The birthplace of the modern apple
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appl...
The first liquor readily available was Applejack, a freeze-distilled spirit made from hard cider. Surprisingly, the first distillery ever licensed in the United States is still around - Laird & Company, of Scobeyville, New Jersey. George Washington asked the founder for his recipe before the Revolutionary War. Sadly, they no longer produce in NJ, and they no longer freeze-distill their spirit; the only commercially produced one available is American Alcohollery's Applejohn, in Moravian Falls, NC.
I see this article, like others on Wikipedia, perpetuating the "they drank booze because water would kill them" myth. How did the original pioneers [to say nothing of the Native Americans..] survive in the new world for close to two decades, then, without any booze? Surely one single person who had been there for a long time might have said, "Uh, guys, actually, we drink the water here, it's fine, we're not dead. You don't have to grow apples for 10 years just to have something safe to drink." But according to modern armchair historians, that would have just been too crazy, and the half-drunken stupor of American pioneers for over a century sounds much more justifiable as "well, clearly they thought the water was bad".
Only a small percentage turn out to be useful for eating, cooking or cider. Once you find one that is the whole population comes from grafts and cuttings. All the varieties we know came from a single, often accidental, tree somewhere.
If you happen to lose all stock of an old variety you have roughly no chance of ever recreating it.
Also, aside from artificial selection, there is also the effect of the overabundance of carbon dioxide in the air, which causes plants to increase their production of carbohydrate[0] compared to aminoacids (as nitrogen is limited).
I seem to remember my grandfather taking me to transplant saplings that grew from seeds from fallen apples from around a few trees.
I was young, and my alcoholic memory is faulty, but I don't recall any grafting. (This was in the blast plains of Wyoming, so, not near the idyllic nooks of the Idaho Rockies)
They are not consistent like the seeds of many other plants. Apples seeds seem to produce more variation than other fruits, though other fruits share this tendency.
Still, if you want an orchard of consistently good cider apples you'd plant grafts from a consistently good cider apple on a suitable root (dwarf, cold-resistant and so on). If you hope to find a new, interesting, variety or can live with that variation you'd plant many seeded trees and see what fruit results. Then keep, and propagate, the good ones. :)
We probably ended up with 10 or 14 trees in total (there would have been more, but crop dusters in the north of our place kept not dusting low enough and their herbicides would kill our trees ... which is a travesty on the blast plains, but what are you going to do?), and we didn't notice a heck of a lot of variability, but there was certainly some.
They were mostly all medium-ish sized and red-ish - and only fruited once per year. They tasted kind of like a McIntosh I guess? But you are right - they were a lot more variable between themselves than the cherries or (say) the berries or rhubarbs.
FWIW: I wasn't particularly interested in cider apples - I was interested in the claim that apples can't be grown and kept consistent from seeds.
Now I'm past my knowledge or knew less than I thought I did. Maybe some parent varieties vary more wildly than others?