By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Cars turned off Cold Soil Road into the entrance of Terhune Orchards on Saturday morning to bring visitors to the family farm of Pam and Gary Mount.
A gentle breeze flapped the American flag hanging on a flagpole right above another flag with the symbol of an apple on it. This was the 38th Apple Day, now a two-day festival featuring live music, farm food and things to do for children.
The festival is a big part of the Mounts’ marketing strategy to attract visitors, something that was ahead of its time in the 1970s when Apple Day started. For a business that relies almost exclusively on direct sales, events like these are critical for attracting customers, something the Mounts know full well.
Mr. Mount is a Princeton University-educated 10th generation farmer who grew up on an apple farm on Route 1 in West Windsor, across from what today is the Hyatt Regency Princeton. In 1975, he and his wife bought Terhune Orchards and made a business decision to sell directly to the customer, rather than be a large wholesale farmer as his father had been. But how to get people there?
“The second year we started, (the) Nassau Inn called us and said how about giving them some apples so they could give them away to people to publicize an event they were having there. So we said, why don’t we do that here,” said Mr. Mount, dressed in a red T-shirt with apples on it.
With that Apple Day was born, “a promotion for our farm, it’s been a sharing with our community and we also sell a lot of our stuff,” he said.
At that time, the Mounts were breaking new ground by introducing the concept; there were no farm or harvest festivals then — an idea that brought people to Terhune from as far as New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
“There was nobody else having open festivals like this,” Ms. Mount said walking through her property where visitors milled about under gray skies.
Apple Day put Terhune on the map, Mr. Mount said in describing an event that grew to become two days long. Today, Terhune attracts about 10,000 people a day for the event, said Ms. Mount, a former mayor of Lawrence.
As with any traditional event, there are staples of Apple Day. The Daisy Jug Band has been playing for 34 years. Dave Kyle has been roasting pigs at the event for so long, he has seen people who once came with their children now come back with their grandchildren.
“That is really cool,” said Mr. Kyle, standing next to the roasting pig, the aroma of its drippings spreading in the pre-autumn air.
Apple Day “really has become a family tradition for lots of families,” said the Mounts’ youngest daughter, Tannwen. She and older sister, Reuwai — both of whom followed their father to Princeton — are the 11th generation of Mounts to farm in New Jersey.
The Mount family owns four farms, three of which they farm themselves and one that is rented out. Today, about 95 percent of everything Terhune sells is directly to customers, with only a small portion of wholesale.
“So we have to have a lot of people,” Pam Mount said, “because when we started in ’75, people would come and they’d buy 12 baskets of peaches and load up their car and go back to Manhattan. Now they buy 12 peaches. So, (you) have to have a lot more people each buying 12 to make up to sell the same stuff.”
“We still go back to the idea that in order to sell our stuff, we have to get people here, because that’s the way we sell things,” Mr. Mount said. “We’re the kind of a farm where people can come and buy their stuff right here.”
