The Old Apple Tree in Vancouver, Washington. Andrew Jeffers/City of Vancouver, WA 

(CNN) — An apple tree thought to be the oldest in the Pacific Northwest has died at 194 years of age.

The Old Apple Tree in Vancouver, Washington, was planted in 1826 when fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company settled in the area. It was considered the matriarch of the region’s bustling apple industry and produced a green apple that was on the sour side but great for baking.

“While we knew this day would come, we hoped it was still years away,” Charles Ray, urban forester for the City of Vancouver, told CNN.

The Old Apple Tree in a picture from 1940. Clark County Historical Museum 

Around 2015, the team of experts caring for the tree noticed that the cambium layer — the growing part of the trunk — was starting to die back, Ray explained. That contributed to the creation of a spiral crack in the trunk, which hollowed out over the years. The tree finally died in June.

“The tree itself has taken on its own persona. It’s a living organism, just like us, and it’s been faced with a lifetime of challenges,” Ray said. “It stood there for generations and witnessed the world change around it.”

“When anybody speaks of the oldest apple tree in the Northwest, everybody knows it was that apple tree,” David Benscoter, a retired FBI agent who now runs The Lost Apple Project, told CNN. “I’m sure people never thought it could reach that age.”

In 1984, a public park was built around the tree and inaugurated an annual festival to celebrate it.

On Sunday, members of the Vancouver community held a memorial for the tree on Facebook, sharing stories and memories.

Legend has it that the Old Apple Tree came to Vancouver as a seed, transported by a British naval officer. Royal Navy Lieutenant Aemilius Simpson received the seeds at a dinner in London before departing for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trading outpost in the Pacific Northwest.

“A young woman that was there with him, as she was bidding him farewell, slipped a few apple seeds from her dessert into his jacket pocket, and suggested that he plant those when he reached the Northwest,” said Brad Richardson, executive director at the Clark County Historical Museum.

After arriving at Fort Vancouver, Simpson handed the seeds to Chief Factor John McLoughlin, who oversaw the establishment of local orchards and gardens for sustenance.

The tree is not  within the perimeter of the historic Fort Vancouver’s orchard but about half a mile away from it, near what would have been the living quarters for workers on the fort.

Apples produced by the Old Apple Tree were dubbed “English Greenings,” a generic classification used to describe old-world apples, according to Charles Ray.

A DNA analysis performed by experts at Washington State University’s department of horticulture revealed that the Old Apple Tree is genetically unique.

“The Old Apple Tree is not identical to any other named variety in a worldwide collaborative data set of several thousand apple variety DNA profiles,” Cameron Peace, a professor of tree fruit genetics at WSU, told CNN. “The Old Apple Tree is therefore unique, one-of-a-kind. It will carry genetic factors not present in other heirloom or modern cultivars.”

Scientists were able to establish that the Old Apple Tree is almost certainly a grandchild of the French Reinette, a 500-year-old variety dubbed “the grandmother of all apple cultivars,” Peace explained. The French Reinette is a close direct ancestor of most modern varieties and also a parent or grandparent to many heirloom varieties.

As the Old Apple Tree’s trunk was dying over time, several “root suckers” — or new shoots — started coming out of its root system.

“We made the determination to start nurturing these root suckers so that in the future we would have a new tree,” Charles Ray told CNN. One of the saplings will remain in the same location to become the “new” Old Apple Tree over the years.

If you attended the yearly Old Apple Tree Festival in Vancouver, chances are you might be in possession of a living piece of the Old Apple Tree. Ray estimates that about  200 cuttings were given away each year.

“Over the years, people would come back and tell us stories, their memories of the tree, and whether or not their cuttings took or were starting to grow — from all along the Pacific, all along the West,” Ray said.

Ray encourages all those who have a piece of the Old Apple Tree living in their yard, or any memories to share about the Old Apple Tree itself, to participate in the City of Vancouver’s “Letters to Trees” program.

A similarly lauded fruit tree has so far survived a mortal threat in Orange County, California.

A 146-year-old orange tree — California’s “parent navel orange” — was enclosed last year in a structure in hopes of saving it from citrus greening disease.

The tree,  brought from Brazil in 1873, gave birth to Southern California’s citrus empire and to most of the navel orange trees alive today. It grows alongside a Riverside thoroughfare.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.