The Ozarks’ heyday in the large-scale commercial fruit industry rode in after the Civil War with the railroad. Its cars took away fruit like strawberries, tomatoes, apples, peaches and grapes and brought rural Ozarkers an even rarer commodity: Cash money.
“I think there was a belief that there was kind of something special about the region at one time, and it’s hard to tell now how much of that was just blatant promotion because certainly the railroads did most of the promoting,” says Dr. Brooks Blevins, the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University. “That’s how Laura Ingalls Wilder ends up in the Ozarks. They come across one of those, you know, railroad promotional pamphlets, the land of the big red apple come down here and and, you know, it’s paradise on earth.”
Blevins said that endeavors like apple orchards were often started by outsiders with means to make them happen. On the other hand, tomatoes were more accessible to everyday Ozarkers…