Crane's of Fennville: an apple orchard that started selling pie to survive

The land was first cleared and planted with fruit in the 1880s, but the Cranes showed up in 1917, when Henry and Muriel Crane — both fresh out of Michigan Agricultural College, the school that became Michigan State — bought the Fennville orchard and started farming. Their family is still there, generations deep, picking the same hills.

The pie came later, and it came out of trouble. By the 1960s, selling apples by the bushel was a thin living. So in 1967, Lue Crane started making up fruit baskets in her own kitchen to sell. Her husband, Bob, began pressing apples into cider to bring in a little more. Then Lue had the idea that turned the farm into a destination: open a little restaurant and sell the fruit already baked into pie. The Pie Pantry opened in 1972 with a menu of nothing but homemade pies — apple, cherry, peach, whatever the trees were giving that week.

People came for the pie and then wanted lunch to go with it, so soups and sandwiches got added on bread baked in the same kitchen. The trick that saved the orchard — sell the work, not just the raw fruit — is the whole business now. There is a U-pick out in the rows, with something like twenty kinds of apples, ten of peaches, and sweet cherries when they hit. There is a corn maze in the fall and a hard-cider winery for the grown-ups.

The dependable thing is the same one Lue figured out in her kitchen in the 1960s: a Crane’s fruit pie, fruit straight off the hill, crust from a recipe handed down through the family. The orchard outside the window grew the apples in your slice, which is a thing very few pie counters can honestly say.