As family legend has it, Ralph Griffith Levering was tired of having to stoop for a living. A sweet potato and strawberry farmer near Knoxville, Tennessee, he wanted to reach for the sky as he worked. So in 1907 Frank’s grandfather wrote the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D. C. Where in the South, he asked, was the best place to plant an apple orchard? Where would apples grow best? Where, in the fragile stages of bud, blossom, and embryonic fruit, would apples most likely escape the spring freezes that could destroy an entire crop in a few hours?

On the southeastern slope of the Blue Ridge conditions are most favorable for planting apple trees, came the reply. There the soil is fertile and deep, the sunlight abundant. There—because of something called the thermal belt—temperatures on cold spring nights are usually warmer than on the crest of the range or in the valley below.

The thermal belt, the department explained, is a zone created by a pattern of air movement on a cold, still night. Each day after a cold front has pushed through, the sun heats the earth. At night the warm air rises and the cold air sinks along the range, leaving a layer of colder air on the valley floor, a warmer layer on the slopes, then another colder layer at the crest. On a still night, an apple crop is more likely to survive on the side of the mountain than in the valley below, while apple trees planted on the crest of the range are consistently exposed to lower temperatures during the risk period from late March to late May.

Then thirty-six, a vigorous man of medium height with a close-cropped dark beard, Ralph Levering decided to take a walk. A long walk. Leaving his wife, Clara Osborne Levering—almost three months pregnant—and two young children in Maryville, Tennessee, in August of 1907, he caught a train to Asheville, North Carolina, then climbed high into the Blue Ridge, heading northeast along the southeastern exposure of the range. Following the Department of Agriculture’s recommendations, he was looking for his own promised land—for just the right place to start an orchard.

Days turned into weeks as Ralph made his way over steep ridges, across isolated mountain coves. In moonshine country, he was several times mistaken for a revenue agent by suspicious mountaineers with rifles. Sometimes he camped at night; more often he stayed with strangers whom he insisted on paying for room and board. Commercial apple orchards, he discovered, were nonexistent in these Carolina mountains; but almost every mountain family had an apple tree or two. Everywhere he went, Ralph asked the same questions: When was the last time spring cold had killed the apples? How many years in living memory had apple crops been lost?

In late September Ralph crossed the Virginia line and reached the Carroll County community of Fancy Gap, just six miles southwest of the next major gap between the peaks—Orchard Gap. He had walked over two hundred miles, been away from home for six weeks. It was time to see his family. Descending out of the mountains to Mount Airy, North Carolina, he boarded a train for Knoxville.

But though he had found good sites and land was available to buy, Sam Levering’s father was not yet satisfied that he had seen enough of the Blue Ridge to make a decision. After a week’s sojourn in Tennessee, he took a train to Roanoke, Virginia.

Now he walked southwest, again in the direction of Carroll County. This time he found commercial orchards at Bent Mountain, but in a letter he wrote home to Tennessee, he reported that too many crops had been lost there to suit him. In a few weeks he reached Friends Mission, a tiny Quaker settlement in Patrick County, only ten miles from Carroll. This was a good omen: Ralph Levering and his wife, Clara, were devout members of the Society of Friends.

In early November, on the western edge of Patrick County, Ralph found the first place he really wanted. Unlike many coves he’d seen, this one tilted gently between two unusually high, protective ridges; the soil was deep, loam rich, and drought resistant. And the family wouldn’t be far from a Quaker community.

But it wasn’t to be. Garland Marshall, the land’s owner, had no interest in selling.

Where Patrick and Carroll Counties meet, the front wall of the Blue Ridge turns northward for several miles, veers southwestward again past a gap in the peaks, then dips southward briefly, forming a horseshoe in the range that sends long spur ridges down to the valley floor. At the eastern edge of this horseshoe that forms the community of Orchard Gap, Ralph came upon the Coveland Orchard, its trees not yet of bearing age. Henry Woods—an experienced apple grower originally from Crozet, Virginia—was the orchard manager. Though Woods could not yet report on crop production, Ralph was pleased that Woods was willing to help him get started should he buy land in the community.

