Parcel 18-442 had been assembled from older tracts.
The earliest deed she could easily obtain dated to 1912.
Samuel and Ruth Bellamy.
The Bellamy family owned the hillside for more than fifty years.
Census records listed Samuel as farmer.
Later his son Walter.
An agricultural schedule from the 1920s recorded orchard acreage, though not varieties.
Mara searched old newspapers.
Bellamy apples appeared in several advertisements.
One from 1931:
BELLAMY ORCHARD. WINTER APPLES, CIDER FRUIT, STORAGE KINDS. BRING BOXES.
Another:
FALL APPLES. LIMBERTWIG, WINESAP, YELLOW BELLFLOWER AND OTHERS.
Mara printed it.
Called Walter Avery.
“Limbertwig.”
“That narrows nothing.”
“It says Winesap too.”
“That narrows even less.”
“You’re difficult.”
“So are apples.”
More records surfaced.
A 1947 farm advertisement described “twelve-acre mixed orchard, approximately 300 bearing trees.”
Three hundred.
Mara sat back.
She had found fewer than a hundred so far.
The hillside might contain many dead stumps.
Or vines could still be hiding living trees.
One newspaper article described a Bellamy son returning from military service and expanding the orchard.
Another mentioned fruit shipped to stores in Nashville.
Then the history faded.
By the late 1960s, commercial orchard references disappeared.
A death.
Children moved away.
Property divided.
Pasture leased.
Buildings abandoned.
Kudzu advanced.
Memory shrank faster than vegetation grew.
Older neighbors remembered pieces.
Ninety-year-old Ruth Ann Mercer remembered riding in a wagon to “the Bellamy place” as a child.
“They had apples nobody else had.”
“What kinds?”
Ruth Ann laughed.
“Honey, I was eight. They were red and they were free if Mr. Bellamy wasn’t looking.”
Another man remembered cider.
Someone else remembered a packing shed that burned.
No one knew the orchard survived.
Walter’s first identification report arrived in October.
Several varieties were familiar.
Winesap.
Likely Arkansas Black.
A Limbertwig type.
Possibly Yellow Bellflower.
A russet that might be Golden Russet or a regional relative.
Others remained uncertain.
Then Walter called.
“You sitting?”
“No.”
“Sit.”
Mara sat on the tailgate.
“What?”
“Three samples are interesting.”
“How?”
“One is not matching our reference set cleanly.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means exactly that.”
“Lost variety?”
“Do not say that yet.”
Mara smiled.
“I didn’t.”
“You were about to.”
“I was thinking it.”
“Thinking is still dangerous.”
He explained.
Old cultivar identification required caution.
A genetic mismatch could mean poor reference data.
Synonyms.
Seedling origin.
Local strain.
Or an undocumented cultivar.
One sample appeared close to a variety once described regionally as Red Royal Pearmain but not enough for certainty.
Another might correspond to an obscure cultivar called Bellamy Sweet mentioned in a 1906 nursery catalog.
That name stopped Mara.
“Bellamy?”
“Could be coincidence.”
“Same family?”
“Could be.”
“You sound excited.”
“I am a retired pomologist.”
“Are retired pomologists allowed excitement?”
“Limited amounts.”
He wanted more samples the following season.
Flowers.
Mature fruit.
Scionwood.
Historical nursery records.