Cherry Capital of the World
Near Traverse City, Michigan
They call Traverse City the Cherry Capital of the World, and unlike a lot of civic bragging, this one holds up. The Grand Traverse region grows roughly three-quarters of the nation's tart cherries, the sour kind that go into pies and dried snacks, thanks to a lucky accident of geography. Lake Michigan wraps around these peninsulas and acts like a giant thermostat, cooling the orchards in spring so the blossoms do not open too early, then holding off the first hard frost in fall.
It started with a Presbyterian missionary named Peter Dougherty, who planted the first cherry trees out on Old Mission Peninsula around eighteen fifty-two. Everyone expected them to freeze and die. Instead they thrived, and neighbors started planting their own.
The first commercial orchard went in around eighteen ninety-three, right as the lumber was running out. In nineteen twenty-five the town threw a Blessing of the Blossoms festival to celebrate the spring bloom. The Michigan Legislature renamed it the National Cherry Festival in nineteen thirty-one, and today it draws around five hundred thousand visitors to a town of only about sixteen thousand people, every single July.