Just over the next two spur ridges from Coveland Orchard, Ralph discovered two superb sites. He preferred the one farthest to the southwest, where the Shadrick family had two acres of Buckingham apple trees that had not lost a crop since 1878. But the Shadricks weren’t selling, either.

In the adjacent cove to the northeast, a man in his late fifties lived with his wife and younger children in a two-story, one-room log cabin amid the November stubble of a cornfield. The cove was steeper and not as wide as the Shadrick cove, but tall ridges offered shelter from the wind. The porter-loam soil—though in spots badly eroded—was generally black and deep. And Ralph remembered what Clara had told him: “Ralph, if thee can find a place where I can see for fifty miles from the front porch, that would be good, too.” Of all the sites that Ralph had seen in a three-month, 375-mile trek, this was the only one that had a view for Clara. Two additional factors fueled Ralph’s interest. Twelve miles south, in Mount Airy, was a thriving Quaker meeting that the family could attend. And Mount Airy was a railhead—he hoped to ship many of his apples by train.

But Alex McMillian was a shrewd mountaineer. Yes, he was willing to sell—but it wouldn’t come cheap. For “40 acres, more or less,” as the deed read, Ralph Levering paid six hundred dollars, more than twice the going rate for that amount of mountain land. Later an accurate survey revealed that in fact Ralph had purchased almost fifty acres. But no matter. Living out his days at the foot of the mountain, McMillian was heard to boast that he had really gotten the best of that young “fur-e-ner.”

In February 1908 Ralph, Clara, their seven-year-old son, Griffith, and their three-year-old daughter, June, arrived by horse and wagon at their new home. They were 1,860 feet above sea level, in the heart of the thermal belt. Two weeks later, in what had been the McMillian family’s log cabin, Samuel Ralph Levering was born. Delivered by a legendary country doctor, Sam was to remain the youngest member of the family—and would outlive them all in a lifetime spanning the more than eighty-year history of Levering Orchard.

Orchards started from scratch take a long time to bear fruit. Ralph Levering was fortunate to have his new neighbor Henry Woods advise him as to which varieties to plant, to teach him grafting techniques. But Ralph could expect a decade or so between the time of planting—1909 and 1910—and his first significant harvest. In the meantime he had a young family to feed.

To clean up his land, Ralph gathered thousands of loose stones and laid stone walls along the contours of the cove. Then, with his father, who came to help from Tennessee, he built the barn that still stands east of our house, with ample room for a horse and a milk cow. Next came a large chicken coop and the “corn crib”—a wooden building for corn storage. Finally, Ralph and his father and men from the community built the spacious house into which the family moved in 1910. Painted with a mixture of linseed oil and iron oxide powder, the facades of the Red House faced precisely north, south, east, and west—Ralph had designed the new home on the points of a compass. Down the fill, just twenty yards east of where we live now, was the log cabin, which stood empty until the early 1940s, when Sam and Miriam had it razed.

Until the apple trees started bearing, Ralph and Clara made their living primarily by selling eggs laid by their chickens. From home they mailed as many as sixty dozen eggs a week by parcel post to Washington, D.C., where Ralph’s sisters sold them on a regular route. To supplement their income—and as a service to an isolated community that had few public schools—Clara taught school in their home. Among her many pupils were Sam and his siblings.

In the early 1920s, at the time the orchard was coming into its own, Sam moved in with his two aunts and attended a Washington, D.C., high school. In 1926 he enrolled at Cornell University, where he studied and taught pomology for seven and a half years, intending eventually to return home and take over the family orchard. Most summers Sam could be found back at Orchard Gap, where there was plenty of practical orchard experience to complement his new training in plant physiology, plant nutrition, and the like.

