Apple Cider with Miss Scorgie
Editor’s note: Elvira Scorgie grew up in Still River and lived there in a house known as Seven Wells for most of her life. In her later years, she served as unofficial town historian and collected much of the material that now resides in the Harvard Historical Society archives. In 1981, she was recognized as the oldest living citizen in Harvard by the Harvard Post and awarded the Post cane. “We give you this cane,” then publisher Kathleen Cushman said, “not to lean on…but to symbolize how much we have come to lean on you.” Elvira Scorgie, according to a March 2008 Press article, held the cane until her death in 1993 at the age of 106.
[In the autumn of 1969,] Miss Scorgie read a slip of a notice in the Harvard Post’s free messages: the Harvard-Roxbury Summer Program would be holding a cider sales fundraiser, and needed bottles. The goal was $700, counselors’ and director’s salaries for its two-week day camp. With permission of orchardists Hermann and Carlson, H-RSP board member Audrey Ball organized mothers and preschoolers to pick October apple drops, which we took to Chase’s cider press in Littleton, where a bushel of drops yielded three gallons of cider. The project caught on and needed more and more glass gallon jugs.
Lots of glass jugs
Miss Scorgie saw the request and called us to say she used to sell cider and had lots of good glass jugs in her cellar. Would we please come over and help ourselves? [My husband] Mac and I did. We brought home about 40 bottles, plain, some fancy, with raised designs of bunches of grapes, apple leaves, a whole apple shape, and some with smart octagonal sides, or necks topped with a good spout. Most were clear glass, some were brown glass, and all needed a hard inside scrub.
My mother was visiting and made old-fashioned suggestions for cleaning: toss in a cup of water, some ammonia, a handful of driveway gravel and a few bits of shredded newspaper. Was this the bookish mother I knew? lt worked, immediately. The prettiest bottles we held back, to sell as pricey objects at spring’s Apple Blossom Festival. We treasured Miss Scorgie’s generosity helping our bridge-building friendships with Roxbury.
Elvira told of picking apples with her family, cider pressing and loading gallon jugs, boxes of apples and other farm produce, even flowers, into Seven Wells’ horse-drawn wagon. She and her father took the Ayer-Boston train to the city. As we cleared the Scorgie house of gallon bottles, Mac admired her cider press. Eventually, he asked Elvira what she would be doing with the press, and since she hadn’t thought about that, he suggested that if she ever sold it, he would like to buy it.
Early cider at Crumbles Farm
She later sold it to him, as it was, worn and needing repairs. Soon fixed, it was in use at our Crumbles Farm. Our kids insisted on early cider, ignoring the green apple rules, and several neighborhood children had real stomach aches for the first time. They remember the production with excited joy, in spite of ill timing and careless parental supervision.
—Jean McCrosky, Old Littleton Road
