Peach orchard in the fog, Southington, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman
Heavy fog engulfs the orchards of Central Connecticut during a curious warm streak in mid-December. Rows of slumbering peach trees recede into the distance, eventually rendered in silhouette with pines and bare hardwoods at the grove’s edge.
Peaches were introduced by European settlers throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies in the New World as early as the 1600s. “In fact,” recalled one 19th-century author,“ peaches were growing so widely in eastern North America by the time of the American Revolution that many assumed the fruit to be an American native.”
New England was a bit slower to truly embrace the peach, instead relying heavily upon apple and pear trees which could better tolerate the harsh northern climate. While scatterings of peach trees may have been planted here or there for a century or more prior, commercial-scale peach orchards in Connecticut didn’t emerge until the early 1900s.
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