Ralph’s long walk was paying off. Rows of twenty-five-foot-tall apple trees stood regimentally across the cove, as if guarding the Red House. Ever-increasing crops of Yorks, Albemarle Pippins, Magnum Bonums, and Winesaps were coming through the spring cold every year. To grade and store his apples before selling them, Ralph and hired hands built an “apple cellar” across the road from the barn—a sixty-foot-long, forty-foot-wide underground room with concrete and stone walls. Like a cave, the apple cellar stayed cool even on the hottest days.

Sales were good and getting better. Ralph had never needed to ship apples by rail; the age of the internal-combustion engine had arrived. From September until Christmas trucks climbed Orchard Gap Road, winding down the orchard lane and loading up at the apple cellar. And Ralph had established a regular route of customers in Winston-Salem, to whom he home-delivered apples twice a week in his Model A truck.

Equally satisfying to Ralph and Clara was what having a productive business meant to their community. Both prior to and during the Depression, their orchard provided jobs for dozens of mountaineers, among whom was Ralph’s crew foreman, a hickory-tough neighbor named Arthur Dawson. By all accounts Ralph’s long-standing relationship with Arthur was forged in mutual respect and affection. Each of the two men was a hardworking, staunch Christian; each was devoted to the art of fruit growing.

But in a community where formal education was scarcer than hen’s teeth, Ralph Levering remained a curiosity. Before he’d married Clara and become a farmer in Tennessee, Ralph had gotten a master’s degree in international law at Columbia University. His interests ranged far beyond Orchard Gap and growing apples. A lover of Romantic poetry, he was regularly heard reciting Keats and Shelley to his cow as he milked her in the barn. Once a week, for more than twenty years, he wrote a letter to the Winston-Salem Journal, usually on a subject of national or international concern. These letters—along with his regular apple route in Winston-Salem—brought him a measure of regional renown. Even now, almost half a century after his death, Ralph Levering is remembered by old-timers in the region as the “old Quaker gentleman” who delivered apples door to door and who wrote all those letters to the Journal.

To earn its keep, an orchard must constantly be replenished with new trees, must adapt to changing consumer tastes, new technology, and new methods of production. In the late 1920s and 1930s, while Sam was in school and later working for the Farm Credit Administration in Washington, he and his father often disagreed about the direction the family orchard should take. With age Ralph had grown conservative, a man for whom the tried-and-true was almost always best. Even the new Blue Ridge Parkway, built as a Works Progress Administration project in the 1930s—which ran just north of Ralph’s land along the crest of the range—was not to his liking. Sam, with his Cornell education and exposure to state-of-the-art orchards, was on the cusp of change. Luckily for the future of the orchard, in dealing with his father he had a mind of his own.

For Sam the future was in newer varieties that consumers would prefer when they saw and tasted them. The future was also in increased production, packing apples in trays to ship rather than selling them loose to local buyers, refrigerated storage, and an expanded work force. From money saved while at Cornell and in Washington, D.C., he purchased land adjoining Ralph’s fifty acres and planted Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Staymen Winesaps, varieties requiring the refrigerated storage facility that Ralph opposed. Against his father’s wishes, he returned home to plant part of the home cove in these same varieties, even as Ralph was replanting a block in Winesaps—an apple that soon became obsolete. In 1939 Sam, Miriam, and their infant daughter, Lois, moved from Washington, D.C., to an orchard with varieties reflecting the different strategies of father and son.

But Ralph Levering turned sixty-eight in 1939, and for him the race was now to the swift. Soon playing only an advisory role in the conduct of the business, he wrote his letters, enjoyed the birth of Sam and Miriam’s next three daughters, and remained active in local and Quaker affairs until his death in 1945. Until she died in 1961, Clara continued to live in the Red House with Frank’s aunt June.

