The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious:

In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, discovered a mutant seedling in his orchard of Yellow Bellflower trees. He chopped it down, but the next season, it sprang back through the dirt. He chopped it down again. It sprang back again. "If thee must grow," he told the intrepid sprout, "thee may."

A decade later, Hiatt's tree bore its first fruit. The apples were elongated globes with red-and-gold striped skin, crisp flesh, and a five-pointed calyx. In 1893, when Stark Brothers' Nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a contest to find a replacement for the Ben Davis-then the most widely planted apple in the country, strapping and good-looking but bland-Hiatt submitted his new variety, which he called the Hawkeye. "My, that's delicious," Clarence Stark, the company's president, reportedly said after his first bite.

[...] With its hardy rootstocks and juicy, curvaceous fruit, the Red Delicious quickly became a favorite of growers and consumers from coast to coast-and as its commercial success grew, so did its distance from Hiatt's Hawkeye. In 1923, a New Jersey orchardist wrote to the Starks to report that one limb of a tree he had purchased from the nursery was producing crimson apples while those on the other limbs remained green. A chance genetic mutation that made the apples redden earlier had also given them a deeper, more uniform color, and customers were lining up for a taste. Paul Stark, one of Clarence's sons, travelled up from Missouri and laid down $6,000 for the limb.

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