Earlier this month, we published a story in Source about a very rare and old Kavanagh apple tree that grows in a slim margin of grass between two parking lots in Freeport. Our goal was to figure out, as best we could, who planted the tree and then who nurtured it through 150 or so years, helping it survive, particularly in an era when Freeport was expanding rapidly as a commercial center.

From Maine’s apple experts, we already knew that the variety had come from Ireland, transported here by an immigrant named James Kavanagh, who arrived in Maine around 1790. He settled in the Newcastle-Damariscotta region and became a powerful shipbuilder and merchant, in partnership with another Irishman named Matthew Cottrill.

The apple tree Kavanagh planted and propagated was known by his name, but it was a localized apple, popular in the Newcastle area, and within a few decades of his death in 1828, Mainers had stopped planting it. The Freeport tree was believed by some to be the only still-bearing Kavanagh to have survived from that era, and it was surprisingly far from Newcastle.

We visited historical societies, looked at old maps and conducted many interviews with longtime Freeport residents. Ultimately, we narrowed the tree’s original owners down to one couple, a grocer from Durham by way of Portland and his wife, whose family had farmed in the Freeport area for at least a century already. The story (Oct. 12, “The story of a Civil War-era tree”) was long – 89 column inches – and included more information than we’d dared to hope about the tree’s many and varied “owners.”

Even so, questions remained, along with curiosity, so we were gratified to hear from many readers eager to help unravel the tree’s remaining mysteries. (Some also were seeking answers, most to the question, “Does this apple tree in my backyard look like a Kavanagh to you?”)

Maine apple expert John Bunker, who first learned of the Kavanagh in the 1990s, helped us, and working from his theories and old documents, we determined that the tree was almost certainly planted by Daniel Cobb Reed and his wife Patience Griffin Reed in the 1850s and that it was part of a larger orchard on their 25-acre farm in Freeport, which also had a small grocery store.

After the tree left the extended Griffin family in the late 1930s, our trail went a little cold. We knew the name of the family who owned the Freeport land, Bartoll, but nothing more – until reader Dave Goldrup wrote to us. Goldrup was born in 1933 and grew up on the old Pownal Road (now Elm Street). He told us his grandparents, Bill and Anna Libby, and parents bought vegetables from George Bartoll, who delivered them door-to-door. Goldrup remembers Bartoll bringing carrots, beets, potatoes, corn and string beans. He doesn’t recall apples among the deliveries, but he does remember that the Kavanagh was surrounded by other fruit trees. “There were a number of trees through that area,” Goldrup said. “Mostly behind where the Kavanagh is. And there were some gardens that went right up to the road.” He credits Bartoll with playing a “major role” in extending the life of the Kavanagh.

Bunker had told us there were also mature Kavanaghs in Arrowsic and Blue Hill. (He’s revived the variety, and Fedco has sold about 150 Kavanaghs since 1997, so young Kavanaghs now grow again in Maine). He also looked at photographs of possible Kavanaghs from readers for us, but so far, no matches.

Reader Heidi Shott, who lives a few doors down from the former Kavanagh mansion in Damariscotta Mills, wrote to tell us that she’d learned about the Kavanagh trees from a talk Bunker gave at the Common Ground Fair a few years ago. Her curiosity inflamed, she took a notecard with a drawing of the apple to the current owner of the house. “I don’t have one,” he told her. Because she lives on the millpond where Kavanagh and Cottrill had their sawmills, she scrutinized her own “scraggly” apple trees hoping for a match. “Alas, no go,” she wrote in an email.

In addition to their shipbuilding and merchant business, Kavanagh and his partner in 1808 built Maine’s first Catholic church, St. Patrick’s in Newcastle. Carrie Watson wrote to let us know she and other members of the St. Patrick’s history project visited Ireland two years ago looking for Kavanagh’s and Cottrill’s birthplaces and hoping to better understand how they came to live in Newcastle. They met one of Cottrill’s descendants and now plan to plant some Kavanagh trees on church property as “a tribute to these two men who gave up so much in pursuit of a dream,” Watson wrote.

Finally, the enthusiastic owners of the Arrowsic Kavanagh came forward to share their story. Jim Arsenault and Lisa Holley thought the tree in the backyard of the 1840s house they bought in 1991 was remarkable, with its enormous trunk and considerable height, but they didn’t know how much so until they brought an apple to the Common Ground Fair in the late 1990s to show to Bunker. “As people do,” Arsenault said. “And he got very excited when he saw it.”

The couple has given the tree plenty of loving attention and for many years it yielded three or four bushels – enough, Arsenault said, to make a very rich cider. “I consider it a close second to the golden russet cider,” he said. But the tree has slowed of late, only eight apples this year, which fed the deer.

But as with the Freeport tree, which Bunker made grafts from to help build up Fedco’s stock, the Arrowsic Kavanagh lives on in new trees. “I’ve grafted about five of them,” Arsenault said, and he has two more growing in his own yard now. “I gave one to a friend up in Sheepscot Village and he planted it,” he said. “It’s being repropagated.”

Once down to just a few known trees, Maine’s Kavanagh variety has a new threshold on life, proving its tenacity. And we at Source are proof that it can maintain nearly as fierce a hold on those who come across it.

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