Ben Drew '32: a taste for antique apples and adventure

It is the antique apples that catch the eye, their names unfamiliar and provocative Sheepnose, Chenango Strawberry, Nodhead, Sops O Wine, Smokehouse and this in turn leads to Benjamin Drew '32, a •man who's been growing apples commercially for more than 50 years. Snowfields, his farm in Vershire, Vt., covers 30 acres and produces nearly 20,000 bushels each year. One row of the orchard is devoted to antique varieties, apples common to colonial America but rare or nonexistent now, except for those found in living museums like Snowfields or the orchard maintained by Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts.

The apples have little commercial value, Drew explained, because shoppers are reluctant to try something not found in stores and because most of the trees bear fruit only every other year. On the other hand, antique apples offer a real taste treat for the adventurous, and those of a historical bent might find the flavor enhanced by the knowledge that Louis XIII sometimes enjoyed a Blue Pearmain or that the Yellow Newton was "a favorite of Benjamin Franklin." Some, like the Sheepnose and the Yellow Newton, are good "keepers," a necessary consideration for 18th-century Americans, who depended heavily on the apple for their winter larders.

brew's interest in antique apples was sparked by Stearns Davenport, a friends of his father, who was beginning to develop the orchard at Old Sturbridge Village at about the same time that Drew graduated from Dartmouth and went to work on the family farm in Westford, Mass. Although his interest hasn't abated in the intervening years (they are, he says, a "fun" thing), the antiques are, in fact, only a sideline. Drew has been involved in several family businesses during his career, serving as general manager of Drew Farms, Inc., director and consultant of the Florida Agribusiness Company, and director of both the Burnham Corporation of Irvington, N. Y., and the Turner Corporation of Naples, Fla.

In addition to 26 years of service as town moderator of Westford, he has also been an active participant in and president of several organizations having to do with the "apple business" the Massachusetts Fruit Growers' Association, the New York and New England Apple Institute, and the National Apple Institute and he is a past chairman of the Middlesex County Extension Service. Prior to moving to Vermont in 1973, Drew was also part of a Department of Agriculture delegation that met with agricultural officials and apple-growers in a number of European countries, traveling from "Paris to Dublin to Helsinki to Bonn."

Drew is every bit as energetic in his recreational pursuits. Newspaper features reported that he had been one of the group of students and alumni who had duplicated John Ledyard's 219-mile canoe trip from Hanover to Old Saybrook, Conn., in both 1978 and 1980. He has, in fact, "voyaged to the sea" with the Ledyard Canoe Club a total of five times, once in company with Arthur Allen '32 and on another occasion with Davis Kirby '32. The features indicated that these "ancient mariners" proved pretty stiff competition for their more youthful colleagues.

Last year, Drew noted, he and his wife, Sarah, visited the Grand Canyon, but on a vacation that was equally strenuous a Whitewater raft trip down the Colorado River. They viewed the canyon from the bottom up. In their spare time (that is, when Drew isn't laboring in his orchards and his wife isn't working with her Morgan horses), the Drews like to travel to Colorado to ski, to New Zealand to visit their son, to the Yucatan Peninsula with a group of Dartmouth alumni, and, this past summer, to Cape Breton and Newfoundland for rest and relaxation.

One of the Drew's five children attended Dartmouth (Ben Jr. '59), as did a cousin, William Fletcher '52, but Drew had been the first of his family to do so. He reflected on why he chose Dartmouth, "Well, several of my classmates at Greenwich High School in Connecticut were going there, and there was the DOC . . ." Then with a chuckle he added, "The Dartmouth-Columbia game might have had something to do with it too. That was back in the days of Dooley and Oberlander. Dooley was the quarterback and Oberlander the outside receiver. My father took me to the game, and that day those two completed a 60-yard pass and Dartmouth won the game. . . Yup, that might have had something to do with it!"

Drew is retiring this year, turning Snowfields' orchards over to a neighbor who has worked with him for the past ten years, although he will be available as a consultant. He's looking forward, he says, to enjoying the beauties of nature and the vanishing way of life still to be found in Vershire, Vt.

Benjamin Drew '32 at his orchard of antique apple trees in Vermont

The author is an administrative assistant inDartmouth's anthropology department.