To grade, store, and market the swelling volume of apples, Sam abandoned the apple cellar and built a two-story packhouse along Orchard Gap Road at the foot of the mountain. With two large grading machines, cavernous rooms where apples could be refrigerated, additional storage space for thousands of empty bushel-size crates, retail facilities, and a loading dock, the packhouse was a community showcase. For four months every fall, as many as twenty-five women and men worked in Sam’s packhouse, eager for the paychecks that supplemented often meager yearly incomes.

Sam did not disappoint them. The 1940s and early 1950s were a time of record prosperity at the orchard, with Levering apples being trucked throughout the Southeast. Sam spread the wealth—bestowing generous bonuses on employees and paying higher than standard wages in the community. But labor was still cheap, and Sam could afford to hire more workers than he needed, to keep mediocre hands on the payroll because he wanted to help them and their families. To this day stories of Sam’s generosity abound in the community: of making loans to men he knew would never pay him back, of helping illiterate people fill out government forms and receive benefits, of hiring workers who—for a variety of reasons—had been fired or were unemployable elsewhere. A tenderhearted Christian, Sam was always willing to give a prospective employee a second chance at his orchard.

From 1922, when he was ten years old, Arthur Dawson’s oldest son, Garnet, had worked summers and, later, full-time at the orchard. With Sam’s return to Virginia, Garnet replaced his father as foreman of the year-round field crew. Thus close ties between the Dawson and Levering families continued into a second generation, with Garnet every bit a match for his father in physical toughness and orchard smarts.

In the mid- to late 1940s, Sam expanded his operation once more, first by purchasing and planting the Shadrick Cove, later by partnering with Garnet and a third man in High Cliff Orchard, which they purchased from a neighbor. A few years later Sam acquired a young orchard started by a cousin of Miriam’s who’d gotten cold feet about the apple business. These additional orchards increased the volume of apples passing through Sam’s packhouse to an early 1960s peak of seventy-five thousand bushels. In number of bushels produced, he had become one of the leading apple growers in Virginia.

But even amid this cornucopia, Levering Orchard was in decline. In the conflict between Christianity and capitalism that continues in Sam to this day, the former—in something approaching its most idealistic form—usually won out. Though labor was becoming increasingly expensive, Sam was reluctant to lay off workers who needed a job. And there were other factors. The 1940s and early 1950s had seen years of windfall profits. Now margins on apple orchards—even under the most efficient management—were close to the bone. Competition from the Pacific Northwest—particularly with the popular Red Delicious apple—had lowered prices, while overhead expenses ranging from fertilizers to new equipment continued to rise. It was a time for belt tightening, but Sam’s heart was not always in it. At the same time, he and Miriam chose not to pare down the significant amount of volunteer time they spent away from the orchard as peace activists. In their absence worker productivity could only decrease.

On December 10, 1965, a stunning event brought to a head the question of whether Levering Orchard should continue. For reasons that remain mysterious, the packhouse caught fire in broad daylight and burned to the ground, despite the best efforts of firefighters from four counties. Luckily, all of Sam’s twenty-five packhouse employees escaped unscathed—though the lights in a grading room abruptly went out, and the pitch-black room filled with smoke before the exit door was opened and the room evacuated.

With thousands of bushels of premium Christmas apples burned to a crisp and the building not fully insured, the fire was a financial as well as an emotional shock to the family. Then the only child remaining at home, Frank remembers his mother suggesting that this might be an opportunity to bow out of the orchard business, a chance for his parents to concentrate on their peace and social concerns. But Sam would have none of it. For him it was a chance to modernize the business, to be a phoenix rising from the ashes to make things better.

The new packhouse went up the following summer—a long, blue, steel building with forklifts and a grading machine, two loading docks, and storage facilities. It belonged to the newly organized Parkway Apple Growers Cooperative—a group of local fruit growers, with Sam and Miriam the majority stockholders. To secure the loan, the two Leverings put their own assets at risk.

