About Himachali Apples in The Mall, Shimla

The Apple --An Apple a day keeps the doctor away , Himachali Apple is the Best Apple in all over the world ----Cheers
History of Himachali Apples :
Samuel Evans Stokes : Apples Gift to Himachal
Apple growers in India’s Western Himalayas still remember Samuel Evans Stokes, the American who brought the fruit to their land a century ago. Stokes went to India to teach and ended up staying there to learn. Stokes’ granddaughter tells his story in a new book, An American in Gandhi’s India.

Samuel Evan Stokes, 21, came to India with the intention of working at a home for lepers in the Simla hills. He married a local pahari girl, played an active role in India’s freedom struggle and was even jailed by the British. Somewhere along the way, he introduced apple crop in the hills around Shimla.

In 1904, Stokes arrived in India and started working in that leper home in the Himalayan foothills. He quickly realized that the people there needed help to fight not only disease, but poverty as well.Samuel Evans Stokes came to India as a missionary and ended up a Hindu, fighting for India’s freedom Samuel Evans Stokes came to India in 1904 as a missionary and ended up a Hindu, fighting for India’s freedom.

On September 12,1912 he marries Agnes, a Rajput-Christian woman Six kilometres away from Thanedar at Kotgarh stands an old church built by the British in 1843. In the early 1900’s Stokes was sent here to recuperate from the heat of the Indian plains. He’d come to India with a doctor couple — Mr and Mrs Carleton — who were working with the Leprosy Mission of India.During a visit to Philadelphia, the couple had been asking for donations at the local church for their work in India and young Stokes was very moved by their cause and dedication and wanted to help out by voluntarily working for the mission in India.

In 1926 the first apple trees bear fruit and the apples are sold.It was during a visit to America in 1915 that Samuel Stokes heard about the new strain of apples patented by the Stark Brothers nursery in Louisiana called the Red Delicious. He bought a few saplings and planted them at his Barobagh orchard in Thanedar in the winter of 1916. Five years later his mother sent him a consignment of saplings of the Stark Brothers Golden Delicious Apples as a Christmas gift. The first apples bore fruit a few years later and were sold in 1926.

“Samuel Stokes belonged to a very distinguished family of Quaker heritage,” she says. “His first American ancestor, Thomas Stokes, had come to Philadelphia in 1678. When Sam was about 20 years old, he decided to go to India and work in a leper home in Simla Hills. He joined some missionary activity. His parents, of course, were worried that he would get leprosy and never return. But he was determined to go.”

“He saw that people in very poor condition “They didn’t have clothes to wear. They didn’t have meals to eat. They would have tea with salt. Then he thought that he could try growing fruits in that area. Somehow the idea of apples came to his mind.

“In 1916, he brought the first apple trees from Philadelphia to the Shimla Hills.He distributed them [the apple seeds] free to the local people and helped them to plant and nurture them. That was a start of an economic revolution in that area.”it wasn’t easy for Stokes to convince local farmers to start planting apple trees.

“An apple tree takes about six to seven years to grow. “And he would tell people to grow the apple trees, and they would say, ‘If we plant the trees, where will we grow our food crops? And what will we eat?’ It was a battle for him in the beginning, but he succeeded and gradually the people began to grow apple trees. That’s why he’s called the ‘Johnny Appleseed of the Himalayas.’ And people still remember him for that.”

“The struggle for right and fair play in the relations of men,” he observed, “is a fight worth fighting.” Though Stokes conceded that many of his dreams of service had met with only “imperfect realization,” he added, “yet the dreams were something.”