By Kristen Kauffman

The 24^th Annual Camp Verde Pecan and Wine festival is hosted this year on March 15 and 16 in downtown Camp Verde and is presented by the Verde Valley Wine Consortium. While the festival has been held for over twenty years, spearheaded by various groups, the roots of the festival are over a hundred years old. 

The property now referred to as Pecan Lane was used by the Camp Verde Military Reservation. When the government decreased military operations out of the fort and the last of the soldiers left in 1891, the land was available, some of it already irrigated to accommodate farms cultivated to feed the fort’s inhabitants. In 1893 a squatter filed a claim under the Homestead Act of 1862 to take over the Pecan Lane property, using Eureka Ditch to irrigate the land.  

Homesteader James D. Price patented the Pecan Lane property in 1904, detailing how he had worked the land, built a homestead and cultivated 26 acres of land that could be used for farming with the help of Eureka Ditch. The property changed ownership several times, each time to a homesteader who made the farm a little more inhabitable. Some grew corn, and some grew peaches and plums. Even as it changed hands, the lower part of the property featured an orchard with apples and peaches that were sold commercially.

The Haydon Family changed Pecan Lane’s landscape into what we know today. Noah Haydon, a Jerome miner, bought the property in 1926 and invited his son, Carl, and daughter-in-law, Eva, to live with him and help work the land. While Carl and Eva lived there for only a few years, it was Eva who changed the property. A relative of hers who grew pecans in Texas shared seeds with her, and she planted them in one-gallon cans she bought in downtown Camp Verde. She nurtured these seedlings, now recognized as the earliest known attempt to grow pecans along the Middle Verde. Eva was looking for a cash crop, something less susceptible to the smoke damage from the smelters of the United Verde Extension Mine. She was willing to wait; the seedlings would take time to mature, they would be smaller than cultivar pecan trees, but the shells would be thicker and more resilient to the elements. The only downside was that pecan trees are slow to mature and can take from fifteen to twenty years to produce a crop.

Unfortunately for the Haydons, they weren’t able to see the fruits of their labor. By 1943 Carl and Eva had moved to Los Angeles, and Noah had lost his job with the mine and had to sell the property. Eva’s trees probably started producing pecans around 1949.

Summer Place Pecan Farm, the largest producing pecan farm in Camp Verde, started in 1977 when Richard Tinlin planted 1,400 trees along the Verde River. In a good year, Tinlin produces tens of thousands of pounds of pecans.

Today Eva’s trees are still alive and well, though they aren’t used for commercial production.  The most visible trees grow north of the Pecan Lane historic marker along Montezuma Highway, two miles north of West Highway 260 and South Main Street, where the tradition is for locals to collect whatever pecans fall outside of the historic property’s fence line. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

The Pecan and Wine Festival in Camp Verde promises, among several offerings, to feature a pecan pie contest and many pecan-based foods to choose from. Sampling these nuts is a tasty connection to the past, something that Eva Haydon pictured as she planted her seedlings.

“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.