With apples not profitable, Sam purchased more land and planted peach orchards—his first major venture into the stone fruits that now comprise the majority of the orchard’s roughly seven thousand fruit trees. Later he planted nectarines and cherries. He even planted an acre or so of plums. Levering Orchard, he was determined, was going to make its comeback with fewer apples and more summer fruits.

And it was coming back—to that end, Sam was willing to stake his reputation, his pride, and his own and Miriam’s estate.

“Fruitopia,” Frank’s mother called Levering Orchard when he was a teenager. Once Miriam coined the word, she used it often, usually without irony. Despite its problems, the orchard was a good place to raise her family, what she called a “character-strengthening” environment for kids learning the value of working hard and getting along with others. “Fruitopia,” she believed, had provided a rich family life and plenty of adventure for three generations, including that of her own parents. In the early 1940s Sam and Miriam built her parents, Earl and Lois Whitmarsh Lindsey, a small cottage fifty yards northwest of the brick house. There the Lindseys lived out their days after Earl’s retirement as a Methodist minister in Pennsylvania. Both loved the rhythm of the seasons, the interaction of the family with the mountain community. Long wanting to be a writer, before his death Earl Lindsey completed a roman a clef he called Smiling Cove.

As Frank was growing up, there was no more vivid season than autumn, when carloads of professional black pickers from Florida arrived for apple harvest. These men were not migrant workers in the usual sense; for ten months every year they lived in their own homes and picked in the citrus groves near Wabasso and Vero Beach. Then—led by Darius Rigby, their crew chief—as many as a dozen pickers worked at the orchard for two months, eating and sleeping in the Red House. Six days a week they picked apples at a phenomenal speed—some up to 175 bushels in one day—for fifty cents a bushel. The coves echoed with the voices of men who seemed to love their work. Frank looked forward to being with them, to hearing the exotic flavor of their shouts, their gospel songs, and their animated conversation as they sped through the trees with their canvas picking bags slung over their shoulders, clambering up and down twenty-two-foot ladders. When a picker had finished a tree, he’d sing out across the orchard to Rigby: “Uh, tree man! Show me a tree!” Assigning every man a new tree, an always feverish Rigby would reply: “Right here, man! Hurry, man! Hurry!” Relatively quiet the rest of the year, the orchard was a hive of exuberant activity in the fall.

After the pickers left in late October, pruning began. Led by Garnet Dawson, a crew ranging from four to twelve men wielded pruning saws from late fall on through the winter to open up, shape, and top the trees. When pruning was finished, there remained the task of clearing out, by hand, the thickets of brush beneath the trees. On rainy or snowy days or in bitter cold, the men repaired broken apple crates beside a fire in the open-ended crate shed near the packhouse or did mechanic’s work in the adjacent cinder-block garage.

Early to mid-March was the time for planting. Trees Sam had ordered from nurseries around the country arrived in thick bundles, packed in moss and wrapped in burlap. Usually two men would do the planting: one to dig the hole and fill it up, one to nip overlong seedlings with snippers, making them proportionate to the size of the roots to ensure a good start.

In late March, as the days lengthened and the tree sap rose, the men dumped fifty-pound sacks into buckets and spread fertilizer by hand in wide circles beneath the trees. Soon those same trees erupted in blossoms—and with them came the bees. For years a fearless soul named Ken Haynes was—among other things—the orchard beekeeper, tending as many as 20 hives east of the barn. Warm, sunny days—and Ken’s year-round care and feeding of the bees—ensured the pollination necessary for most of our fruit crops. When Ken left the orchard for another job, Sam contracted Herbert Joyce, an equally fearless veteran “bee man” from whom we continue to rent hives every spring.

Spraying started in early April and continued into the summer. In May came the first mowing, followed by a second mowing in the dreaded heat of August. All summer long it was all the men could do to keep up with the work: picking cherries, hand-thinning peaches and nectarines and apples so that limbs wouldn’t break and the remaining fruit would grow bigger, picking peaches and nectarines and plums and hauling them into the packhouse to grade and sell.

