The New York Times has finally given its imprimatur to a truth I tried to pound into the heads of my fellow University of Georgia students more than 55 years ago: South Carolina, not Georgia, is the real Peach State.

The Palmetto State ships more than twice as many peaches as Georgia does, and has been doing so for years. When I had the impertinence to mention this fact in my U.Ga. class in “Contemporary Georgia,” the old professor just snorted and, without disputing my facts, asserted that California grew more peaches than either state.

True enough. But nobody I know of goes roaming hillsides and byways in search of California peaches.

“They taste like cardboard,” said Phillip Rigdon, farm manager at Lane Southern Orchards in Georgia, as quoted in the Times. I don’t think he’d get any argument from his counterparts across the Savannah River.

Georgia automobile license plates have borne the label “Peach State” from antiquity. The South Carolina Legislature got around to adopting the peach as the official “State Tree” in 1984.

South Carolina claims to be the “Tastier Peach State,” and I’m not going to contest that claim. In football season, you’ll find me rooting for the Bulldogs of my alma mater against the Gamecocks of my native state. To make things right with my fellow Sandlappers, I’ll take their side in the battle of the peaches.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of the Saturdays when the family would climb into our 1932 Ford V8 and head for The Ridge, a mild ripple in the South Carolina landscape just above the Fall Line, where peaches were the most visible and the tastiest crop. We would cruise up U.S. 25 and occasionally veer off onto red-clay country roads, where you could find a smorgasbord of ripe South Carolina peaches that you could buy from roadside stands by the peck or bushel. We would take them home, peel them and slice them, then turn them over to Mama’n’em to be canned in Mason jars.

Even earlier than that, during the depths of World War II, when gasoline was rationed at home to make sure Patton’s tanks had enough petrol to propel them across the Rhine, I remember walking dusty roads and reaping wild peaches from banks beside them.

These wild peaches were smaller and wormier than the plump Elbertas and Georgia Belles that came from the orchards, but during a hard year of sharecropping they provided tasty desserts in the form of peach cobblers. You had to be careful in peeling, slicing and eating these, because they were home to a lot of worms, and you had to evict the larvae and scrape away the adjacent flesh they had soiled. My Uncle Grady always joked that if you missed one, it wouldn’t hurt; it would just add protein to your diet.

I don’t know whether these scrawny little refugees from the orchards had names, though there was one we called the Indian peach, because its meat was dark red. It’s a reminder of the role the native Indians played in spreading the peach tree across the map.

The Spanish brought the peach to St. Augustine, Fla., in the early 16th century, and the Indians took a liking to it. By the time the English colonized South Carolina, they had spread the tree across South Georgia, and it was growing along the Carolina coast. By the 1850s, both Georgia and South Carolina were shipping peaches to northern markets. After the War Between the States, many farmers switched from cotton patches to peach orchards.

I figure those wild peaches of my boyhood were descendants of the peach trees the colonists found when they reached the Carolina coast. Unexposed to the civilizing influences of the orchard, they still retained the taste that has made the peach the second largest commercial fruit grown in the United States — next to the apple.

In my early career with the Augusta Chronicle, I covered both sides of the Savannah River as state editor, with the additional title of farm editor. One of my pleasant duties was to visit farms in both states, looking for feature stories, especially if I could pass on profitable hints to other farmers. Often, these farms were peach orchards, with their packing sheds, and invariably the owner would send me away with a free peck of fresh peaches. It was a nice supplement to a modest salary.

In wandering the interstates of the Southeast, I have become familiar with the peach-shaped water tanks of Gaffney, S.C., and Clanton, Ala. I don’t know of such a tank in Georgia, but when you have “Peach State” emblazoned on several million license plates, who needs a water tank?

The New York Times is not the most influential newspaper in either state, so I don’t think its anointing of South Carolina as the real Peach State will have much effect. Wikipedia, the on-line do-it-yourself encyclopedia, still insists: “The three largest peach-producing states are California, South Carolina and most notably Georgia.”

Maybe the way to settle the issue is to leave it up to the annual Georgia-South Carolina football game. Call it the “Peach Bowl Game,” since the bowl that once bore that name chickened out in favor of a fast-food chain. The state whose university wins the game should be entitled to call itself the Peach State for the ensuing year. Historically, that would give Georgia the title for the great majority of the time. But then, those Gamecocks have been looking pretty peachy lately.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.