Hewes' Crab: "Ambrosia"

This cider apple, also known as Hughes' Crab and Virginia Crab, was the most common fruit variety grown in eighteenth-century Virginia. In an 1814 letter to James Mease that was published in the Memoirs of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, Jefferson attempted to recall the history of the Hewes': "I remember it well upwards of 60 years ago, & that it was then a common apple on the James river." In property advertisements in Williamsburg's Virginia Gazette between 1755 and 1777, the Hewes' Crab appeared more times than all other described fruit varieties combined. Jefferson wrote home from Chestertown, Maryland in 1797 and suggested the superior reputation of Hewes' cider: "It will be worth his [son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph] while to have the making of his crab cyder well attended to hereafter, as I learn here that good cyder of the qualities commonly at market sell for a quarter of a dollar the bottle, wholesale. Crab cyder would probably command more." A friend of Jefferson, John Hartwell Cocke, proclaimed that the Hewes' produced "the best cider I have ever seen."

The Hewes' is a maverick apple. Its vigorous, growth habit suggests that it may be a cross between a native American crabapple, Malus angustifolia, and the domesticated apple of horticulture. Virginian Landon Carter's "crabs" were the only apple unhurt by a late spring frost in 1772. In 1814 Henry Wynkoop of Pennsylvania lamented the unexplained decline in the health of his dessert apples, yet he rejoiced in the "smooth and fair" progress of his Hewes' Crabs. The fruit is very small, one to two inches round, with a dull-red to bright, pinkish-red skin. When pressing the Hewes' for cider, the juice "runs through the finest flannel like spring water," or, according to another writer, "the liquor flows from the pumice as water from a sponge." The juice, described as "ambrosia" by one colleague, is both sugary and pungently tart, cinnamon-flavored, and delicious.

Peter J. Hatch, Director
Monticello Gardens and Grounds
January 1995

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