09/30/2026
On a night in 1919, the temperature in the Hood River Valley dropped to twenty seven degrees below zero, and it wiped out enough of the valley's orchards that farmers had to decide what to plant instead. They chose pears, and the choice built an entire regional economy. 🍐
Hood River County is now the world's leading producer of Anjou pears, responsible for roughly two out of every three pears grown in Oregon. Just down the road, the Rosenberg family's Bear Creek Orchards developed the Comice pear into what they marketed as the Royal Riviera, a pear so buttery and fragile that for decades it was mostly sold by mail order because it bruised too easily to trust to a grocery store shelf. Every fall the valley runs on the same rhythm it always has, pickers moving row by row under Mount Hood while crates stack up faster than trucks can haul them away. 🏔️
Pear growing in Oregon actually goes back to 1847, when Henderson Luelling hauled boxes of fruit tree sprouts west along the Oregon Trail. It took nearly two centuries and one brutal freeze to turn that into a nineteen thousand acre industry, and in 2005 the state legislature made it official by naming the pear Oregon's state fruit. 🌾
A single hard freeze in 1919 is the whole reason Hood River smells like ripe pears every September. What is your favorite way to eat one, straight off the tree or baked into something warm?
