214- TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



make his permd^ent home. At this time steamboats did not run on the 

 Wabash river, nor was there any public conveyance or roads of any sort 

 leading west. The most common mode of transportation was the sluggish 

 keel-boat. Accordingly he manned his own boat with hired boatmen, 

 dropped down the Ohio river, propelling with rope and oars up the Wa- 

 bash to Fort Harrison, near Terre Haute, Ind., where the Government 

 maintained a garrison for the protection of the surrounding country. 



A part of his first cargo was two hundred bushels of dried apples, 

 which he liad dried the previous season, from the orchard of his raising 

 and in a kiln of his own construction. This fruit found ready sale in the 

 village and settlement at three dollars per bushel. Here he abode the 

 remainder of the season and through the winter, selecting a fine tract of 

 prairie and timbered land eighteen miles northwest of Terre Haute, Ind., 

 in what is now known as the North Arm of the Grand Prairie, in Edgar 

 county. 111., and four miles east of where Paris was laid off seven years 

 later. A log cabin was erected, some fencing, breaking, and other im- 

 provements made, and some of his nursery stock brought over and heeled- 

 in here late in autumn. There were but four families who preceded him 

 in this North Arm settlement. He came over in March, 1818 and began 

 farming and planting a nursery and orchard. 



This was the first nursery commenced in the State of Illinois, and 

 the first orchard of grafted trees planted in this county and perhaps in 

 the State. This small collection of fruit, particularly the apple, some 

 twenty-seven varieties of which he brought from Ohio, and which he had 

 been some fifteen years gathering together and testing there, proved to be 

 very valuable here. Some of these varieties are now superior to any of those 

 he subsequently introduced, though hundreds were received and fruited. 

 From 1835 to 1840 he received from the East, and from various States of 

 the Union, a very large collection of apple, pear, cherry, peach, plum 

 and other fruits, many of which, when put on trial here, were found to be 

 of far less value than in the locations from whence he obtained them. 



Under all the discouragements and inconveniences of a frontier set- 

 tlement, he continued to plant nurseries and orchards, and to experiment 

 with an untiring zeal and love for horticulture. He did more to furnish 

 trees to the State and the Northwest than any other half dozen nursery- 

 men of his day. Years a^, when a great part of this State was unset- 

 tled and its now large and valuable nurseries were unthought of, he was 

 sending out trees and plants by the hundred thousand annually, far and 

 near over the country. 



For many years he peddlecf the trees. There were no railroads ; 

 steamboats reached but a limited portion of the country, and although 

 men frequently came fifty and even one hundred miles to the nursery to 

 make purchases, he found it a necessity to haul trees to the distant settlers 

 to dispose of his accumulated stock. But it was the greatest blessing to 

 the purchaser to have the choicest grafted fruit trees brought to his door 

 at nursery prices, and without the least fear of being imposed on in qual- 

 ity of tree or fruit. Had it not been for this medium, many farms would 

 have been treeless until the advent of the rail-car. How little our young 



