TRANSACTIONS OF HORTICULTURAL SOCIKTY OF >'ORTIlERN ILL. 26 1 



is pleasant for me to thank the citizens of this place through you, sir, for 

 the hospitable tender of their homes to friends. It is fit that we should 

 wish to meet here, as here is shown one of the earliest planting of forest 

 trees, and a most successful one, by one of the fathers in horticulture in 

 the West — the venerable D. C. Scofield. Again I thank you, in the name 

 of the Society, for the cordial welcome tendered this Society. 



PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL ADDRESS. 

 The President addressed the Society as follows: 



Gentlemen and Ladies of the Northern Horticultural Society : 



It is with great pleasure that I rise to address you at this the 

 thirteenth annual meeting of the Society. How short these last thirteen 

 years seem, since when a small but select body of enthusiastic and pains- 

 taking Horticulturists — not a few of whom live to continue their labors — 

 assembled at Mount Carroll, in December, 1867, to form this association. 

 How long to look forward to thirteen years to come. Yet it is the future 

 which is as near as the past. It is our longings for the future that make 

 the years seem as though they would pass slowly, and our regret that we 

 could have accomplished so little in the past that makes those years seem 

 so short. Have we, then, in reality, accomplished so little in these years 

 past? No ! the record is fully worthy of the dead and the living who have 

 made the horticulture of to-day what it is. Let us look back a little 

 farther, to the year 1851, to the meeting of the Northwestern Fruit 

 Growers' Association, out of the labors of the members of which has grown 

 our present State Department of Agriculture, our State Horticultural 

 Society and our own Northern Illinois Horticultural Society. Then the 

 country was new indeed, with homesteads scattered only here and there, 

 "few and far between." The roads were mere tracks across almost 

 boundless prairies, with no timber, except here and there groves that had 

 gotten a foothold upon rough and broken ground or along the margins of 

 streams. Hardly an orchard could be seen in a day's journey; our great 

 cities were mere villages or hamlets; and only the beginnings of one rail- 

 way, out of which has grown the vast net-work of the State — now the 

 North-Western, with its two thousand miles of roadway. The Illinois 

 Central was but begun. The other great lines were on paper. What a 

 change I It indeed seems but as yesterday to look back upon, and yet 

 what wonderful progress in those twenty-eight years. As the railway 

 carriage now bears the traveler onward, farm after farm is passed, no open 

 prairie is seen, but inclosed farms — farm joining farm — woodland groves, 

 reared by the hand of the planter, of size sufficient for timbers for houses 

 and barns, and one of the most noble of these plantings cultivated by a 

 venerable citizen of this beautiful city. Orchards upon almost every 

 homestead I had almost said, but will qualify it by saying, about the 

 homestead of every intelligent farmer, with shelter-belts and groves 

 scattered in profusion everywhere. 



