John W. Hershey

The engine behind the 20th century tree crops movement

We’ve talked about the role of J. Russell Smith behind the development of a comprehensive tree crops movement, and in his most famous book, Tree Crops— one name pops out repeatedly for the research that they were doing; John W. Hershey. While John’s work lives today through both what remains of the Downington Food Forest and the work of folks like Zach Elfers, Max Paschall, Buzz Fervor, Pete, Chrisbacher, and more who have worked tirelessly to save the genetics of the trees from his former orchard, a google search for John’s name only pulls up a few scant articles— typically his name in passing in regards to either his nursery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or J. Russell Smith. While wildly incomplete, the goal of this piece is to provide as much of a comprehensive piece on John’s life and work, one which otherwise does not exist.

Because of the limited information that exists in books, pamphlets, and news articles (to put this article together required multiple pamphlets with limited access, which have been since scanned into PDFs which we will make publicly available), this piece will likely change over time (and that’s a good thing because it means we’re learning new information to give a more thorough history of his life). That all said, every project begins with a first step, and that’s what we’re doing here.

No pictures exist of John W. Hershey if you do a Google search (but, of course, as you can see above, they do exist, with the right resources). In fact, in all of the documents I was able to find, none had a correct birthday for John Walter Hershey, whose birth certificate is on record in Lancaster county as February 5th, 1898 to John Krieder Hershey and Mary (Maize) Hershey. John’s father was also a farmer and influenced him from a young age.

Nothing is recorded about John’s life as a child, except his interest in farming and his Mennonite background. He once said that he grew up on a farm and that “diversified farming was our salvation.”¹ Early in his career, he was fortunate enough to connect with John F. Jones, a tree crops legend who had come from Louisiana. Jones saw passion and potential in young John and became his mentor, as young John worked on his tree nursery and eventually made connections with other figures in the tree crops world, including the man who would become his close friend, J. Russell Smith, who he often described as a godfather-like figure. John married his wife, Elizabeth Kitch, in 1925, at the same time he started developing his own nursery on 8 acres on the east end of Downington, PA (technically in 1924, according to John, but if you ask his wife Betty, it was 1921), a small space he would quickly outgrow.²,³ It wouldn’t be until almost a decade later that he would have stock to sell, which was in 1932.⁴ It was also around this time John and his wife adopted their daughter as a baby, named Catherine Mae Detterline— whom they dotingly called “Kitty”.

His early years with his nursery were tough— the land he had purchased across the street from the Quaker meetinghouse was “sick and lifeless, two to four inches of top soil and lots of stones. I didn’t know much about soil robbing then, so I didn’t know my soil was sick.” His solution was to use horse manure to quickly improve the nutrient profile of his soil, which caused his black walnuts to be covered with cat’s eyes disease while leaf hoppers destroyed his English walnuts. Slowly, he learned to apply cover crops, such as soybeans, scything the plants and other weeds down, keeping a permanent green crop of beans or oats to feed the soil. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, that he began to incorporate leaves for mulching (1934) and even began trucking in leaves for compost— around 1938 he was trucking in “65 to 70 large dump truck loads”.

John was drawn to the “Bio-Dynamic idea”, moving away from conventional fertilizers and relying only on the occasional dry blood or raw bone. However, he was known to, in the late 40s, use “soupy dog manure from the hunt club” as well as “five tons or more of backhouse material (human waste)”. By 1943, his two-to-four inches of topsoil measured eight to twelve inches deep. At first, John largely used chickens for insect management on the farm, but later switched to ducks, as they had no problem devouring Japanese beetles. John leveraged native cherries to draw caterpillars away from other trees. The soybeans kept the rabbits from eating his hazelnuts. John didn’t start selling trees out of his nursery until 1932.

To back up— the late 1920s was a tough time for John; his daughter Patricia Ann Hershey died shortly after birth in 1927 & his son John K Hershey died in 1928 shortly after his birth. J.F. Jones, his mentor would also die unexpectedly in 1928. The late 20s and early 30s were a formative time for John; he would begin writing and making the connections that would be so valuable for the trajectory of his work. One of these moments was the development of the Tennessee Valley Authority, under the guidance of President Roosevelt in 1933. Arthur E. Morgan, the man who oversaw much of the agricultural and forestry parts of the TVA, had wanted J. Russell Smith to head the tree crops component of the project. John Hershey accepted and in April of 1934 left the nursery in the hands of his good friend John Pannebaker.

