Peach Preserves: A few families carry on despite decline in Nashville agribusiness

Photos by Eric Nicholson. Joey Jamison, a third-generation peach farmer, cuts into a bud on one of his 4-year-old peach trees. Jamison has managed to hang on in the peach industry by selling at farmers markets and supplying Bryce’s Cafeteria with peaches for its pie.

Originally published in the Texarkana Gazette and on writeforarkansas.org on May 9, 2011

NASHVILLE, Ark.—Above the postmaster’s lacquered oak door in the Nashville Post Office, Bert Johnson’s peach orchard extends to the horizon beneath a cloud-streaked sky.

Workers in baggy overalls and worn fedoras march between rows of leafless peach trees, spraying pesticide from a tanker truck, and, elsewhere, pluck fruit from laden branches. Their faces are anonymous, their expressions fixed and humorless.

Kneeling among them, holding a grafted branch upright while a worker shovels in the ochre soil, is Johnson himself. His eyes, set in an angular, weather-creased face, stare into the distance as if gauging the likelihood of a storm.

He looks much as he did on the day he died, June 27, 1938, when he wrecked his car in the hinterlands of Howard County—the same day the picture was taken on which the portrait is based.

It was far from clear at the time, but Johnson’s death symbolized the beginning of the end of Nashville’s once-thriving peach industry.

The 1939 mural that hangs above the postmaster’s door in the Nashville Post Office depicts Bert Johnson, kneeling, who was the father of the town’s once-thriving peach industry.

‘Peach Capital of the World’
Bert Johnson wasn’t the first to plant peach trees in Howard County.

Early settlers to the area brought peaches and other fruit with them from the east. Commercial production had begun at least by 1880, and the Missouri Pacific Railroad, searching for additional revenue, strongly encouraged peach cultivation in the area.

By the time Johnson planted his first trees in 1904, the peach industry was already beginning to establish itself.

But Johnson did it better, and with more savvy, than anyone else, and he stands in local history as the undisputed father of the peach industry in Nashville.

From an initial 100 acres, Johnson expanded rapidly. Within about a decade, he had multiplied his holdings exponentially and employed 2,500 workers during harvest time.

Johnson was an innovator. He was the first in the area to mechanize planting and cultivation, and he adapted sorting and grading equipment from the citrus industry in Florida for peaches.

He sold small parcels of peach-growing land to foreign missionaries, for which he paid a pro rata share of earnings for the right to harvest. Workers were lodged at on-site boarding houses and hotels and supplied at orchard commissaries—both of which were owned by Johnson.

Johnson eventually accumulated more than 3,000 acres planted in peach trees and his operation was widely proclaimed as the largest orchard in the world. It earned Johnson the title, in fruit-growing circles, of King Peach.

But Johnson was exceptional only in how thoroughly he realized his ambition. While he was piecing together his kingdom, others, lured by his example, sowed the countryside with peach trees until northern Howard County resembled a single, unending orchard.

A newspaper advertisement from the era, name-dropping Johnson, promises fortune seekers “what others have done you can do.”

“Come and see this county and you will find thousands of acres of orchard land awaiting … real men of brains, energy and capital.”

The city of Nashville itself could not resist the transformation in its hinterlands, and the peach became a large part of its identity.

Downtown, peach brokers and suppliers established themselves alongside canneries and peach sheds. An ice plant throbbed day and night to provide ice for thousands of freight cars waiting to deliver Nashville peaches to St. Louis, Chicago and beyond.

Given the volume of peaches that flowed daily through the town, Nashville saw fit to bestow upon itself the title of “Peach Capital of the World.”

A few pink buds cling to Joey Jamison’s peach trees into late March. It’s another three to four months before the peaches are ready for harvest.

Stubborn and nostalgic

Peaches, in a sense, are a part of life in Nashville. A drive down Main Street takes one past the Chamber of Commerce, where a banner announces the Peach Blossom Festival and the Elberta Arts Center next door, which bears the name of the once-ubiquitous peach variety grown here.

Another two blocks is the post office, where Bert Johnson and his orchard greet postal customers.

Two blocks more, a framed city logo, dominated by a peach, hangs from the wall. A right at the stoplight will take one, in a block, to Peachtree Street.

Given their ubiquity in local iconography, peaches themselves are surprisingly difficult to find outside of a grocery store.

The few peaches still produced around Nashville are tucked away in tiny pockets kept alive by men too stubborn or nostalgic to care that Nashville’s peach boom has long since busted.

“I’m one of the few nuts left doing it,” said Joey Jamison as he surveyed the few delicate pink blooms that had persisted to late March.

Jamison is broad-shouldered, reminiscent of a linebacker who has softened at the edges, though not enough to erase the impression of latent force, and affable, with the wry pessimism of a farmer.

He wears a brown baseball cap pulled low on his forehead and a red hooded sweatshirt revealing a pair of overalls and flannel shirt. In his pocket, he carries a pen knife that is readily produced when he cuts into a bud to reveal its inner workings.

Jamison’s orchards, which he farms with his wife, Lou, are sandwiched between a hilly cow pasture and a glinting chicken house that just north of Nashville. The trees are uniform, about as tall as Jamison and carefully pruned to a slender “Y” to maximize sunlight, and arranged in neat rows. A sun-bleached scarecrow, head lolling back, patrols a single row of blackberries.

By now, growing peaches is in Jamison’s blood. His grandfather harvested his first crop in 1930, and, growing up, Jamison had little doubt that he would follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.

