Peaches, and Mrs. Ross� Croghan Cobbler recipe. (original) (raw)

Wherever they grow, if a peach tree reaches 30, it has lived an unusually long life. Indeed, most peach trees seldom make it past their first decade of existence.

That�s what made the peach tree outside the old stone structure in Burnet at the site of Fort Croghan so unusual. No one could remember how long it had stood there, but every summer, it still bore tasty if somewhat tart peaches.

The famed Second Dragoons established the fort in 1849 to protect the area from hostile Indians. After the military abandoned the post overlooking Hamilton Creek in 1853, settlers moved into some of the old government structures, including the small rock building where the peach tree still flourished in the early 1960s.

Some said whoever had lived there must have planted the tree. Others said its proximity to the entrance of the structure indicated someone might simply have discarded a moist peach seed that took root and flourished on its own.

However it came to be at Fort Croghan, the fruit tree had been there for a good while.

I first saw the tree, and tasted its fruit, in the summer of 1963. A precocious teenager as interested in Texas history as girls and cars, I attended (thanks to my late mother, who drove me there) the annual meeting of the Burnet County Historical Society.

They met at the old fort every year for a potluck picnic topped off with a cobbler made by Mrs. L.C. Ross from the peach tree that grew at the fort.

She had been president of the society in 1960, they year the group began working to restore the old fort. While at the site that year, she told me later, she picked the choicest peaches from the tree �before the squirrels and birds got to them.� She baked them in a cobbler and a tradition had begun.

The longevity of that Fort Croghan peach tree is all the more unusual considering the care a peach tree normally requires. It has to be pruned after the first hard freeze in the fall, a process that must continue through early spring when the trees bloom. Since the trees normally produce more fruit than they can ripen, they have to been thinned of fruit to keep peaches spaced six to eight inches apart.

Too, a peach tree takes a lot of water, weeding, and insect and disease control. Another venerable peach tree once grew in Lampasas County. In the early 1930s, a tree belonging to L.W. McCrea measured six feet in circumference. At the time (1934) it was considered one of the oldest peach trees in Texas. McCrea said his family planted the tree in the late 1860s or early 1870s.

A few years after enjoying my first Croghan Cobbler, I was with my granddad when he stopped to buy some peaches at a roadside stand between Fredericksburg and Stonewall.

When we walked in the tent, two women about my granddad�s age sat happily gossiping away in German. As granddad selected a basket of peaches, they continued their conversation, secure in their belief that the older man and teenage boy � obviously tourists -- knew nothing of the language they spoke.

What they did not know was that my granddad�s last name was Wilke. His grandfather, Herman Wilke, had settled in Fredericksburg in 1850. Granddad grew up hearing German spoken and all those years later, still knew a little.

As we walked away, the women resumed their German discussion. Suddenly, acting as if he�d almost forgotten his manners, Granddad stopped and turned toward the gossips.

�Danke schon,� he said with a smile. Realizing he must have understood what they had been talking about, the women froze worse than a peach orchard hit by a late-March norther.