84 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



EULOGY UPON HON. A. M. BROWN. 



Parker Earle, Committee on Obituary, signified his readiness to 

 report, whereupon the President announced that the report would be 

 heard. 



Mr. Earle read as follows: 



Our Society has often been a mourner by the bier of some noble 

 member and brother who has ''found higher, nobler work to do" above 

 these earthly gardens and orchards. Since I was last permitted to meet 

 with you at this annual harvest of good thoughts, some of the most useful 

 men of the nation have left our membership to join in the labors of the 

 immortal fields where blight and storm destroy not. 



The names of Dunlap and of Hull, the indefatigable investigators 

 and pioneers, and of Flagg, the Chevalier Bayard of American Horti- 

 culture — "a knight without fear and without reproach" — will live while 

 the records of rural industry survive. Our losses have been great ; we 

 have had great wealth to lose. 



But my duty now is to say a word in memory of another nobleman 

 of our ranks, another ex-president of our Society, Judge Brown, of Villa 

 Ridge, the news of whose death, the past summer, carried pain to so 

 many hearts. 



Alexander Montgomery Brown was born near Paris, Bourbon county, 

 Kentucky, Dec. ii, 1818. His parents removing to Indiana, he was 

 mostly educated in that State, where he graduated from Hanover College 

 in 1838. He studied law in Indianapolis, and entered into practice, but 

 removed to his old home in Paris, Ky., in 1844, where he continued in 

 the practice of his profession until his removal to our own State. He was 

 for eight years the editor of the Iran's Citizen, a long-established and 

 influential Whig newspaper. 



His great love for horticultural pursuits led him to remove, in 1861, 

 to Pulaski county, in this State, where he settled near the new station of 

 Villa Ridge, upon the beautiful place which he occupied until his death. 

 Here he commenced to build the pleasant home which so many of us 

 knew, in the midst of the primeval forest ; his fine peach and apple and 

 pear orchards supplanting the great oaks, beeches and tulip-trees of this 

 most luxuriant woodland region. 



Horticultural art was newly born in Southern Illinois eighteen years 

 ago, and the pioneers in that vocation had to strike out new paths, and 

 adopt many new methods. Many years were given to experiments and 

 researches deemed essential to the success of our young art in this new 

 "environment." In all this patient and costly labor Judge Brown was 

 foremost. No man has lived in our part of the State whose horticultural 

 labors were of greater benefit to his neighbors and the community. He 

 foresaw the importance of our section as the great early fruit-producing 

 region for the Northwest. He believed in Southern Illinois. He believed 

 in fruit-growing as a special business, and that it had a great future. He 

 believed in horticulture as a refining and ennobling art for everybody. 



