Description
Granite Beauty is a large, beautiful apple, roundish, ribbed, with red patches and stripes over a yellow skin. Its cream-colored flesh is crisp and juicy, and it has a rich, sweet-tart flavor with hints of coriander or cardamom.
Discovered: Early 1800s, New Hampshire
Parentage: Unknown
Harvest: Late Season
History
Zephaniah Breed, who discovered Granite Beauty, wrote in the late 1850s that “no orchard is considered complete here unless it contains a good share of these trees. A good fruit grower here says he would sooner do without the Baldwin than the Granite Beauty.”
Breed published this account of Granite Beauty in the New Hampshire Journal of Agriculture, which he edited:
“Years ago, soon after the first settlers located upon the farm we now occupy, they paid a visit to their friends in Kittery (now Elliott), Maine, on horseback, that being the only means of conveyance then in vogue. When about to return home, Dorcas (for this was her maiden name; she was now Dorcas Dow, formerly Neull) needing a riding whip, she was supplied by pulling from the earth, by the side of the road, a little apple tree. With this she hurried her patient and sure-footed horse toward her wild-woods home in Weare, then Halestown.
“An orchard being in ‘order’ about that time, the little tree was carefully set and tended, and when it produced its first fruit it was found to be excellent, and Dorcas claimed it as her tree. When nephews and nieces grew up around her, the apple was called the Aunt Dorcas apple, from the claim she had upon it.” As she grew older and her grandchildren grew up, the apple took the name of Grandmother. In another part of the town it was called the Clothesyard apple.