The last Colorado Orange apple tree stood for 100 seasons, its location a sworn family secret.

Riley Diana, 74, said the owner of the historic Steinmeier Farm told him there’d be no peace if word got out.

“He said we’d have people all over this orchard if they knew it was here,” Diana remembered.

But, in 2014, Diana knew he had to break his promise or lose the storied apple forever.

“I could tell it was checking out. It stopped producing blossoms,” he said.

The retired prison psychologist who cared for the five-acre apple orchard east of Cañon City knew exactly who could discreetly keep the Colorado Orange from dying out.

He had heard about a pair of apple hunters out of Cortez who were searching for any sign of the legendary fruit.

“When he called, he said he had a Colorado Orange,” said Jude Schuenemeyer. “We thought it was extinct.

It was almost too good to be true for Schuenemeyer and his wife, Addie, who dedicated their lives to mapping lost historical Colorado apple varieties in hopes of restoring them.

More than once they sent leaves they thought may have been that of the Colorado Orange to labs for DNA testing. And more than once, the results came back showing a different apple variety like the York or the Ben Davis.

Diana sent them nine blush-colored apples from his gnarled mother tree.

‘Not just a backyard curiosity’

When the Schuenemeyers sent Diana’s leaves for forensic tests, the result came back “unknown.”

This was a major clue, which told them that there was no known apple for comparison. If there had been, this would not have been the leaf of the Colorado Orange.

“We knew then that this was not just a backyard curiosity,” Jude said.

With no modern scientific method to prove they had a Colorado Orange, the Schuenemeyers did the next best thing. They brought the Cañon City orchard apples to the archives at Colorado State University, where they compared their apple sample to a 100-year-old pomological watercolor collection painted by a woman named Miriam Palmer, one of the first female professors at CSU, who used to visit state fairs for inspiration.

The watercolors matched the apples in hand, but the Schuenemeyers needed more.

They were aware that a CSU professor had a century-old, artificial waxed apple collection displayed outside of his office, which could include a Colorado Orange replica. After countless trips to Fort Collins, they found that before he retired, he had stored four boxes of antique waxed apples tucked in styrofoam in his old office.

When they held the fake and the real apples side by side, “they looked as convincing as possible,” Jude Schuenemeyer said.

After spending some of his best 75 years in the orchard, Diana was sure of it.

“I saw the wax and I saw the nine apples I sent them and they were identical,” he said.

Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project

Next, the Schuenemeyers decided to visit Diana’s 1905 homestead. What they found was a gnarled old mother tree with apples on its branches even in December — an unlikely time of year.

Like fingerprints, June Schuenemeyer noticed particular patterns in the bark he knew to be indicative of the legendary Colorado Orange.

Another clue? This tree’s December fruit was ripe.

“That told us an awful lot,” he said.

The apple looked a lot like the description they first mapped from an early Montezuma County fair record, which described the Colorado Orange as “oblate, wider than tall with prominent ribbing and the yellow, red and orange color.”

Fruit trees are not usually grown from seed, so orchardists fuse two trees into one by grafting a piece of twig or young shoot from a tree to the root stock of another.

Still afraid to believe this was the Colorado Orange, they cut 13 tender shoots of the ancient tree to save her. 

Each year since then, they grafted and distributed around 100 trees per season. Today, they have 14 trees within a couple of seasons of bearing fruit.

The trees are part the couple’s Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project (MORP), where they research the history of Colorado apples. By poring over historical books, reports and records, they have rediscovered 500 varieties of apples that were planted in Colorado prior to 1930.

Many of the apples on this list they find still growing on trees up to 100 years old or older. Nearly half of the apple varieties on the archive are considered lost.

“This was not an intentional plan. I feel like MORP is pretty far on the cutting edge of what’s happening in heirloom fruit preservation,” said Jude Schuenemeyer.

Apples, apples, apples!

In 1923, an ad in the Leadville Daily Herald announced the sale of 1,000 bushels of “the best apples for general use” at the Main Street grocery, John King Mercantile.

The Colorado Orange Apple sold for $1.35 per bushel.

The unique winter crop was in high demand and could even be delivered from orchard to doorstep.

At its height, acres of land were devoted to the large firm apple the color of a mountain sunset. It was recognized by growers and eaters on the East Coast and even in Europe.

But the days of the juicy Colorado Orange Apple were numbered.

