Fred Openshaw Farms

Honeycrisp on West 13100 South

Each fall the Openshaws open an orchard on West 13100 South in Santaquin to people who want to pick their own Honeycrisp apples. The picking days come after the family has taken what it needs for market, usually late September through early October, and the farm announces dates and times each year. The charge is a flat fee per vehicle. Honeycrisp is the only crop offered this way. Cherries, apricots, peaches and the rest are picked by the farm’s crew.

The farm goes by two names. Its older website calls it Fred Openshaw Farms, “Home of Grandpa Fred’s Fabulous Fruit,” and that logo is printed on its packaging. Its newer site, and the apple boxes in grocery stores, say Openshaw Acres. The office address is 69 North Center Street. The family keeps a fruit stand in town and a pickup stand at 33 West 100 North for online orders. Its own figures for the farm’s size do not agree. The state agritourism directory gives 20 acres of orchard. The farm’s FAQ gives about 25 acres. A Marketspread vendor profile gives 70 acres of orchards and names tart cherries as the major crop.

The farm’s ripening chart starts with sweet cherries in late June and apricots in mid-July. Peaches, nectarines, plums and pluots follow from late July into early August, summer apples in mid-August, and fall apples and pears from late August through October. The Utah Tree Fruit Growers listing says Utah peaches last until about mid-August, after which the farm sells Idaho peaches. On September 15, 2026, the farm posted that peaches had only a couple of weeks left and that the O’Henrys that week came from Idaho. Its Utah’s Own listing names the apples grown: Ginger Gold for summer, then Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji, Braeburn and Honeycrisp.

The Honeycrisp apples culled from the packing line are juiced into cider. It is sold in half gallons, and in summer it is frozen into slushies served in a 14-ounce refillable bottle. The online store lists sugar-free Honeycrisp applesauce, jams and Honeycrisp apple butter at ten dollars each. Vegetables from partner growers fill out the booth. A post for June 20, 2026, listed snap peas, English peas, radishes, green beans, beets, zucchini and yellow squash beside the Fuji apples, pears and cherries.

The farm calls itself conventional but follows some organic practices. It works under an integrated pest management program and sprays only when a crop or the trees are at risk. Before picking, it sends samples away to be tested for pesticide residue. In spring the family arranges blossom photo sessions in the orchard for those who ask ahead. School classes and homeschool groups come for tours.

Booths from St. George to Bountiful

Most of the fruit leaves Santaquin by truck for farmers markets. The 2026 season opened on June 6 at Vernon Worthen Park in downtown St. George and at Cory Wride Memorial Park in Eagle Mountain, both on Saturdays. The farm closed its St. George booth on September 19, 2026. Springville sells at the Civic Center on Mondays and Orem at City Center Park on Wednesdays. Before the last week at both markets, the farm posted: “We’ll be there even if it’s raining.” Draper’s market is held Tuesdays at Smith Fields Park and Bountiful’s on Thursdays. Lindon has been on the list as well. A seasonal fruit drop serves Las Vegas. Through Little Opee’s Produce Company, the Honeycrisp apples reach Lee’s Marketplace, Kent’s, Reams, and Macey’s in Santaquin.

The stand at home keeps its own customers. A review the farm posts tells of a family heading back to southern Utah who came across the stand on Labor Day: “They returned home to share their fruit with us long after they had closed on Labor Day as we just happened upon their fruit stand on a whim.”

A line of Freds

Fred C. Openshaw (Fred Colvin) and his son, Fred Allen Openshaw, run the farm as partners. Fred C. became an educator and school administrator, like his father. He told the Serve Daily writer Arianne Brown in May 2023: “The farm has always been a side hustle. We have always employed local kids to help us, and it has also been something that we have done as a family.” Fred Allen grew up working the orchard and came to love it through FFA at Payson High School. He took a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness from Utah State University and a master’s in agricultural economics, in 2017 and 2020 by the paper’s account. He then moved his family back to Santaquin to farm full time. The paper reported that none of the Freds before him had done so. Fred C.’s wife, Carlotte Davenport, and their daughter, Carlysa, also worked the orchard. The youngest Fred, Fred David, called Davey, was two years old in 2023, when the paper said he could be found handing out fruit at the stands. “We’re not just about growing our product; we’re about growing our children,” Fred C. said.

