He grew peaches and a life in Filbert. Then, he shared both with everybody he could.

He hadn’t been back a day when the best worker on his daddy’s farm asked why, after all the education, Army service, traveling and opportunities to go almost anywhere else, did Ben Smith Jr. come back?

Near 60 years later, Rush Smith still tells tale of his father’s response.

“He said, ‘I think I’m going to like it,’” Rush Smith said.

Ben Smith not only liked peach farming, he also was good at it. He and his late wife, Merwyn, opened The Peach Tree in 1965. They helped make Filbert a go-to place for local produce in the decades since. On Dec. 30, Smith died at age 83.

“We all raise a good peach, good fruits and vegetables,” said Arthur Black at competitor Black’s Peaches, one of several nearby growers along with Bush-N-Vine. “You had to have an edge to sell your stuff, and he was a master of that.”

Black and his father worked with Smith for longer than the farmer can recall. The Smiths were a competing business but also the neighbor Black would call if a sprayer went down and he needed help. And he would offer the Smiths help if they needed it.

“The area is big enough to support us all, but he was a competitor, and that made it good,” Black said. “He was a farmer that if a neighbor was in trouble, he was going to help him.”

Between his time at Clemson University and Presbyterian College, and on the family farm, Smith knew the agriculture of farming. He also knew it was just as important to make a sale. He put a premium on relating to customers who may come back as much for the friendly face behind a counter as the latest crop.

“He made his business go with his personal contacts,” Black said.

Smith was “one of the forefront guys” at taking produce directly to local customers, Black said. Rush Smith said his father hit “kind of a crossroads” in the early 1960s. He had to decide whether to package and ship peaches north, or focus on marketing and selling them locally.

“He opted for the latter,” Rush Smith said. “We all buy local. We tried to eat the food that was grown near us. That’s pretty common now, but at the time it was kind of a new idea.”

The result was a customer base who became almost family.

“We had customers of The Peach Tree who watched us grow up,” said daughter Beverly Hutchison.

Relating to customers was good business, but it also came naturally to the Smiths.

“(Customers) would stay longer than they might have expected,” Rush Smith said. “That was really what he enjoyed, what he identified with. He loved peaches.”

Then there were the seasonal employees, people who grew up with the farm and returned with stories of weddings, homes and adventures.

“They literally raised, I don’t know, 100 girls?” Hutchison said of her parents’ business. “They were The Peach Tree girls. They truly became part of the family.”

In some ways, Smith was a man of seasons. Peaches came first, but Clemson football came close behind it, and the quail were waiting next.

“When football season was over,” Hutchison said, “bird season started.”

Yet what most defined Ben Smith were the loves never changed with the weather. He and Merwyn traveled extensively, and always together. Smith spent his entire professional life within eyesight of where he was born. The 1951 York High School graduate had a set of friends who hadn’t grown apart since age 10.

Upon his death, the only ones who didn’t reach out to the family were the two preceding him in death.

“We have heard from all of them, been visited by some of them that are local,” Hutchison said.

Framp Harper lives in Lake Wylie now, but is part of the group who travels to the beach together and recounts old stories.

“He was a great guy,” Harper said. “He and I became friends in the fifth grade.”

About half the group is local, but often meet-ups brought them all back to where they went to school years ago.

“Anytime anybody had anything going on in York, we’d all meet at Ben’s house,” Harper said.

Harper and Smith dined together several times since Merwyn died. Harper did, at least.

“He wouldn’t eat,” Harper said. “He had to stop and say hey to everybody. He was in that peach stand all the time, so everybody knew him and that’s how he spent his time, greeting people. That was his nature.”

Nature meant a lot to Smith. His habit, family members say, was to find something he loved and stick with it. He did it with peaches. He did it with the family farm, the friendships, the wife of 59 years, the orange-clad university with generations of Smith students following him there.

“He did what he loved,” Rush Smith said.

This story was originally published January 1, 2017 at 10:23 PM with the headline "He grew peaches and a life in Filbert. Then, he shared both with everybody he could.."