By 1943, the Colorado Orange and hundreds of other tasty varieties, such as Gravenstein (Thomas Jefferson’s favorite), Early Joe, Winekist, Pink Pearl, Summer Rambo, and Six Finger Jack were forgotten, replaced by three-to-four kinds, including the Jonathan and a descendant of the Winesap called Red Delicious — a beauty queen which was shiny on the outside but mushy and tasteless on the inside.

Industrial farms promoted the Wonderbread of apples for the sake of simplicity and style — to the detriment of hundreds of Colorado varieties, including the Colorado Orange trees which were left in back pastures to rot.

The new orchardists

The revived Colorado Orange is so new, every tree is still too young to bear fruit. But they are popping up all over the state.

In Steamboat Springs, Elkstone Farms has a few of them mixed in with 50 other heirloom trees growing at 7,000 feet.

“There are people out there who will spend 4-5 years growing a fruit tree from a seedling banking on something they’ve never even tasted,” said Elkstone permaculturist Marco Lam. “There’s something beautiful about the idea that there are people out there who are willing to do that.”

Wesley Swartz has just one healthy Orange Apple sapling growing among a diverse 35-variety orchard in rural east Boulder County called Benevolence Orchard and Gardens. Swartz’s baby Orange Apple is surrounded by a cage to keep the deer away. Above the flowering young tree is a pole that acts as a makeshift roost, where predators like hawks and eagles can watch for voles who may destroy the roots.

This could be the most nurtured Colorado Orange in existence but it won’t see fruit for several years.

“It’s gonna be a thing in the marketplace,” Swartz said.

His own marketplace sells home-harvested honey and fancy mushrooms, which grow inside the property’s dark, musty barn. His goal is to produce 100 different varieties of apples in his nursery.

“I want to be the Johnny Appleseed of Colorado,” he said.

As it turns out, Swartz won’t be the original.

Colorado’s first Johnny Appleseed

The father of the Colorado Orange was a homesteader named Jesse Frazier, who filed one of Colorado’s first permanent farm claims in 1860.

According to records, 150 years ago he hauled his first fruit trees from Missouri to Florence, Colorado, in an ox wagon. After many of the transported trees were eaten by insects or died from freezing, a “chance seedling” emerged from the ground, which didn’t look like anything else Frazier had ever seen.

He handed control to Mother Nature, and like Jack and the Beanstalk, a distinct variety sprouted, which had adapted remarkably well to Colorado winters and diseases.

Folks wanted to name the new fruit the Frazier Apple. But Frazier balked at the idea. The self-described Orange Apple was a new variety not seen anywhere else in the world.

Frazier’s historical notes from 1873 indicated the Colorado Orange was a winter apple, grown from December to June.

“It is the longest keeper I know and of excellent quality,” he wrote, describing it as “very crisp” and “exceedingly juicy” and “highly aromatic.”

Frazer’s Colorado Orange took first place at county and state fairs. His orchard eventually grew to more than 200 apple, pear and plum trees.

In just 20 years, Cañon City and Penrose were dotted with apple and cherry trees, and, by 1880, Frazier hauled in $2,000 from fruit sales, according to the Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center.

At the turn of the century, apples — not peaches — were a major Colorado fruit. Three hundred different kinds of apples grew in the Rocky Mountain state alone, according to a 1903 report by the state horticultural board.

In February 1914, a farmer named Dall DeWeese wrote an article in the Cañon City Record that, after 30 years of producing, people loved the Colorado Orange so much they were buying them from his orchard “long before picking time.”

Today, there are only a handful of people who know what the red and orange-blushed fruit tastes like.

“It has that snap you really like in an apple. It’s brisk acidity is a zing on your tongue,” said Jude Schuenemeyer.

Riley Diana said it has a floral aftertaste.

Schuenemeyer only allowed himself a couple of slices. Diana preferred to eat them off of the tree whenever he felt like it. 

The Shuenemeyers educate elementary school kids in the Four Corners region who thought apples magically appeared on store shelves but who now “know that you can take an apple from a tree and eat it.”

The couple navigate water resources to keep the trees growing in an area that counts its raindrops.

A couple of years after the Schuenemeyers cut the branches from the old Cañon City matriarch, it died. The stump is still in the Steinmeyer orchard, a favorite stoop and scratching post for an orange barn cat named Maui.

“If the mother tree has lived on that spot for 100 years, it’s proof that it can survive,” said Jude. “Life will keep going long after we are all gone.”