Fred C. was nicknamed “Cowboy.” As a boy he was his grandfather’s sidekick, watering the orchard with him, going along for haircuts, and picking Grandma Angie up from work.

Hogs on Center Street

That grandfather was Alfred “Fred” Openshaw, the farm’s Grandpa Fred. Serve Daily says he took over in the 1950s and 1960s and added hogs and chickens, selling eggs and poultry to Utah Poultry, now IFA Country Stores. He and his wife, Angie (Angeline Vilsmeyer in her son’s obituary), bought the orchard and the old Santaquin house where his father had kept a doctor’s office. Grandpa Fred set up a fruit stand in front of the house on Center Street. The farm’s story says “He knew his trees so well that all the customer would need to do was tell him they wanted an apple with a certain taste and he could help the customer get just the right apple.” Serve Daily credits the same skill to his son.

That son, Fred H.C. Openshaw, was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on August 30, 1938. He remembered going at night with his grandfather Eli to the canyon orchard to take the water turn and pick fruit to sell. Later he sold the crop by the box in towns across Utah and Arizona. While courting Patricia Tanner, he learned she loved fresh green apples. He told her he knew an orchard with the best ones, but they would have to sneak in because the farmer was “a real ornery old guy.” The orchard was his family’s, and he and his father were the ornery farmers. The farm’s story says Patricia was “incredibly embarrassed but Fred was amused.” They married in the Salt Lake Temple on December 4, 1961, and raised six children on the farm.

His obituary records a career kept alongside the trees. He taught at Tintic High School in Eureka, retired as superintendent of the Tintic School District in 1995, and then led the Fort Morgan School District in Colorado. He rose to colonel in the Utah National Guard and served 39 years in uniform in all. He also belonged to Summit Creek Irrigation. The farm’s history says he and his father once raised 150 hogs on Center Street, until the growing neighborhoods objected. He later ran cattle on a 15-acre plot west of town, near today’s Blue Flame Propane. He bought 40 head at $200 each for dairy and auction sales, and nearly a fifth of them died soon after reaching Utah.

In the early 1980s, according to the family, livestock had become too hard to balance with his military and school work, and the farm turned to orchards. The farm’s story puts the decision in about 1980 and says Fred H.C. and Fred C. made it together. They planted most of the ground in tart cherries and later added Red Delicious apples, nectarines, pluots, Honeycrisp and peaches. After he retired, Fred H.C. worked the orchard alongside his son. The obituary published by Brown Family Mortuary and the Payson Chronicle gives his death as December 7, 2023, and records his burial with military honors in the Santaquin City Cemetery. The farm’s own story gives the date as December 4, 2024.

The doctor’s orchard at the canyon mouth

The orchard began with Fred H.C.’s grandfather, Dr. Eli Openshaw. According to Fred C., Eli was born and raised in Spring Lake. The farm’s story says he became a doctor late in life and returned to Santaquin to practice, building his office onto his home on Center Street. He bought ground near the mouth of Santaquin Canyon and planted fruit trees there, so that patients who could not afford a visit could work off what they owed. The Marketspread profile says he bought about 10 acres after the Great Depression began. Serve Daily dates the farm to the early 1900s.

A neighbor’s account, shared on the farm’s Facebook page and reprinted by Serve Daily, describes a grandfather who lost his farm in the Depression and moved his family into a tent on a city lot. As summer ended, he still had only plans for a basement house. “One day, Dr. Openshaw approached him and said, ‘Thomas, just about everybody in this town owes me money. When you get ready to dig your basement and pour the cement, let me know and I will make sure you have the help you need.’ On the appointed day, a large number of men came to work off their debts to Dr. Openshaw, completing the work in a very short time.”

Eli had learned trees from his elders. His father, Samuel Openshaw, was asked to settle in Santaquin after the Martin Handcart Company reached Salt Lake City. Samuel married Esther Melita Johnson and learned farming from her father, Benjamin Johnson. Johnson, a horticulturist, taught his grandson Eli to graft trees for the varieties he liked. The family counts Johnson as its first farming generation, which is why its new website gives the farm’s founding as the mid-1800s.

Johnson brought his family to Santaquin in 1850–1851 and planted apple seeds he had carried across the plains. When nothing seemed to come up, he took them for dead and let a woman use the plot for her garden. One day, while she was weeding, he saw the ground full of tiny apple trees. The farm’s story says he begged her to let them grow, “but to his dismay she hoed up every last one of them.”