For third-generation apple grower Stanley Brewer, October is the sweet culmination of a “13-month-a-year job” that he still loves, even after 45 years.
Photo by Keith Phillips
Stanley Brewer
Hometown: Long Creek.
Claim to fame: Owner and fried apple pie chef at Blue Haven Orchard; 45-year veteran firefighter and assistant chief of the Long Creek Volunteer Fire Department.
Words to live by: The 10 Commandments, which are posted outside his apple store on Long Creek Highway.
Favorite apple: He prefers either the sweet crunch of a Golden Delicious or the juicy Cameo apples that ripen in October. “A Cameo is like eating a ripe peach.”
Co-op affiliation: Member of Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative.
For the past 45 years, there have been two constants in Stanley Brewer’s life—Blue Haven Orchard, his third-generation family apple business, and service with the Long Creek Volunteer Fire Department. On March 7, 2022, those two worlds collided.
Just before 8 p.m., the department was dispatched to a structure fire that had fully engulfed Brewer’s wooden packing shed and warehouse. The memory is still hard to shake. “I had to respond to my own fire,” he says. “It was a bad experience.”
The fire destroyed the commercial packing side of the business that supplied grocery stores, farmers markets and other wholesale clients throughout the Southeast, but the Long Creek community rallied around the family. The fire department raised $12,000 to help the Brewers restart a roadside stand in a café building next to the site of the original packing house. Chattooga Belle Farm pitched in, allowing Brewer to pack and ship apples using their facilities.
Today, Brewer and his wife, Barbara (everyone knows her as Babs), operate their farm store from May to December, selling peaches, produce, tree-ripened apples and every apple product imaginable. On busy days, you may find Brewer in the kitchen, his apron covered in flour, as he rolls out the dough for handmade fried apple pies that are a hit with customers and with his fellow firefighters at their monthly potluck dinners.
At age 73, he still looks forward to October as the peak month for tree-ripened apples grown in the orchard his grandfather started in 1920. Fall is the culmination of a “13-month-a-year job” but one he still enjoys. Even after the fire, Brewer says he never seriously considered leaving the orchard business.
“I like growing apples,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t want to do anything else.”