BRANDIED PEAR
What the orchards left us
Pears, patience, and a Farmington harvest.
KERBY ORCHARD · FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO
The sweetness that stayed
In 2010, at ninety-five, Tom Kerby was still grading pears.1
It is a small detail, tucked into a newspaper account of his birthday. But it brings an entire orchard into focus: not simply trees on a piece of land, but work returned to, season after season. A harvest does not finish itself. Someone must still look closely at the fruit.
Tom and Evelyn Kerby founded Kerby Orchard in Farmington in 1945. Decades later, pears remained part of its harvest, alongside peaches, cherries and other fruit. Water from the Animas River reached the orchard through the Echo ditch system—a reminder that sweetness in this landscape depended on more than sunshine.1
More than one kind of pear
When Leslie Kerby described the orchard’s crops in 2018, he counted about five kinds of pears.2
That detail deserves a place in the story. An orchard is not a single flavor repeated across a hillside. It holds differences: fruit that asks to be noticed, seasons that cannot be hurried, work that continues long before anything reaches a table.
Leslie also spoke about the way customers bought their harvest. Bushels once carried home for canning had given way to changing habits, while a renewed interest in preserving was bringing some people back to that older rhythm.2
A season kept a little longer
There is something quietly enduring in that idea: a brief season made to last a little longer.
The pear belongs to this local history. Not as a decorative symbol of harvest, but as fruit people here actually grew. Remembering it leaves room for a more intimate picture of the San Juan Valley—one measured not only in landmarks, but in the things its orchards produced.