The Orchard After the Drought

In 1988, a peach farmer named Harold Gentry in Chilton County, Alabama, watched his orchard wither through the worst drought in forty years. Every tree stood skeletal against the August sky. His neighbors told him to bulldoze the lot and sell the acreage. Harold refused. He spent that fall hand-watering root systems with buckets from his well, pouring out what little he had on trees that had produced nothing.…