From Everett Smith’s house in the midcoast town of Hope, he can see his childhood home.
He can also see a farmhouse his ancestors built on the land the family has inhabited for six generations, and the fruit trees his great-great-grandfather planted more than a century ago.
But this view doesn’t just represent the past to Smith, an eighth-generation descendant of the town’s early settlers. He’s actually focused on the future: bringing the land back into production to provide for his three young children.
Those fruit trees — mainly apples, pears and plums — are a link between the two. Smith is building a small mail-order business of local varieties, a passion that grew out of researching his family’s long history in the Maine orchard world.
“It all started interweaving,” he said. “The more I researched my family, the stronger my roots got, and the stronger my roots got, the more I wanted to plant.”
While Maine has long attracted aspiring homesteaders from out of state, Smith is building up his own homestead and business on land he has deep connections to. Because he knows so much about its past and is so invested in its future, he said he feels he’s just borrowing the land.
He grew up in town and attended nearby Unity College, majoring in wildlife biology and starting to learn about plants. As a graduation gift, his great uncle gave him several acres of family land, where Smith grew a garden and had his first experience stewarding a piece of property.
“I knew that my family had been here for a long time, but when it’s your turn to kind of take over a piece of it, it starts coming to the forefront, who came before you and where you want to see it go in the future,” he said.
He had several opportunities to leave the state for work, but his roots kept him in Hope — and made him want to put down more. Smith and his wife Samantha purchased his grandparents’ home in 2016 with help from family.
When the pandemic hit, Smith started researching his family members in local newspaper archives and learned that they had been prominent orchardists and local agricultural experts.
His great-great-great-grandfather James P. Hobbs was a traveling apple tree salesman, a judge of fruit contests at the predecessor of the Union Fair and even exported apples from the farm to Europe. Hobbs’ son Everett was also an award-winning fruit grower and possibly the first farmer to successfully grow peaches in Maine.
Smith also learned to graft trees, a process of binding cuttings from an existing tree to root stock to create new trees identical to the old ones.
“I tried it, and the rest is history,” he said. “I couldn’t stop.”
Some trees planted by his forebears still grow next door, where the neighbor who bought the land from Smith’s family gives him access to take cuttings for propagating.
He’s identified some, including the Fletcher Sweet, an apple variety developed in Lincolnville that may never have been grown outside of Knox County. Others remain a mystery, and still others are lost, such as the Union Pippin, an apple Everett Hobbs once grew on the farm.
Smith has 150 varieties grafted right now, including some traditional apples such as Baldwin and MacIntosh, along with some nuts and other fruits.
His fledgling mail-order business, Hobbs Horticulture, is shipping young trees across the country. Smith hopes to hold his first local sales this year and expand into a nursery.
Along with classic fruit trees, he’s working on developing cultivars of native edible plants to sell for backyard growers, including native honeysuckle and Canada plums.
At home, Smith is focusing on stewarding the land to benefit their children and give them future opportunities. Among those trees, Samantha Smith noted, are ones planted when their sons were born.
“It’s been fun seeing the orchards grow at the same time as our family and thinking about how it will be there for them as well,” she said.
The original farm was at least 60 acres and is now roughly 20, so Smith wants to take care to preserve it for his family.
Fruit trees are one clear way to do that, he said: “What else can you do that will literally put food on the table for generations?”
