Old Apple Tree Festival attendees take in a performance by Portland-based ragtime band The Juleps on Saturday at Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree Park. (James Rexroad for The Columbian)Photo Gallery
After 192 years of living, the Old Apple Tree probably has enough friends, one might think.
Yet at Saturday’s Old Apple Tree Festival in Vancouver’s Apple Tree Park, plenty of people formed new connections with the oldest apple tree in the Pacific Northwest. Richard Corbin, 50, and his daughter Jasmine Corbin, 14, were a couple of those festival newcomers.
The pair visited Vancouver Waterfront Park last weekend for the grand opening and saw a sign advertising the Old Apple Tree Festival. They thought it would be a fun time to visit the tree and tour Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.
“We thought it would be cool to see a 100-year-old tree,” Jasmine said.
“It’s kind of historic,” her dad added.
Charles Ray, an urban forester with the city of Vancouver, bagged and passed out Old Apple Tree cuttings at the festival. The cuttings came with directions on what someone could do with them to possibly end up with their own tree descended from the Clark County landmark.
“It’s an early opportunity for the attendees to take a little bit of history home with them,” Ray said.
Ray mentioned there’s about a 50-50 chance a cutting ever yields an actual tree. Vancouver Urban Forestry does its best to track trees descended from the Old Apple Tree. Ray explained that there are clones of the Old Apple Tree throughout the area. Although he doesn’t have an exact number of how many, he said it’s a “small list.”
Maybe the next descendant will be in Roszie and Gary Seistrup’s Vancouver yard. They already have a green apple tree, which Roszie Seistrup said they use mostly to make tart apple pies. She’s also a newcomer to the Old Apple Tree Festival herself, and she said she liked the mixture of vendors, history and education. The cutting gives them a possibility of always having a reminder of the festival.
“I live here in Vancouver, and I had no idea we had an apple tree that old,” Roszie Seistrup said. “I wanted to see it. And I wanted to be able to plant another tree in our backyard just to kind of remember the whole event as well.”
Bob Cromwell, the chief of interpretation with Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, said that luck is, in many ways, one of the reasons the tree has been able to live so long. At the start of the festival, Cromwell mentioned: “If the Old Apple Tree could talk, just imagine how many stories it could tell.” He also explained there’s a 1950 or ’60s-era truck axle inside the tree’s trunk.
Cromwell said some “old-timers” have told him the axle was placed inside the trunk after the 1962 Columbus Day storm because “the storm really did a number on the tree and there were concerns that the trunk was actually going to fail way back then,” he said.
Today, the axle is the reason the trunk is still standing upright. Throughout its life, development has taken place all around the tree while it’s kept living. Highways, the Vancouver Land Bridge, The Waterfront Vancouver. About a hundred years of preservation efforts have helped it keep going through the changes, Cromwell mentioned.
Red Mond, an Urban Forestry specialist, said the tree is still “very, very vigorous” and is “putting out an enormous amount of growth every year.” But he did say that no one knows how much longer it will live.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Mond remarked.
The tree still produces some fruit, which is better for cooking than eating directly, Mond explained. He also said there have been talks about coming up with a bracing system to aid its existence.
“Our hope is to keep it upright,” Mond said, “and hope for the best in the future.”
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