80 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



ing fruit and very often the market was oversupplied and the fruit, 

 especially peaches, went to waste. In 1874 or 1875 we shipped what I 

 believe to be the first car of peaches that ever left this county. We load- 

 ed an ordinary box car with probably 100 bushels of Crawford peaches, 

 setting the baskets directly upon the floor. My father took this car of 

 fruit to Saginaw and sold them, establishing a new industry and a new 

 market. After this nearly every year we shipped more or less fruit, 

 both by freight and express to nearby towns and established the custom 

 of using the bushel basket. Previous to this peaches everywhere were 

 shipped in crates or slatted boxes. The bushel basket was for years 

 after a distinctive Grand Rapids package. Time and again I have been 

 on the Chicago or Milwaukee markets when the only baskets of this 

 character were from Grand Rapids, while today half the packages used 

 in the entire country are the standard bushel. 



Along about this time it began to dawn on people's minds that fruit 

 growing was profitable and more orchards were planted. I very well 

 remember when in 1879 I planted my first orchard. I bought a piece of 

 land, thirty acres, for |4,000, just the bare land, no buildings or orchards. 

 I paid $1,000 doAvn and afterwards borrowed the balance, |3,000, of 

 the late Isaac Phelps, paying him 10 per cent for the loan and glad to 

 get it at that. Upon this land I planted 2,000 peach trees of various 

 kinds. Everybody said that I was crazy and that the market would be 

 oversupplied. All kinds of dire results were predicted. The orchard was 

 a success, and the first two or three crops wiped out the mortgage and 

 put some buildings on the land. Soon after this planting orchards, 

 especially peaches, became an epidemic. Nearly every farmer in the 

 county having anything like an elevated piece of land planted peaches. 

 Those who did not have planted other fruits, apples, plums, grapes, or 

 small fruit, and the farmer in this county who did not grow fruit was 

 lonesome. Up to this time we had had no organizations; we were all ama- 

 teurs; nearly everybody growing fruit treated the business as a sort of 

 side issue. Much of our fruit was shipped out on consignment and re- 

 turns were often unsatisfactory. However, this condition brought about 

 the formation of the Grand Rapids Fruit Growers' Association, un- 

 doubtedly the largest and, I believe, the most successful organization of 

 its kind in the country, notwithstanding the fact that it had no cor- 

 porate charter or legal standing. Necessity is the mother of invention 

 and necessity drew and held the growers together, and there grew up 

 in Grand Rapids the largest fruit market in the world; a real market 

 where the producer brought his produce in the morning and went home 

 with his cash in his pocket. We brought the buyers here and they bought 

 what their markets demanded. These were palmy days for the Kent 

 county fruit growers, with good crops and fairly good prices. 



I remember one morning when we had by actual count 120 outside 

 buyers on the market. The climax was reached in 1902 when the fol- 

 lowing statistics as to fruit actually marketed here were taken by the 

 Grand Rapids Board of Trade: Peaches, 1,706,000 bushels; pears, 7,400 

 bushels; apples, 174,000 bushels; plums, 42,650 bushels; crab apples, 

 2,000 bushels; quince, 1,100 bushels; cherries, 42,000 bushels; pie plant, 

 7,300 bushels; grapes, 125 tons; strawberries, 213,000 crates; raspberries, 

 92,000 crates; blackberries, 96,000 crates; gooseberries, 2,000 crates; 

 currants, 5,400 crates. For several weeks the transportation lines de- 

 voted nearly all their men and equipment to moving the fruit crop. It 



