Life & fun · September 2, 2025
Making the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection Browsable
I built a website featuring the paintings at https://pomological.art and a [https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mhoodlbpfiobhfbblii...](Chrome extension) that shows a random watercolor from the collection on each new tab. *The story*: In the 1880s the USDA commissioned 7,500+ botanical illustrations to document American fruit varieties in a time when we had over 14,000 types of apples. The collection got digitized after decades in government storage (thanks especially to Kent Whealy and then Parker Higgins), but it remains scattered across government sites,…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built a website featuring the paintings at https://pomological.art and a [https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mhoodlbpfiobhfbblii...](Chrome extension) that shows a random watercolor from the collection on each new tab. *The story*: In the 1880s the USDA commissioned 7,500+ botanical illustrations to document American fruit varieties in a time when we had over 14,000 types of apples. The collection got digitized after decades in government storage (thanks especially to Kent Whealy and then Parker Higgins), but it remains scattered across government sites, Wikimedia, and the Internet Archive, and difficult to really explore and dig into. *The site*: Lets you filter by crop type, browse by artist or range of years, examine particular varieties, or see where specimens came from on a map. You can explore how the same variety changed in appearance over time, or browse paintings that show plant diseases. My goal is to continue to research and start to provide history and context for the varieties themselves. The Chrome extension just serves up a random painting each time you open a tab. It's a nice way to stumble across varieties you've never heard of. *Some context:* Previous HN discussions covered the collection itself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44287019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397168). Parker Higgins FOIA'd the USDA and got them to drop their paywall after discovering they'd made a grand total of $565 over several years (https://parkerhiggins.net/2015/11/the-usda-pomological-water...). *What's cool*: Apple hunters use these paintings to identify "extinct" varieties still growing in abandoned orchards. The Lost Apple Project matched fruit from a tree on Eastern Washington's Steptoe Butte to paintings of the Nero apple, which was assumed to be lost for a century. The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project a few years back rediscovered the Colorado Orange the same way, matching fruit from a lone tree to four paintings in the collection. *Why I care:* I'm starting a small cidery in Oregon (called Landrace Cider) and have become obsessed with rare and heirloom varieties over the years. I stumbled across the collection a couple years ago doing some variety research on [Orange Pippin](https://www.orangepippin.com/), and it still boggles my mind that such an incredible resource exists and lives in the public domain and yet so few people have ever heard of it. *Also:* I wrote a more in depth slash thoughtful essay on the topic, which tells the full story of the collection and gives more context for why the USDA felt compelled to pay artists to paint fruit: https://andrewhaupt.substack.com/p/a-field-guide-to-resurrec...
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