The Lancaster Daily, 11-21-1934

The TVA years

Not a formally trained forester, he stood out of place among legends in their fields— Dr. Ernest J. Schreiner (who was a foremost expert on tree genetics) and J.C. McDaniel (who’s best known for Magnolias, but did work with Hickories and has a variety of Kentucky Coffee Tree named after him), which made him seem out of place. The Tree Crop Nursery was near the Norris Dam in Tennessee, and he worked alongside Harry Steward, who also had been tutored by J.F. Jones, and together they worked to harvest nuts from the best trees in the valley and oversee their team of planters. John worked with native and nonnatives, including jujubes, che, persimmons (both Asian & American), hickories, pecans, honey locusts, blueberries, and even oaks.

The project was wildly visionary, it was the first forest breeding project on this scale in the world. To collect genetic material, the TVA ran contests for all of their crops— sweet acorns, honey locusts, persimmons, and more. Many of the discoveries made from these contests can be found in tree crop catalogs today— and many of those selections were the result of generations of breeding work by indigenous groups— such as the Cherokee, who had used the honey locust, for example, as a sugar crop.⁵

The competitions were based on the successes of similar collaborations that J. Russell Smith devised with the Journal of Heredity in the 1920s. For John & J.R., the competitions didn’t always run smoothly. For example, the first contest for a sweet honey locust was won by a woman in Villa Rica, Georgia. Smith had requested scionwood from the woman, who obliged, but the grafted trees didn’t bear any pods. He passed along scion to John Hershey, who planted some at the TVA, only to discover the scions were male. When Smith investigated the origins of the scions, the woman who won the prize admitted that she didn’t actually know which tree the winner came from, that the pods were from “over there”, pointing to a row of honey locusts. When pressed on the tree shown in the image with her contribution, it was an entirely different tree because they had wanted a picture of a honey locust, and the scionwood came from the tree with the lowest hanging branches with no bearing on which provided the pods that had one.

The vision of the Tennessee Valley farmer was to be similar to many farmers in places like the Iberian peninsula, where the farmers would rely on healthy ecosystems built up by managed tree plantings to feed livestock and the community. Unlike most federal entities, it was responsible for a region rather than a single project— and even had its own authority to buy land and implement its own proposals, meaning folks like John were given the ability to exercise his professional opinion without being weighed down in red tape. Further, the TVA was expected to address a number of human rights and ecological issues simultaneously— flood prevention, soil conservation, power production, and the redevelopment of rural economies. It initially was to address the issues of flooding from the Tennessee River, which was to be managed through dams that would provide power to the region while also developing long-term ecological solutions to mitigate the worst of any flooding through soil stewardship.

The architects behind the TVA believed that they would be able to use the TVA as a model for regional planning—that it would highlight the ways the new modern rural economy could thrive under the weight of government organizing and progressive policies— what Leo Marx described as the “pastoral ideal”.⁶ The vision was one in which rural communities embraced and leveraged technology for improved material conditions while not destroying nature to the extent that conventional farming practices that led to the Dust Bowl did.

This movement was led by the work of folks like Ebenezer Howard & Patrick Geddes, who wrote about ‘garden cities’ which would be the blueprint for the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). The Garden Cities vision was tinged by competing board members Arthur Morgan, Harcourt Morgan & David Lilienthal, who fundamentally disagreed about the role of state planning, democratic rule, and reconciling the needs of poor white rural farmers with the poor black urbanites just outside the range of the TVA’s jurisdiction. While Arthur Morgan was the one who hired Hershey, it would be Harcourt Morgan who would oversee the land management aspects of the TVA.⁷

That said, Arthur was invariably interested in tree crops personally and maintained an open line of communication with John. When Arthur would talk about using forest genetics for plastic and chemistry, John replied “My goal is to find select ‘tree crops’ to be planted on the unplowable hills of America, so that when our complex economy breaks down the individual will have a little more ease in standing the strain of having to go back to a self-sustaining plane of ‘just living’ as our forefathers did and as EVERY OTHER people did when the pressure of cultures on the soil broke its back and the artificialities of materialism receded in decay.”⁸