Sense of Place: When peaches boomed in Sonoma County

Peachland Avenue is in Green Valley, 3 miles north of Sebastopol, off of Highway 116. It’s named for the Peachland Post Office, established in 1891. The post office was named for the extensive peach orchards nearby; peaches grew so well and were so profitable that for a while everybody was planting them.

In fact, the land was almost too productive. Everything grew so prolifically that a crop with any promise could easily became a fad. Local farmers, it was observed, were “tempted to go from one thing to another” with “everyone doing the same thing until no one could make money.”

It took a few decades for the peach fad to get underway. The first peach tree grew from a pit John Wiley brought from Virginia and planted in 1850. The first orchards in Green Valley were a mix of peaches and apples, planted a year or two later by pioneer settlers Isaac Sullivan, from Kentucky, and Mitchell Gilliam, from Tennessee.

It appears that the post office was established at the peak of the peach boom. Within a few years, a glut of fruit caused prices to drop like a stone fruit pit. Then a peach blight came along, causing “massive tree death.” By 1900, almost all the peach trees had been pulled out. The citizens of Peachland found themselves peachless.

Italian laborers heaped the dead trees into huge piles, covered them with mounds of soil, left a few air holes, and lit them on fire. After many days of careful tending, the trees burned down to charcoal, which was bagged and shipped out by train. Charcoal from peach trees was in high demand at fancy San Francisco restaurants. The burn pits didn’t go to waste, either — many were used for gardens, since the ashes made the soil fertile and productive.

Vineyards soon replaced many of the peach orchards. But with the coming of Prohibition in 1920, grapevines were removed and the land planted to peaches once again. Those trees lasted until apples became the next big crop. By 1948, The Press Democrat declared Green Valley to be “The Most Concentrated Apple Area in All the World.” Twenty-five percent of the nation’s dried apples came from here — processed at eight large and numerous small apple plants. There were vinegar plants and fresh-pack facilities, too.

Apple production peaked in the 1960s and then began to fall off. The economics no longer penciled out. As longtime resident John Dierke remembered, “I was packing my own apples. You can’t make any more money than packing your own, right? And I couldn’t make it pay.”

By the 1980s, vineyards were coming back again. “Any place there’s a vineyard now, there used to be an orchard.”

The fact that the name “Peachland” survived is reminiscent of an ancient life form preserved in amber, untouched by time as everything around it changes. Every few decades, old crops have given way to new ones — cycling from peaches to grapes to peaches to apples to grapes again. Sonoma County has seen many crops come and go. Hops, walnuts, quince, potatoes and pears all had their day; the Peachland story is just another facet of our ever-changing agricultural heritage.