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History · c. 1780–1920

Temperance and the reclassification of cider

Did the temperance movement destroy American cider?

In short

It did a great deal of the damage, but slowly and indirectly. Early American temperance targeted distilled spirits and treated cider as a benign farm product; over the first half of the nineteenth century the movement moved to total abstinence and cider lost its exemption.

The effect was less a campaign of destruction than a change in what a farm orchard was for. Where fruit had been grown for the press, respectability, new urban markets and better transport pushed orchards towards dessert and culinary fruit, and the cider tradition thinned out ahead of Prohibition rather than because of it.

Cider’s early exemption

The first American temperance argument, in the decades around 1800, was about spirits. Distilled liquor was cheap, strong and increasingly available, and reformers held it responsible for a distinct and worsening pattern of harm. Fermented drinks of modest strength, made at home from a farm crop, were not what they meant.

Cider consequently sat on the permitted side of the line for a generation. It was drunk in households that considered themselves temperate, supplied to hired labour without comment, and defended as wholesome, domestic and traditional — an argument identical in structure to the one made for cider allowances on English farms in the same period.

That position was unstable. Once the movement began to argue that the appetite for drink was itself the problem, a household drinking cider daily was difficult to distinguish in principle from a household drinking anything else.

The turn to total abstinence

From the 1820s the organised movement grew rapidly, and through the 1830s the pledge shifted from abstaining from spirits to abstaining from all alcoholic drink. Cider was named explicitly in that shift, and the farm cellar became a target of reforming attention rather than a background feature of rural life.

The argument used against cider was a gateway argument: that a farm where cider ran freely accustomed boys and hired men to drink, and that habitual cider drinking led to spirits. Whether or not the causal claim held, it was rhetorically effective precisely because cider was so ordinary — the reformers could point to a practice in almost every farmhouse.

Local histories and reminiscences record farmers cutting down cider orchards on conviction, sometimes at the urging of a minister or after a revival. These accounts are real but anecdotal, and they do not establish how common the practice was. It is safer to say that temperance made cider orchards socially awkward than that it caused their felling on a large scale.

Felling on principleThe image of the converted farmer taking an axe to his own orchard appears repeatedly in nineteenth-century temperance literature and in local recollection. Such incidents plainly happened; the literature had every reason to publicise them, and no source allows an estimate of how widespread they were.

What actually changed the orchards

Alongside the moral argument ran a commercial one that probably mattered more. Railways, refrigeration and growing cities created a national market for fresh dessert fruit, and a well-run orchard of named table varieties returned more than a seedling cider orchard ever had. The economics pushed in the same direction as the preaching.

Grafted commercial varieties accordingly displaced seedling trees, and the fruit came to be graded, packed and shipped rather than milled. In parallel, the arrival of cheap lager beer from the 1850s onwards gave working households an alternative drink that cider had to compete with on price and consistency.

The cumulative effect was that by the later nineteenth century, cider had shifted from being the ordinary drink of the northern farm to being a residual product of an older way of farming — which is precisely the position in which Prohibition found it.

The long consequence

The most durable effect was on knowledge rather than on acreage. Cider varieties fell out of nursery catalogues, the skills of the farm cellar stopped being transmitted, and within two generations the word cider in American usage had detached from fermentation altogether.

When American cider was reconstructed from the 1990s onwards, it had to be reconstructed largely from European stock, from surviving heritage trees and from research programmes, because the continuous tradition that existed in Normandy, Asturias and the English West Country had been broken here. That discontinuity is temperance’s longest-running legacy.

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.

  1. c. 1780–1820

    Spirits, not cider

    Early temperance argument targets distilled liquor; farm cider is treated as a wholesome domestic product.

  2. 1820s–1840s

    The pledge hardens

    Organised temperance moves to total abstinence and names cider explicitly among the drinks to be given up.

  3. Mid nineteenth century· probable

    Orchards reorganised for the table

    Rail transport, refrigeration and urban demand make grafted dessert fruit more profitable than seedling cider fruit.

  4. Later nineteenth century· probable

    Cider becomes residual

    Cheap lager and changing respectability leave farm cider as a survival rather than a staple.

  5. Temperance retelling· contested

    Orchards felled on conviction

    Widely repeated in temperance literature and local memory. Individual cases are well attested; the scale is not, and the commercial reorganisation of orchards was probably the larger cause.

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