What verifiable sources tell us about a Western New York field nursery
For years, akrontreefarms.com was the online home of Akron Tree Farms, a wholesale field-production nursery in Pendleton, New York, specializing in deciduous shade and ornamental trees. The original site no longer appears at this address; what remains publicly verifiable is an archived snapshot dated August 22, 2018, and a handful of directory listings. This page assembles those traces into a single factual record.
The documented footprint of Akron Tree Farms is small but consistent. An archived capture of the site's Products page, dated August 22, 2018, shows a nursery catalog organized by Latin name, common name, size, and notations. Directory listings from the same general period describe the operation as "a Western New York field production nursery specializing in deciduous shade and ornamental trees" and as a "wholesale grower of deciduous shade & ornamental trees," both pointing to 5911 Fisk Rd., Pendleton, NY 14094, with the phone number (716) 625-8462.
According to the site's own About Us page, preserved in search listings, the nursery "began in 1990 by John and Linda Heinike on 20 acres." The sentence trails off in the surviving snippet, so any later expansion is not documented here. Nothing in the available record speaks to the business's current status, and this page makes no claim about it.
The phrase the business used to describe itself has a specific meaning in the trade. A field production nursery grows trees in open ground rather than in containers, letting them develop over several seasons before they are dug — typically with a tree spade that lifts a compact root ball, which is then wrapped in burlap and wire for transport. Container production, the main alternative, keeps the root system in a pot from start to finish.
Field-grown, balled-and-burlapped stock is the standard format for larger shade and ornamental trees sold at wholesale. Caliper sizes of 1.75 to 3 inches, like those in the Akron Tree Farms catalog, represent trees several years old and too heavy for container handling. Wholesale growing means the buyer is typically a landscaper, municipality, rewholesaler, or garden center rather than a retail homeowner.
The 2018 snapshot preserves the top of a catalog table with four columns: Latin Name, Common Name, Size, and Notations. The first entries are Acer campestre (Hedge Maple) in three caliper sizes — 1.75, 2.00, and 2.50 inches — followed by Acer freemanii 'Autumn Fantasy' (Autumn Fantasy Maple) at 3.00 inches. The capture cuts off mid-table, so the full list was longer than what survives.
The notations column shows how the nursery described its stock. For the 1.75-inch Hedge Maple it reads: "Zone: 4. Height: 25-30'. Form: Globe. Good disease resistant tree." That is a compact spec sheet — hardiness zone, mature height, crown shape, and a selling point — aimed at professional buyers comparing lines. Caliper, the size unit used throughout, is trunk diameter measured at a standard height above the ground, the usual way field-grown shade trees are graded in North America.
The snapshot's navigation bar lists six pages: Home, Products, Summer Dig, About Us, Directions, and Contact Us. It is a typical structure for a small wholesale nursery of its era — a catalog, guidance for visiting buyers, and contact details, with no e-commerce layer.
The "Summer Dig" page is the one non-obvious entry. In the nursery trade, digging field-grown stock is safest while trees are dormant, but many species can also be dug in summer with extra care — larger root balls, prompt handling, and close attention to watering. A dedicated page on the topic suggests the nursery regularly fielded questions from buyers about lifting trees outside the dormant season.
Pendleton is a town in Niagara County, in the far west of New York State between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and the 716 area code in the listings matches that region. Despite the name, the documented address is in Pendleton, not in the nearby village of Akron, which sits just across the county line in Erie County, a short drive away.
Western New York's nursery trade operates within reach of Buffalo, Rochester, and the Canadian border, and field nurseries there typically grow cold-hardy stock suited to USDA zones 4 through 6. The Hedge Maple notation in the catalog — zone 4 — fits that pattern: trees selected to survive winters colder than the immediate area's.
This site is an independent reference page. It is not operated by Akron Tree Farms or by anyone connected to it, and it does not sell trees, take orders, or forward inquiries. The phone number and address quoted above appear strictly as historical facts drawn from public listings.
The record is limited to what can be checked: one archived page capture, the text of directory entries, and the surviving fragment of the nursery's own description. Where the sources stop — the full product list, the farm's later acreage, its current status — this record stops too, rather than guess.