History · 1920–1933
Prohibition and American cider orchards
Did Prohibition agents cut down America’s cider orchards?
In short
There is no good evidence for systematic destruction of orchards by federal agents, and the image should be treated as folklore. What Prohibition did was remove the legal market for fermented cider, which removed the reason to keep trees whose fruit was good for nothing else.
The decline was already well advanced by 1920 for commercial and temperance reasons, and cider varieties had been leaving nursery catalogues for a generation. Prohibition accelerated and completed a contraction rather than starting one.
What the law did
The Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920 and the Volstead Act supplied the enforcement machinery, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and transport of intoxicating liquor. Fermented cider fell within that prohibition as an alcoholic drink like any other, and the commercial cider trade lost its market at a stroke.
Two exemptions mattered for apples. Vinegar was lawful, and cider vinegar remained a substantial outlet for apple crops throughout the period. And the Volstead Act permitted a householder to make a quantity of non-intoxicating cider and fruit juices for domestic use — a provision drafted with farm custom in mind.
The domestic provision was ambiguous in exactly the way that mattered. Juice pressed at home ferments without being asked to, and what was non-intoxicating on the day of pressing was not non-intoxicating a fortnight later. Enforcement and the courts wrestled with this, and in practice a great deal of household cider continued to be made and drunk.
What happened to the trees
An orchard of dessert or culinary fruit was unaffected: apples were still eaten, and the fresh-fruit trade continued. An orchard of dedicated cider varieties — small, tannic, acid fruit that nobody wanted to eat — had lost its only market apart from vinegar, and there was no reason to replant it as trees aged out.
That is the mechanism by which cider fruit disappeared, and it is quieter and slower than the popular image. Trees were not felled in a campaign; they were simply not replaced, and the land went to other fruit, to pasture or to other crops as each orchard reached the end of its life.
The parallel loss was in the nursery trade. Propagation of a cultivar depends on continuing demand for grafting wood, and varieties that stop being ordered stop being listed. Several colonial cider apples came close to extinction in exactly this way and survived only as isolated trees.
What the tree count actually shows
The United States counted its fruit trees, and the numbers are decisive. In 1910 there were 217,115,000 apple trees; in 1920, 151,504,000; in 1925, 137,997,000; in 1930, 116,304,000. The Department of Agriculture summarised it in 1932 as a net decrease of 100,811,000 trees, or 46.4 per cent against the Census figures.
Note where in that series the loss falls. Nearly two thirds of it — some sixty-five million trees — had already gone by 1920, and the Eighteenth Amendment took effect on 17 January of that year. Whatever removed those trees, it was not a law that had not yet come into force.
The Department gave its own explanation at the time, and it is an ordinary agricultural one. The rapid decline in tree numbers was necessary to compensate for overplanting during the years 1905 to 1912. These heavy plantings resulted in very large crops in 1911, 1912, 1914, and 1915, with the result that prices fell to very low levels. Returns were so low that millions of trees were pulled up or abandoned. A planting bubble, then a price collapse, then a correction.
And it explains why the crop held up while the trees vanished: this is due to the shift that has taken place from farms to better located commercial orchards. The trees being lost were farm trees. The trees being kept were in orchards run as businesses. That is the same movement, in the same decades, that took the cider apple out of the American nursery catalogue — and Prohibition is not mentioned anywhere in the report’s account of it.
| Year | Apple trees | Change from 1910 |
|---|---|---|
| 1910 | 217,115,000 | — |
| 1920 | 151,504,000 | −65,611,000 |
| 1925 | 137,997,000 | −79,118,000 |
| 1930 | 116,304,000 | −100,811,000 (−46.4 %) |
The axe story, and why it persists
The image of federal agents moving through the countryside destroying orchards is vivid, memorable and repeated in a great deal of popular cider writing. It is not supported by the enforcement record, which was overwhelmingly concerned with distilling, smuggling, saloons and commercial supply rather than with fruit trees.
Its appeal is easy to understand. It gives a diffuse economic story a villain and a moment, it maps onto real and well-documented images of agents destroying stills and pouring away liquor, and it flatters the modern revival by casting the tradition as something taken away rather than something abandoned.
