Hope — On Tuesday, Sept. 18 at 10 a.m. at the Hope Historical Home, William Pearse will conclude Hope Historical Society’s series on apples. Like all Hope Historical meetings, this one will be free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Maine is hardly a big apple-producing state, but, believe it or not, Hope with its two commercial orchards, is one of Maine’s top apple-producing towns. The August Hope Historical meeting featured Tom Hardy and Brien Davis, who are commercial growers.

Tuesday’s talk will be by Hope’s current Boston Post caneholder. His amazingly-acute memory goes back to the early 1920s. That doesn’t include the settler days when people coped with the pain of rural life by consuming large quantities of hard cider. It does, however, go back to the days before the Great Freeze of 1933-1934 when Hope produced a lot of hard Ben Davises and Baldwins for export to Great Britain and South America. After the Great Freeze, Pop Wentworth, Hope’s USDA extension agent, persuaded and helped people to plant many orchards of hardier MacIntoshs and Courtlands from upstate New York. Today, in spring, Hope’s woods are filled with the blossoms of survivors of those orchards.

Come Tuesday and learn all this and more from William Pearse, whose has been there and done that. The Hope Historical Home is on Route 105 just northwest of Hope Corner by the new Hope Corner firehouse. The business meeting starts at 9:30 a.m. For more information, contact Hope Historical secretary Bill Jones. at 763-3576 or by email at wijones@tidewater.net.