Iowa was the nation’s sixth-largest producer of apples a century ago before an unexpected blizzard on Nov. 11, 1940, froze the sap in trees, virtually eliminating the state’s apple industry.

The Armistice Day storm 84 years ago this week caught Iowa’s apple trees “totally unprepared because the weather had been warm,” the Des Moines Register’s Farm Editor J.S. Russell wrote in January 1941.

Temperatures in Des Moines dropped 31 degrees in two hours from 54 to 23 degrees by 8 a.m. and continued to fall, settling at 9 degrees for a single-day drop of 45 degrees.

Russell explained that in the fall “the sap goes down in trees,” creating “a state of dormancy from which they do not emerge until spring.” 

In Iowa, he added, “the blizzard … came on the heels of three [unseasonably warm] days of rain.”

“The sap had not gone down. And the result was that the trees were frozen. … The real worry is whether … orchards will ever bear [fruit] again,” the farm editor wrote.

Most apple trees did not. Iowa’s 1941 apple crop was only 15% of what it had been before the storm, according to a 1999 study by the Leopold Center at Iowa State University.

Looking back from the 21st century, where individual factory farms stretch across thousands of acres of row crops and massive confined animal feeding operations are the norm, it’s hard to imagine how diverse Iowa farms were in 1940.

Back then, 160 acres was a big family farm with a variety of animals from cattle to hogs, sheep, chickens and even a few horses. Most Iowa farmers grew corn, barley, oats, wheat and hay. (Soybeans did not become a major crop until after World War II.)

Farm families also had gardens for potatoes, green beans, sweet corn and strawberries. Many also grew apples, either for their own use or for sale.

According to the Leopold Center, apples originated in Asia and arrived in England during the first century B.C. Pilgrims imported the first apples to the New World, and the first American orchard was planted in the Boston area around 1630.

Massachusetts native Johnathan Chapman, also known as Johnny Appleseed, was credited with spreading apple seeds throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois from the 1790s until his death in 1845. Chapman was such a cultural hero that Walt Disney made an animated film in 1948 that solidified the legend of Johnny Appleseed.  

Iowa apples have no known ties to Chapman, but we did have our own apple man, Madison County farmer Jesse Hiatt, who is credited with discovering red Delicious apples.

Hiatt, a Quaker farmer, settled southwest of Winterset in 1856 and planted an orchard. One day, he noticed a seedling growing between his neat row of trees. He tried repeatedly to kill the stray sprout, but it kept returning. After two years, he let it grow.

During the 1890s, Hiatt twice sent fruit from that tree to a major apple contest in Missouri, where it was twice judged the best. Unfortunately, the first year the judges lost the tag identifying the grower. Not until the second year did Hiatt get credit.

Hiatt named his apples “Hawkeye,” but a Missouri judge had a better name “Delicious,” which is what they were called when they were marketed nationwide with great success.

In 1957, the Des Moines Register wrote: “The offspring of that first Delicious apple tree now numbers seven or eight million” with an annual market value of $20 million.

The Delicious apple’s mother tree was a victim of the 1940 Armistice Day freeze.

As noted, Iowa’s apple industry never recovered from that event. After World War II, many Iowa orchards were plowed under and planted to the then-new miracle crop, soybeans.

In recent years, Iowans have shown renewed interest in apples. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach reports that today about 150 Iowa apple growers interact directly with consumers, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in 2022 that 498 of Iowa’s 86,911 farms received some revenue from apple production. ν