The honest account is less dramatic and more useful. American cider declined because farms stopped needing it, markets rewarded other fruit, respectability turned against it, and then the law removed what remained of the trade. Nobody had to cut anything down.
The industry at repeal
Prohibition ended in 1933, and the drinks industry that reassembled itself afterwards was built on beer and spirits. Cider had no organised trade left to lobby for it, no varietal orchards at scale, and a name that in ordinary American speech now meant unfermented juice.
A small commercial fermented-cider business persisted in parts of the north-east and the mid-Atlantic, and household making never entirely stopped. But the reconstruction that mattered did not begin until the 1990s, and it began substantially from imported cultivars and from research programmes rather than from a surviving trade.
How this developed
Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.
Before 1920· probable
Decline already advanced
Commercial reorganisation of orchards, cheap beer and temperance sentiment have already reduced cider to a residual product.
1910–1920
Sixty-five million trees go before the law does
The federal census counts 217,115,000 apple trees in 1910 and 151,504,000 in 1920. The Department of Agriculture attributes the fall to overplanting between 1905 and 1912 and the price collapse that followed. Prohibition takes effect on 17 January 1920, after almost all of it.
1920
Prohibition takes effect
The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act remove the legal market for fermented cider; vinegar and household fruit juice remain lawful.
1920s· probable
Cider varieties leave the nursery trade
Dedicated cider cultivars lose their market and their place in catalogues; ageing orchards are not replanted.
1933
Repeal
Prohibition ends, but the reassembled drinks industry is built on beer and spirits, with no organised cider trade remaining.
Popular memory· contested
Agents felling orchards
Not supported by the enforcement record, which concentrated on distilling, smuggling and commercial supply. The story persists because it supplies a villain for a diffuse economic decline.
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- Was cider illegal during Prohibition?
- Did people still make cider at home in the 1920s?
Related
Places
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- Why do americans call apple juice cider — Because in American usage the word stayed with the pressing rather than with the fermentation. Cider originally meant the pressed juice and what it became; when temperance made the alcoholic product unmentionable, and technology made unfermented juice keepable, the name attached to the juice and the fermented drink had to be distinguished as hard cider.
- Did the temperance movement destroy american cider
- How did american cider come back
- What is harrison apple — A New Jersey cider apple, nearly lost and revived, and the highest-phenolic fruit in a Virginia study of twenty cultivars at 926 mg/L against a Golden Delicious of 218. It is the clearest single number CiderHQ holds for why a cider apple is a different object from an eating apple.
- Where is hard cider made in the united states — The main concentrations are New England, New York State, Michigan, Virginia and the Pacific Northwest — regions with a colonial orchard history or a modern apple industry, and often both.
- Why was cider so important in new england — Apples grew where grapes and barley struggled, water was often unsafe, and every farm could press. Cider was the ordinary drink of colonial New England until temperance and then industrial brewing displaced it.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Cider, Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions, and Making Your Own
Ben Watson, The Countryman Press, first edition 1999; third edition 2013 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: first published 1999 by The Countryman Press, with five editions recorded and a 2008 printing scanned by the Internet Archive as ciderhardsweethi0000benw. The scan is access-restricted to the print-disabled collection. The site had registered this without a year; it now carries one, and the first-edition date matters because a general trade book on cider written in 1999 predates almost the whole of the North American cider revival it is sometimes cited about.
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.
World Apple Production and Trade (Foreign Service Report FS-57)
United States Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, September 1932 · government · passage verified 2026-08-25 · covers 1910–1930
A contemporary federal accounting of what happened to the American apple tree, written while it was happening and published two years before the end of Prohibition. It is registered here because it settles by arithmetic a question that is usually argued by anecdote: the United States lost a hundred million apple trees between 1910 and 1930, and roughly two thirds of that loss had already happened when Prohibition took effect on 17 January 1920. The report gives its own explanation, and Prohibition is not in it. Retrieved as PDF and read on 2026-08-25.
Where to go next
- The history of cider — The rest of the history, by period and by tradition.
- Cider culture — What survived from this history and is still practised.
- Regions — The places this happened in, and what they make now.