Apple essay author wins academic prize, January 2002

Apple essay author wins academic prize

An essay about a stubborn Carleton County apple-growing pioneer has won a prestigious prize for a recent St. Thomas graduate.

Lorna Williams became the first St. Thomas student to win the esteemed David Alexander Prize for her essay entitled “Francis Peabody Sharp and the Development of a Commercial Apple Industry in New Brunswick, 1842-1898.”

“Francis Peabody Sharp was a horticulturalist in Woodstock in the 1800s,” she explains. “He believed he could grow apples in Carleton County and no one else thought it was possible. My essay focuses on how he ended up building a viable industry and how it’s been built since then.”

The David Alexander Prize is awarded annually to an undergraduate student in any university who composes the best essay on the history of Atlantic Canada (written in course). Entries must be undergraduate essays between 1,500 and 5,000 words in length on some aspect of the history of Atlantic Canada, written in English or French.

“He worked with people from all over the world,” Lorna says – an incredible accomplishment in an era of slow communication. “He didn’t want to go out of Carleton County to grow his apples and he was aware that Russian apples are grown in a climate like ours. He succeeded but there’s no paper trail of that work because of a fire.”

Lorna’s submission had actually slipped her mind prior to her notification of winning. The deadline passed and she believed another contestant had been chosen. “I assumed it wasn’t me, so I was very, very surprised. It was quite pleasant.”

Lorna attended St. Thomas over a seven-year period, taking six years of part-time studies. Her interest in Canadian history always held priority for the Woodstock native; all but one of her history classes involved Atlantic or Canadian history.

Based on her knowledge, Lorna also prepared an exhibit on Sharp for Kings Landing. She completed it this past summer. “The project is important to them because they’ve grafted some of Sharp’s apple trees onto root stock. It’s an ongoing project there as they’re hoping to start an orchard using only apples he worked with.”

Lorna’s analysis of Sharp demonstrated that the apple-grower experienced interesting exploits and successes during his trials. He was developing an autobiography of his work but a fire in 1892 destroyed his memoirs. “Most of his stuff was lost,” Lorna says, “and gone was a lot of his equipment from that period.” She adds, however, that there is a surviving portrait of Sharp (which was painted on a window shade by his son-in-law) hangs in the Carleton Country Historical Society.

Sharp left no legacy in print, but his ideas are still used, such as dwarfing trees.

Lorna’s intense attachment to Canadian and Atlantic history merited her the Chuddy McCarthy Memorial Prize for History in Fourth Year at the last spring convocation. Lorna is now working toward her master’s degree at UNB. Her focus is Loyalist women in New Brunswick, “before, during and after the revolution. I want to study how their lives changed over those time periods.”