^34 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



were sent a mile or more for some pear sprouts that we brought home 

 and planted out, and each one was permitted to claim his own as indi- 

 vidual property — a trifling circumstance that I throw in as a suggestion 

 to those who wish their children to become cultivators of fruit after 

 them. 



The fruit men of Missouri will not think it altogether irrelevant to 

 the subject under consideration if I narrate a little of my own experi- 

 ence in orcharding in this part of the country, as something of the sort 

 is necessary as a foundation for the claim I make of knowing some- 

 thing of the business. 



In 1864 I bought 40 acres of well-worn freestone land, closely 

 underlaid with shale, one and a half miles from the court-house of New 

 Albany, and situated on the first terrace of the ''Knobs," 150 feet above 

 the level of the city. Situated as I was above the frost line, in close 

 proximity to three cities for my market, and where I could buy all the 

 stable manure I would want to feed my trees, I naturally felt myself in 

 close reach of everything that heart could wish, even before I had 

 planted a tree. Ambitious to be able to ehow the finest orchard in the 

 country, I left nothing undone from the start, and bought the best 

 varieties and planted out some twenty-five acres in apples, plums and 

 cherries, and spared neither pains nor expense in hurrying them on to 

 bearing maturity, when I fondly expected to realize the fruition of all 

 my bo.yhood's hopes. 



It is hardly necessary to tell you experienced fruit men of Mis- 

 souri that I never realized any such thing on land such as mine, where 

 roots could go no depth for moisture to carry the trees through the 

 ordeal of maturing and ripening their fruit, and located where idle 

 sportsmen from the cities kept all the native birds killed off. 



In a few years I realized the mistake I had made in the location 

 and quality of soil for fruit-growing, and when a good opportunity was 

 offered, I exchanged my fruit farm for a residence in the city and went 

 back to the practice of my profession, a wiser if not a better man than 

 when I left it. 



In the eight years that followed the commencement of my trees to 

 bear, if my memory serves me right, I had two fairly good crops of 

 peaches, but not large fruit, and two partial crops of wormy ones of 

 no value, one good crop of plums and perhaps three or four of cher- 

 ries, more or less wormy, that barely paid for the picking, the curculio 

 infesting my stored fruit every year. My pear-trees early fell victims 

 to the " blight," and never came to any good. I had apples of some 

 variety about every year, but it was a rare thing after the first crop my 

 trees bore, that I could find an apple in my orchard that was not bored 



