Mesa Orchards

The shares cost $500 an acre, and the money built a company town: some 50 families lived at Mesa, with their own store, school and post office, and in 1921 more than 120 rail cars of apples and peaches went east. The luck ran both ways. In December 1920 a packinghouse fire, a year after it opened, burned 50,000 boxes of apples; freezes and poor markets followed, and debt changed the company's hands in 1936. A Montana ranching family bought what was left in 1954, the last trees were pulled in 1967, and pieces of the flume remain.

What the plaque says

Mesa Orchards For more than half a century, after 1910, an apple orchard of nearly 1400 acres, thought to be the largest in the United States under one management, covered this area. Investors, mostly from the eastern U.S., bought 10-acre shares to finance the project. An eight mile wooden flume carried water for irrigation from the Middle Fork of the Weiser River, and in 1920, a unique gravity tramway was built to carry fruit 3½ miles north to a rail siding. Production lasted until about 1960 when frozen crops and production problems led to its demise. 374 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McCall Smokejumper Base — 25 mi
  Where conscientious objectors in the Second World War parachuted onto forest fires, and were shunned in camp for it.

More markers nearby

• Old Railroads — 7.0 mi
• Long Valley Ambush — 21 mi
• An Early Industry — 22 mi
• Packer John's Cabin — 25 mi