LOOKING BACK is a Leader online feature that highlights historic photos. Readers are invited to submit their historic Jefferson County photos for online publication.
There was a time when Hillsboro was the peach of Jefferson County.
The county seat is still a fine place, full of friendly folks, but in the 1960s and early 1970s, people came from far and wide to buy peaches at Boyer’s Hilltop Acres, an orchard and retail produce stand at Hwy. 21 and Hwy. B.
“People came from all over to buy peaches,” said Sheila Lewis Missey, one of Leo Boyer’s four children, all of whom worked in the operation. “They came from Arnold, Cedar Hill, Farmington, Potosi – everyone knew about Leo Boyer’s peaches.”
Missey said fans of the stand came from points even further away.
“Some people would come in with Styrofoam coolers, and take loads of peaches back on planes, to California or wherever they came from,” she said. “We were known for peaches.”
But the peaches that Leo Boyer and his family sold weren’t just any peaches, and Leo Boyer wasn’t just any peach farmer.
As a child, his interest in agriculture was sparked when he won an Arbor Day contest. His school encouraged students to plant trees and at the end of the year, the fifth-grader’s plantings had surpassed those planted by all the other fifth- through eighth-graders.
Boyer became a barber, but later devoted himself full-time to agriculture.
He bought 110 acres in Hillsboro with plans to plant a peach orchard.
“We lived in Racola (near Old Mines),” Missey said. “Dad would drive around, looking for places to buy to plant peach trees. One day, we were out, and it was really cold, and he noticed that all the peaches were frozen – except for ones he saw in Hillsboro. He saw one tree that was just loaded with peaches. He went to the owner of the property, a German lady, and offered to buy her land. She said she didn’t want to sell, but if she did, she’d call him.”
That call came five years later, in 1959, and Boyer completed the purchase of 110 acres for $7,000, then uprooted his family and planted 180 trees.
Two years later, he opened his stand.
Missey said she and her sisters and brother, and eventually their spouses, children and other family members worked on the land.
Boyer took his interest in agriculture and, through grafting, developed his own peach, called a B-9.
“There’s never been another peach like it,” Missey said. “Nothing is as good as a B-9. Through grafting, he made it himself. It was juicy, it was sweet. Everybody from all around knew about it. And we wouldn’t pick them when they were green like they do now. We picked them when they were ready to be eaten.”
Missey said the name of the peach came about because it was her father’s ninth attempt to develop his own peach variety.
“They spoiled me forever,” Missey said of the B-9s. “I can’t eat any other peaches. They’re not the same. I know a lot of other people who say the same thing.”
Leo Boyer eventually turned over management of the orchard (which also sold apples in the fall) to his son-in-law, Harold Sansoucie, before Leo sold 80 of the acres to Circuit Court Judge Charlie Sheehan in the mid-1970s.
The closure of the stand meant the demise of B-9 peaches.
“Why didn’t he patent those?” his daughter asks today. “Who knows? But I sure do miss those peaches.”
Leo Boyer died in 1995, on the birthday of his wife of 50 years, Nelia, who died two years later. Leo was 90.
Today, Boyer’s Hilltop Acres is the site of Hillsboro City Park and the Peachtree Plaza shopping center.
The land that Boyer didn’t sell was divided among his family. They still live on lots along Hwy. 21.
Missey has researched the ownership of the property dating back to 1917, when Hwy. B was known as Morse Mill County Road.
“I sure do remember selling peaches in the hot sun, year after year,” she said. “But those were happy times. We were one big happy family.
“It’s kind of sad remembering all this and then coming up to (the property) and seeing a gas station and a dollar store there,” Missey said. “But I’m thrilled they named it Peachtree Plaza. We feel like they’ve honored my father.”
Send submissions to LOOKING BACK to nvrweakly@aol.com or bring or mail them to the Leader office, 503 N. Second St., Festus (P.O. Box 159, 63028). Please include your name, phone number, a brief description of what’s in the photo and tell us how you came by it. Please also include when it was taken, where and by whom (if known). A new LOOKING BACK feature will be posted each week.
