The Golden Age of Kootenay Orchards

Prize-winning apples, cherries as big as plums – in the early 1900’s, Kootenay Lake was a major fruit-producing area, rivaling the Okanagan to the west as a lucrative land of orchards and berry patches.

As the Kootenay mining industry waned in the early years of the 20th century, the Canadian Pacific Railway began to promote the area as a fruit-growing oasis. English settlers responded to the CPR’s campaign, planting apple and cherry trees, and establishing thriving strawberry fields. Kootenay fruit was soon recognized as some of the finest in the world, taking prizes at prestigious international competitions. Crate after crate of rosy apples were loaded on to the steamships that connected the Lake’s shoreline communities, bound for export around the world, and supplying their growers with healthy, dependable profits.

Little Cherries, Big Problem: The giant, juicy cherries of Kootenay Lake were the greatest source of pride for the area’s orchard-growers. (In the fruit-growing town of Kaslo, on the Lakes’ western shore, cherry trees symbolically lined the community’s downtown boulevards.) But sadly, the cherries were also the cause of their economic demise. In 1933, a devastating virus known as “little cherry disease” began to spread through the Kootenay cherry orchards. Transmitted by the apple mealybug, the disease caused the cherry trees to produce small fruit with pale colour and poor flavour.

The disease, which began at Willow Point, eventually affected every orchard in the Kootenay region, and by the 1950’s the Kootenay cherry industry had been decimated. (By 1979, the region’s cherry production had dropped from 680,000 kilograms in 1947, to 68,000 kilograms, most of which did not meet packinghouse standards.)

With the advent of World War II, Kootenay orchard-growers suffered another blow. Demand for “luxury” fruits such as apples declined dramatically. In addition, the growers faced increasing and overwhelming competition from well-located American growers to the south. Fruit-growing in the Kootenay area was no longer a commercially viable industry.

Today, successful eradication of little cherry disease has resulted in a resurgence of cherry growing in the Creston Valley at the south end of Kootenay Lake. The Creston Valley has reclaimed its place as British Columbia’s second most productive fruit-growing area (after the Okanagan region to the west). It is known for its apple orchards, its many roadside fruit and vegetable stands, and its thriving “pick your own” industry.