Wonderful people and peaches warm my heart.
Coggins Retraces Old Roots and Replants Peach Orchard
By Kathleen Brown
For The Advertiser
Tommy Coggins can’t talk about peaches without smiling. While standing in his 400-tree orchard on Lisbon Road last week, he reached a tanned arm into a tree that is brimming with the sunset-colored peaches.
While he explained the type and exact differences in this species he pulled a pocketknife from his pocket and took a slice out of the very fruit of his labor.
Tommy Coggins shows off one of his sun-kissed peaches that he
grows at his orchard in Laurens.
“A peach only grows on new growth,” Coggins said, explaining that a peach tree has to be pruned every year.
Another type of “new growth” is exactly what has brought Coggins to the orchard he is standing in.
Coggins’ father, the late E.B. Coggins, was the first of the family to catch the peach fever.
“My father, he could make a peach tree look just picture perfect,” Coggins said as he looked out into his orchard. “He’d always be out here pruning them and picking at them, getting them just right.”
Tommy’s peach orchard is located on the very road where the Coggins’ family once held their farming dynasty. Not to discount the successful Coggins’ Poultry Farm, owned and operated by Tommy’s brother, 57 year-old David Coggins, but the entire family once was able to live completely off the land.
David Coggins, who owns the Coggins Poultry on Lisbon Road three driveways down from his brother's peach orchard has planted an entire field of sunflowers.
He plans to use the field for dove hunting.
Tommy Coggins’ 80 year-old mother, Carolynn Coggins, remembers the sprawling farm that boasted cotton, grain, a dairy farm, and peaches - lots of them.
During WWII Carolynn Coggins was a young woman when she met E.B. Coggins while he was stationed in her South Dakota town. The southern charm must have made an impression because after the war, the two wed and Carolynn was brought to her new home in distant, Laurens, SC.
Laurens in 1946 must have seemed a strange place to the city-dwelling bride when she first arrived.
Carolynn Coggins leans on the rail of her porch outside of her home in Laurens
“I had never been South in my life,” Carolynn said, “and I knew nothing about farming.”
The family hired help to manage the large variety of crops, but Carolynn remembers countless times when she helped with the farm, especially with the peaches.
“We had this shed around back for packing, and I’d sit in there and pack peaches all day.”
At the time the Coggins’ Peach Orchard was shipping peaches all over the state, and the peaches became their primary income.
Tommy Coggins remembered the excitement of packaging peaches even at an early age.
“When I wasn’t big as nothing…they’d (the workers) bring peaches into the shed to pack and the chickens would be running around trying to peck at them,” he said. “It was my job to keep them away.”
But in 1976, after five years of failing peach crops killed by heavy freezes, the Coggins abandoned the peach business.
“I can remember I was a junior in high school when we brought down all the trees,” David recalled.
The itch to revive the empty peach orchards caught up to Tommy and his father in 2003, and they began to fill the empty rows up again.
“I just missed having them around,” Tommy said.
Carrying the fruits of his labor
Together the father and son team cultivated the new trees and tried to get the trees ready to grow fruit. But last year, before the duo could enjoy the success of the first good crop, E.B. passed away.
This year, only a year and a half after his father’s death the peach season brought trees that were full and healthy, but the memories left in these fields can be bittersweet to Tommy Coggins.
Coggins sells his peaches to the occasional customer,
but he considers it mostly an "expensive hobby."
Today, he grows 14 different types of peaches on his orchard, and knows which variety is best for canning, which one is best for pies and which ones you can eat right off the tree. Tommy can rattle off facts about peaches all day, but he readily assures that there is a lot he doesn’t know.
Like his father told him all his life, Tommy said, “You always learn.”
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