As we celebrate National Cherry Month, the Leelanau Ticker works to separate facts from folklore about the cherry’s earliest local origin.

There’s a widely shared story that the Reverend Peter Dougherty planted the Cherry Capital’s first cherry tree — and on the Old Mission Peninsula.

Local historians think that’s about as accurate as the tale of a young George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. The morality tale of how a 6-year-old George couldn’t lie to his father when asked if he’d used his new hatchet to chop down a cherry tree originated with biographer Mason Locke Weems, and experts say they can’t prove it wrong—or right.

The same might be said for the story of Dougherty. It is a “nice, but unverified story,” that in 1852 the ambitious recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary — who’d arrived by invitation of the Chief to minister to the local tribe — planted the first cherry tree, says Christopher Rieser, the Old Mission-based president of the Peter Dougherty Society. The Presbyterian missionary was also a well-known botany enthusiast, so that part makes sense; still, there’s no official record of any cherry trees while Dougherty lived on Old Mission Peninsula.

It’s more likely that if the Reverend Dougherty planted the first tree, it was across the bay in Omena.

The year Dougherty was said to have planted the first cherry tree is the same year he crossed the bay with the tribe, settling in Omena where under a new treaty and state law Tribal members could buy land. A history of Omena Heights says there were already apple trees on the land and that Dougherty added a cherry.

There’s more historical documentation that the first cherry tree was planted the following year, in Northport, by the town’s founder — a Congregational missionary to another local tribe, says local historian Mark Smith. Reverend George Nelson Smith had traveled with Chief Peter Waukazoo from what’s now Holland, by boat and canoe, to reestablish the Ottawa Mission further north.

In his journal of November 1853, Smith wrote of buying trees from a traveling salesman named J.B. Barker, noting: “I bought in all of him 9 dwarf pears, 9 cherries, 4 currents. Paid him cash. For his board, he gave me a shovel.”

Ten years later, those trees were thriving, said a secretary of the Department of Agriculture who visited the Smith farm. According to an agricultural history of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore called “A Garden Apart,” the secretary wrote in 1863 that Smith’s trees were “handsomely set to fruit.” The report also made a prediction that proved true.

“No reason appears why cherries could not succeed over nearly the whole of the Grand Traverse region,” the secretary’s report added. “The comparative mildness and uniform temperature of the winter, together with the generally porous nature of the soil, may be regarded as favorable to the finer kinds of this fruit, or the so-called heart cherries.”

But while it’s safe to say that Smith planted the first cherry trees, it’s unfair to credit Smith with establishing the cherry industry, says Susan Odom, archivist with the Omena Historical Society. That honor may go to another legendary Leelanau figure: D.H. Day.

According to same agricultural history of the dunes, early lumber baron D.H. Day rejected the “cut in and get out” approach to logging popular in his day. After purchasing substantial tracts along the lakeshore including Glen Haven, he logged some but raised a second growth forest and earned acclaim as a reforestation pioneer. His interest in agriculture sprung, the report said, from the same philosophy. He planted the first cherry orchard in Glen Haven in the 1890s, and in 1903 another 400-acre farm was described as “the best appointed in the country” with 3,000 thriving fruit trees.

The industry “took off like a skyrocket” from there, according to local historians, with farms like Leelanau’s Cherry Home Orchard growing what was then the largest tart cherry orchard in the world with its 14,000 Montmorency cherry trees, warehouse, canning factory and deep water dock for large ships.

In 1914, a Traverse City newspaper estimated the value of the local cherry crop at $500,000, reporting that 240 refrigerated railroad cars full of cherries had been shipped to markets in Detroit and Chicago.

So with historians giving the nod to Leelanau as the true spot of the cherry industry's birthplace, how does the lifeblood of the region stack up today? According to the Leelanau Conservancy, Leelanau County grows more tart cherries than any other county in the nation — more than 1,000,000 trees grown on 9,000 acres. With 25 percent of all tart cherries grown in the United States coming from Leelanau County, the county's growers are responsible for two slices of every cherry pie.

And that’s no lie.

Pictured: Lasch Orchards, Bingham Township, 1915, courtesy Leelanau Historical Society