Holding a retyped supplier’s list from the 1930s that was salvaged not long ago from a long-vacant downtown building, Jamison flips through page after page of tables linking the grower’s name with the acreage and varieties planted there.

“There’s my grandpa,” Jamison says, scrolling through the list. “There’s my great-uncle.” The page flips. “There’s my other great-uncle.”

Jamison’s relatives were among several dozen peach farmers whose names appeared on a list of a single supplier in Nashville.

Now, there are only four peach-growing operations that remain in the Nashville area, and Jamison is the only one who does it for a living.

Of the other three, one is a high school agriculture teacher, one owns a trucking company and a father-and-son pair run an insurance agency.

It’s a considerable fall from when Johnson had 3,000 acres and each of Jamison’s family acres had more 100 planted in peach trees.

Though he has inherited from Johnson the title of most prominent Howard County peach farmer, Jamison has just 25 acres planted in peaches.

“There used to be thousands of acres,” said Dwight Jones, the elder of the father-son pair, leaning on the counter of his insurance agency. “Now, there’s probably not 100.”

“I don’t imagine there is,” said son Tim Jones. “That about catches all of it.”

Decline
On Oct. 9, 1931, Bert Johnson’s peach orchard, the world’s largest, was put on the auction block.

The previous year had been devastating, with temperatures dropping as low as -16 degrees, wiping out the peach crop. The next summer brought a record harvest in Nashville, but it wasn’t enough to offset rockbottom prices, so, at the onset of the Great Depression, Johnson and other large growers went into foreclosure.

In a chronicle of local families written in 1932 and published in “Corinth Revisited by its Kinfolks,” farmer S.B. Reese predicted the imminent decline of Nashville’s peach industry.

“I wouldn’t be writing about the peach orchards for everybody knows all about that now that ever heard of the country, but I find that people soon forget things, and this may be read when the peach industry is no more and some other industry is in its place,” Reese wrote. “In fact, it is the public opinion that Commercial peach growing on a large scale has seen its best days.”

Reese’s epitaph was a decade premature. The Missouri Pacific Railroad purchased Johnson’s land at auction for the fire-sale price of $35,000 and continued to operate many of his orchards, and most smaller, independent growers were able to ride out the severe weather of 1930 and the next year’s price collapse.

What finally toppled Nashville’s peach industry was nothing so dramatic as biblical weather or global economic catastrophe. It was a labor shortage.

Peaches are a labor-intensive crop. They must be picked by hand to avoid bruising and have to be carefully packed into baskets for shipment, not to mention off-season work of pruning, fertilizing and spraying peach trees and manning the ice factory, peach sheds and associated businesses.

With the entry of the United States into World War II, much of Nasvhille’s labor supply migrated to the front lines or to wartime factories in larger cities.

While the war continued, German prisoners of war from a camp near Delight, Ark., filled the void, but after the end of fighting, too few workers returned, and the worker shortage persisted.

Further shrinking the labor pool was the shift from corn and cotton to chicken and cattle. After harvesting their own crops in the early part of the summer, area farmers would camp with their families on an orchard to make a few extra dollars picking peaches.

Chickens and cattle are yearround concerns, and farmers could no longer afford to spend two weeks on a neighbor’s peach orchard. On top of that, the opening of poultry processing plants offered steady, yearround employment, an appealing alternative to would-be peach pickers.

The decline was gradual but inevitable. The peach festival was cancelled in the late 1940s, and the basket factory stopped making baskets in the early-1960s.

According to an article in Howard County Heritage, a publication celebrating the town’s centennial, “Volume production was pretty much over by the mid-1970s.”

By the 1990s, the number of growers was down to single digits.

The ice plant, which once operated day and night to cool peach-filled freight cars on the adjacent railroad track, is now an abandoned shell.

Momentum
The ice plant that once provided the pulse beat of Nashville’s peach industry is silent now.

It looms four stories above the railroad track, its three-footthick concrete walls overrun by ivy while trees stretch from the floor toward the open, roofless sky.

A fire has gutted the wing where the ice was made, leaving only blackened boards and rusted machinery. A rusted “For Sale” sign, obscured from the dead-end street by overgrown brush, leans against the building.

The abandoned plant is a visible reminder of the Nashville peach industry: once grand and important, now a forgotten relic, an irrecoverable shadow of its former self.

It’s been sad to watch Nasvhille lose what remains such a major part of its identity, Jones said.

“It’s just I guess the way of life now,” Jones said. “It’s turned into an industrial world.”

Jamison has managed to hang on by selling directly to consumers, mostly through farmers markets (Lou Jamison likens her appearances at the Arkansasside farmers market to that of a rock star) and, famously to Bryce’s Cafeteria for the iconic peach pies.

He also opens his orchard by appointment to visitors who want to pick their own.

It’s not as lucrative as the days when Bert Johnson was known as King Peach, but it’s a living and, by now, after three generations, something more.

When asked what has kept him in the business while his neighbors have almost all sold out, Jamison shrugs, like he’s never given the question much thought.

“I still got it in me, I guess,” he says.

He and Lou are hoping that it’s been passed on to their two adult children, Carlee, who works for the Farm Service Agency in Arkadelphia, Ark.,and Riley, who works as an engineer at the Husqvarna plant in Nashville.

Both hated working in the orchards as children, but Jamison is cautiously optimistic that there will be a fourth generation of Jamison peach farmers.

“When you got something that’s been going this long, you want to keep the momentum going.”