The History Behind the Georgia Peach

KENNESAW — William Thomas Okie opened his Saturday lecture at The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History with one question: “What’s the deal with all the peaches?”

Okie, a history professor at Kennesaw State University, spoke about his 2016 prize-winning book, “The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture and Environment in the American South” and the history of the state fruit.

The speech was part of the museum’s Adult Speaker Series, held on the second Saturday of each month, where speakers discuss a variety of historical topics.

From license plates to country music, Okie addressed how the fruit came to be so synonymous with the state of Georgia.

“There’s peaches all over the state, at least in imagery… but the peach itself is not quite as common as you might think,” Okie said.

The Peach State actually ranks third in terms of peach production in the country, falling behind California and South Carolina, said Okie.

“Our most important agricultural commodity is actually chickens,” Okie said. “Peaches are way down the list. … Pine straw and deer hunting licenses are bringing in more money than peaches do every year.”

Growing up near the Peach Belt in Warner Robins, Okie always had a connection to the fruit. His father worked as a peach breeder for the United States Department of Agriculture and is credited with working on the popular Prince variety.

“When I went to graduate school for history, it was an easy topic to get into,” Okie said.

Through his research, Okie discovered three main components necessary to understand the popularity of the Georgia peach: environment, agriculture and culture.

Environment

Peaches, native to Asia, arrived in North America in the 1500s with Spanish colonists, Okie said.

“Within less than a hundred years, there were so many that Native Americans adopted them into their trade on the Eastern Seaboard,” he said. “When colonists arrived at Jamestown, they thought the peaches were native because there were so many.”

The fruit particularly did well in Georgia because of the state’s milder winters.

“To produce fruit on a peach tree, you have to have a certain number of chilling hours, hours below a certain temperature in the wintertime,” Okie said.

The Fort Valley plateau, in middle Georgia, did especially well because the winters provided the modest chill needed to grow the fruit while the dense red clay held moisture during drought and heat.

From the southernmost point for growing peaches, Georgia peaches matured earlier than in many other states, meaning Georgian farmers had the earliest fruit on the market.

“They were the earliest peaches in the big produce markets of Philadelphia, New York and Boston and I think that it acquired a reputation that way,” Okie said. “To think, you’ve been eating sauerkraut and canned food all winter and then a fresh peach.”

Agriculture

While the environment was right for peaches, the industry itself was shaped by horticulturists and laborers.

Horticulturists like Louis Berckmans, who owned the first large-scale horticultural nursery in the Southeast (now Augusta National Golf Club) and Sam Rumph, who developed the main peach variety of the time, played pivotal roles in beginning the Southern peach industry.

Okie added that laborers, predominantly African-American sharecroppers, were essential to the industry’s initial success, even though they were rarely credited for the importance of their work.

“When a peach is ripe, when it’s ready to be picked, it needs to be picked within a week,” Okie said. “Labor changed the industry. You need a lot of workers for a short amount of time and as rural Southerners left for cities, there weren’t as many people eager to work in orchards during the hottest months of the year.”

Today, most of the industry’s labor comes from the H-2A temporary agricultural program, which helps employers who anticipate a lack of available domestic workers bring in foreign workers.

Culture

Okie added how the answer to why Georgia’s a peach state had to do with Southern history — specifically, the end of slavery and the South’s desire for a rebrand.

“Peaches emerged in the late 19th century, when the South was looking for a new reputation in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Okie said. “They wanted a future that was very different from cotton — even though peaches never really replaced cotton, it seemed very culturally different. It provided a sense of identity at a crucial moment and then they hung onto it.”

Becky Brashears of Kennesaw regularly attends the museum’s speaker series and decided to hear Okie’s speech to learn more about the state’s history.

“I moved here from Florida about four years ago so anything dealing with Georgia, I’m learning about,” Brashears said.

Through November, the museum will host five more speakers, ranging in topics from the dulcimer to prohibition in Cobb County.

For more information about upcoming events at the museum, visit southernmuseum.org/events/list .