her husband Chuck in preparation for leaving behind their corporate lives for agricultural ones. They found the land first, and the land was made for apples. Diane had a seven-year plan to learn how to run an orchard and cider operation as she transitioned out of work.

Looking for know-how, she got hooked into the national scene of cider makers. There were only a handful then. Steve Wood had been growing cider varieties since the early ’80s at Poverty Lane Orchards near Lebanon, New Hampshire. Terrence Maloney was making cider at West County Cider in Colrain, Massachusetts. There were a few others out west.

Naturally, Flynt found her way to Tom Burford.

“I was connected to Tom just through the apple world. His name came up. I think Steve Wood asked me if I knew him,” Flynt said.

Wood had been making English cider under the name Farnum Hill Cider from apples he grew in his orchards, many of which were traditional French and English cider varieties. He has been a mentor to many cider producers since, in part because of his background in running a commercial fruit growing operation that once focused on putting McIntosh and Cortland apples in grocery stores.

Flynt consulted Burford on the layout and variety list for her orchard. Tom told her to plant Harrisons.

“I think Tom is a national treasure for many reasons. His knowledge base…to have grown up with the number of apple varieties he did and to have known them intimately,” Flynt said.

“You can read books. You can talk to pomologists who know the science. But nothing in the world of farming substitutes for experience.”

Flynt, whose farm sits at a 3,000′ elevation in prime apple growing territory, put 40 Harrisons into her test orchard, which contained 30 varieties and around 300 trees. Today she believes she has the largest Harrison planting in the country.

Flynt’s Foggy Ridge cider sells in big wine markets like Charleston, Chapel Hill, and New York. But she has taken up Tom’s mission to spread the word about planting cider varieties locally. This year, she convinced John Saunders of Silver Creek Orchard in Nelson County to take enough grafting wood from her orchard to plant 5,000 new trees, including Hewe’s Crab, Ashmeade’s Kernel, and Harrison varieties.

She and Burford have started Apple Corps, a project aimed at identifying valuable old apple varieties on forgotten trees.

“The real idea is to find apples in your own backyard or at your neighbor’s farm or in a cemetery that are good apples and are interesting apples and bring them to Tom and let’s figure out what they are,” Flynt said.

Flynt makes a clean-tasting, American-style blended cider, and she isn’t sentimental about the challenge she faces in getting people to buy it.

“We need to make cider that is so good that people buy it and drink it in preference to what they’re currently buying and drinking,” Flynt said. “The story only gets us so far. We need them to come back and buy it every week like they buy a New Zealand sauvignon blanc. We are in the premium wine market and that’s a pretty small market and it’s a global competition.”