For us, this cycle of the orchard year has continued largely unchanged. Though the land we work is down to ninety acres—Sam and his partners sold High Cliff Orchard, and a second old apple orchard has been abandoned—the tasks that must be done are essentially the same now as they were a generation ago. But with increased mechanization as well as our efforts to cut labor costs, the year-round work force has shrunk to zero. We’re doing much of the work ourselves, with as little seasonal help as we can manage. With far fewer apples than when Frank was growing up, we no longer see, hear—or hire—the pickers from Florida. Autumn in the coves is quieter, and not as much fun, without them.

What apple trees we do plant these days are “specialty” apples—varieties not generally available in supermarkets that attract discriminating customers while not competing with the glut of standard varieties like Red Delicious. With apples—as with all our other fruits—the emphasis is now on retail sales at the packhouse, not on the costly packing and shipping of times past. In years when the stone fruits are scarce, the harder-to-kill apples are an “anchor to windward,” as Sam likes to say, ensuring that the orchard will not go without fruit.

In the early morning hours of May 8, 1986, Ralph Levering’s thermal belt lived up to its reputation. In the valley half a mile below us, the temperature dipped to 24 degrees and stayed there for a few hours—cold enough to destroy a cherry crop. But in the cove, the seven A.M. reading was 29 degrees—a near miss. Barring another, more devastating late freeze, Levering Orchard was back in the cherry business in 1986, after slim pickings the year before.

In anticipation of our largest crop ever, we sent out an extensive mailing list of postcards to Sam and Miriam’s regular customers. The season would start on May 29. At 6:30 on the appointed day, the first car appeared at the “checkin station”—a card table near the barn where Miriam signed in customers, gathering names and addresses for future use, and issued buckets. There she would also direct traffic to one of four parking lots, open fields in two coves from which our customers could walk to the trees.

More cars appeared shortly. All day they kept coming—almost more people than we could handle, winding down through the cove on the one-lane gravel road. At the ripest trees, Frank and a muscular young helper named Joey Haynes received the customers and set ladders for them in the cherry trees, moving them to another location as needed. With metal hooks on their buckets to hang on a ladder rung or cherry limb, the customers picked—and picked. Large, dark red Viva cherries hung in bunches, irresistible both to the hand and to the mouth. All day people from as far away as South Carolina—most from cities and small towns in North Carolina and Virginia—toted twelve-pound buckets of cherries to their cars and continued down the one-way lane to the packhouse. At dusk dozens of pickers remained in the field with Frank and Joey, while at the packhouse Wanda, Sam, and Hattie Mae Love weighed the cherries, deducted the one-pound weight of the bucket, and were paid by the pound.

Word spread beyond our regular customers. Day after day, six days a week, the crowds came until, in four weeks, the trees were stripped bare. Ours was indeed a smiling cove: a small amount of rain had not damaged the crop, and gross sales exceeded the previous record, set in 1984, by more than a third.

For Sam particularly, the season was cause for celebration. For years he had hoped that one or both his sons would follow him into the business, as he had followed his father. Now that Frank was back home, it was harder than ever for Sam to fail: the dream of succession was vitally linked to Sam’s thirst for success. Now he had proved to his son and daughter-in-law that there could be money in these trees—not just beauty and a way of life.

We knew how lucky we were. Hoping that we, too, could have a rewarding life here, Sam and Miriam had knocked themselves out for us, as well as for the orchard we shared in common. It was almost unimaginable: two people in their seventies—one who’d suffered a heart attack the previous year—working fourteen-hour days, collapsing into bed when darkness fell, only to rise again the next morning and do it all again. How many people our own age were capable of such effort?

But the days of their labor could not last forever. Not too far in the future, we knew, the long tradition of Levering Orchard would be entirely in our hands.