Have just read a great article that shows how sometimes a challenging situation can close one door and open another to a more fruitful future.  Enjoy Dana

apple tree

Mansfield’s all-time champion fruit grower was Jacob Deane of Fruit Street. As I’m sure you’ve already figured out, the street took its name from his extensive orchards. Until the mid-1800s, Fruit Street was called, for reasons clear only to our forebears, the Medfield High Road.

Jacob started out by teaching school in Taunton. That town’s wealthiest citizen, whose teenage son attended his classes, took a dislike to the young Mansfield man and decided he had to go. He ordered the son, who was a big kid, to beat up the teacher. Male schoolmasters in those days had to be skilled pugilists and wrestlers. Jacob flattened the boy. The father pressed charges. A judge ruled in Dean’s favor, greatly enhancing his local popularity, because nobody liked the old man or the son.

Perhaps irresistably drawn by the lure of his ancestral lands, Jacob, after teaching in Taunton, Easton, Stoughton and Mansfield, gave up his career as an educator and became a horticulturist.

Jennie Copeland tells us, “He sold his Greek and Latin books, in which he had been delving for the roots of languages, and turned his attention to the roots in the soil of the old homestead.”

From his father, John Dean, Jacob had inherited the house and 135 acres of farmland on what was called Eight Mile Plain. Overlaid on a modern map of Mansfield, his estate would swallow our municipal airport plus adjoining land on both sides of Fruit Street. On this tract Deane planted 100 varieties of apple trees, as well as cherry, peach, pear, plum and mulberry trees. The presence of the latter suggests that he may have been one of the many farmers to experiment with raising silkworms, which feed on mulberry leaves.

Some of his fruit trees he imported from England. Maybe in this connection, he wrote Queen Victoria about trees, though there’s no evidence that Her Majesty, who had matters of Empire on her mind, deigned to reply. Jacob also opened a nursery where he sold ornamental and fruit trees. To increase his farm’s diversity, he hired East Mansfield’s universal man, Isaac Stearns, to graft trees for him.

In 1835, when Jacob Deane was 55, the Taunton Branch Rail Road decided they wanted to run a track through his land. The railroad would connect the Boston & Providence rails at Mansfield depot with Taunton and eventually with the rich whaling port of New Bedford.

“No way!” was Jacob’s response. He was convinced that smoke from the wood-burning locomotives would blight the orchards to which he’d devoted so much of his life. He hadn’t yet learned what all Florida citrus growers know – that smoke helps protect fruit trees from frost.

The corporation realized that Jacob had them over a barrel. His estate was too big to detour around. If he persisted in stonewalling them, they might as well take their trains and go home. Rather than get embroiled in a long costly court dispute, they sweetened the deal.

They told Jacob they’d build him an 8 by 12-foot private station where he, his family and relatives, simply by displaying a flag, could stop any train and get aboard. It may have been the only private passenger depot on a U.S. public railway. Not only that, the company presented him with a handsomely engraved lifetime pass, good for himself and his family, bearing railroad president Thomas B. Wales’ ornately scrolled signature.

Jacob caved. In 1836, trains began running regularly through his property. They did no harm to his fruit trees. The station and the free pass served him until he died in 1871 at age 91.

In 1917, the historic Deane house burned. The foundation hole and the walled lane by which Jacob Deane reached his private depot are now obscured by a housing development.