Hazelnut Country: Oregon's Nut Capital

Before the vineyards took over these hills, and still today all around them, grow orchards of a different crop, the hazelnut. Oregonians long called them filberts, and the Willamette Valley is so perfectly suited to them that this one valley produces nearly all of the hazelnuts grown in the United States. Yamhill County, where Dundee sits, is one of the heartland counties for the crop.

Settlers carried the first trees here from Europe in the nineteenth century, and in nineteen oh three a grower named George Dorris planted one of the first big commercial orchards in the Pacific Northwest, near Springfield. At one point more than half the hazelnut trees in Oregon are thought to have come from his nursery stock. The nut became such a point of pride that Oregon named the hazelnut its official state nut.

You can spot the orchards easily, low rounded trees planted in tidy rows, their trunks kept clean so machines can sweep the fallen nuts off the ground each autumn. Wine may be the glamour crop of the Dundee Hills now, but hazelnuts are the deep agricultural roots this whole valley grew from.