On a crisp spring morning, Peter LoVerso and CJ Johnson were deep in the Crooked River National Grassland near Madras.

They stood squinting into the sunlight, across a barbed wire fence from rows of squat, gnarled trees. LoVerso reached up, grabbed a low-hanging limb and hoisted himself over the fence’s metal spikes.

“A fun fact about Peter,” Johnson said. “He’s also a trapeze artist.”

On this day, though, LoVerso was primarily a tree detective. He and Johnson were searching for a handful of tagged apple trees in the more than century-old orchard.

“This guy looks great,” LoVerso, 34, said of one tree, as he picked leaves off a branch and placed them in a plastic bag. “It’s not going to hurt the tree, and better to have too many than too few.”

The leaves will be sent to a lab at Washington State University for DNA testing to see what kind of tree it is and where it came from. LoVerso is an amateur cidermaker, and when he connected with Johnson, he also joined her community of fellow apple lovers in Central Oregon.

The two are now leaders of the nonprofit Heritage Apple Corp. The core group has six members, but they draw out a larger number of volunteers for special events like pruning days. They work through the U.S. Forest Service to get permits for reviving and protecting orchards on remote public land.

The group pruned this orchard last year. It’s one of many established in the area during the state’s homesteading era in the late 1800s. At one point, the surrounding hills supported around 700 homesteads, according to the Forest Service.

Aside from pruning trees, the group helps clear defensible space around the orchards in case of a wildfire. They’ve developed interpretive signs for the historical sites that will be unveiled during a ribbon-cutting ceremony this summer. LoVerso recently launched a website with an interactive map to catalog every heritage tree on public land.

The Apple Corp is moving fast, they say, because apple trees don’t usually live over a hundred years, so the window to document and save those planted during the homesteading boom is closing fast.

Johnson started the Apple Corp to ensure that the stories contained in twisted branches are preserved. The group formally launched in 2025 as a program under a larger nonprofit, but its beginnings date back to 2020, when Johnson would pass these trees on bike rides.

“You see these old orchards and they are screaming for attention,” Johnson, 64, said, gesturing around the glade. “It was also really exciting that there were other people like me who wanted to keep the history alive and the culture in these orchards.”

The trees surrounding her were planted by the McCoin family in the mid-1880s. Jerry Ramsey is a descendant, who lives about thirty minutes north of the orchard. He remembers childhood horseback rides when he would stop to pick apples in the summer.

“When I was a kid, I was no cowboy, but I liked to ride up there just for the sheer fun of riding in those wide open spaces,” Ramsey said.

Now in his 80s, he is a local historian and author of the book, “Words Marked by a Place,” which details the history of white settlement and development in the region. He works with Heritage Apple Corp members to trace the lineage of his ancestor’s trees.

“It’s kind of a haunting thing to think that when you bite into one of these McCoin or Cyrus orchard apple trees, you’re biting into living history,” he said.

Not every centenarian tree is in a remote wilderness — some are hiding in plain sight amid cities and neighborhoods.

Just past an outdoor mall in Bend’s Old Mill District, LoVerso was running down a tip on a recent afternoon. He heard from someone who lives nearby that there are old apple trees down by the Deschutes River.

Ducking under overgrown brush on the side of a popular trail, LoVerso pointed to a clump of trees.

“And here they are,” he said. “One, two, and then three is back there.”

The trees would have been easy to miss in the tangle of vegetation growing along the water’s edge. LoVerso picked and bagged a few newly-sprouted leaves.

He’ll know how rare the find is after DNA testing is done.

At peak popularity, there were over 17,000 cataloged varieties of apples in the U.S. Today there are less than half that many. During his forays for heritage trees, LoVerso is hopeful he’ll find a long-forgotten variety.

“People have been here since time immemorial and there’s been history happening that whole time,” he said. “Anybody can come up here, walk among these trees, taste the fruit. And I think there’s something magical about that.”

This summer, he said, the trees by the mall in Bend should have plenty of fruit for people passing by to grab and eat. He noted their coordinates for the website map.

Though LoVerso joined the group less than a year ago, he already has 47 saplings at his house. He’s taking care of the baby trees until they can be planted in a nearby orchard later this year.

OPB is a nonprofit, statewide news organization with a mission to tell stories for communities in all parts of Oregon and Southwest Washington. As part of that goal, we work with partner news organizations and freelance journalists to identify stories like this that might otherwise go untold. If you have an idea for a story, live in an area outside Portland and want to work with us, send your freelance pitches to [email protected].

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/11/central-oregon-heritage-apple-trees-washington-state-university/