Texas Highways

How to Make the Most of Texas Peach Season

Freestone County
Freestone County is home to Cooper Farms, one of Texas’ most reliable suppliers of elegant freestone peaches—the names of the peach variety and the county being a quirky coincidence. Carved out of Limestone County in 1850, Freestone County was named because of the quality of its soils. Mass-scale peach production would come more than a century later, with such soils being critical to peach production.

Cooper Farms Country Store on Interstate 45 sells specialties like cook Carl Govan’s Peach Bread and, with a bumper crop, thousands of bushels of tree-ripened peaches from its 300-acre orchards elsewhere in Freestone County. Though Cooper Farms delivers peaches to grocers if there is a surplus, co-owner Elizabeth Johnson says “50 percent of our traffi c is roadside,” a throwback to her parents’ first marketing efforts.

Her parents—Tim and Kathy Cooper, now retired—built the peach-centric empire near Fairfield over the past quarter-century. Elizabeth and her high school sweetheart, Brady Johnson, attended Texas A&M to hone their agriculture and business skills, and now A&M uses Cooper’s operations for research into potential new peach varieties.

“We have lots of generational customers,” Elizabeth says. “When you were younger, your parents would stop by the side of the road and buy peaches. Then you would make a pie with grandma. People would call every year. Now their kids are calling.”

Watching out-of-towners milling around the Country Store, she says, “I would drive an hour for a really good steak, so I guess they would drive an hour for good peaches.”