STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 215 



friends of to-day know of the toil and privation of the early settlers in 

 planting and building up the country, making the wilderness blossom with 

 the rose, and luxuriate in the golden fruits of civilization ! 



The demand for trees being greatly on the increase, in 1841 he 

 grafted two hundred and seventy thousand root-grafts — the largest amount 

 that he had put up in a single season. The grafting \yas usually com- 

 menced in January, and continued till the season of planting. 



In the year 1843 ^"'i'' collection numbered three hundred varieties of 

 apple, ninety of pear, twenty-eight of cherry, twenty-five of peach, thirty of 

 plum, twelve of grape, and three of ciuinre ; and a good assortment of 

 small fruits, ornamental trees and shrubbery. 



My father was raised by quaker parents, but early in life he joined 

 the Methodist Episcopal church. In 181 2 he was ordained and sent out 

 by the Ohio Conference as a traveling minister, in which capacity he 

 labored one year and declined further work in the itinerancy. Through 

 the remainder of his life he was a local preacher in that church, laboring 

 on the farm and in the nursery through the week, and ministering to 

 the people of his and surrounding neighborhoods on the Sabbath. He 

 was a man of exceedingly industrious and persevering habits, and a hard 

 laborer in the pulpit, in the class-room and in the Sabbath school, and in 

 private as well as in public he labored zealously to promote the interest of 

 the church and community. The toil and exposure through which he 

 jiassed as a pioneer, and the zeal with which he pursued every enterprise 

 in which he engaged, at last undermined his almost iron constitution, and 

 made the last few years of his life years of peculiar affliction. In 1845 he 

 gave up the management of his nursery to his four sons, but although health 

 and strength had greatly failed him, tlirough the remaining years of his life 

 he took much pleasure in conversing with horticultural friends on this favor- 

 ite theme to which his life had been devoted. 



During the last few months before his death he seemed to feel confi- 

 dent that his pilgrimage must soon terminate, but constantly testified that 

 all was well. Conscious and happy to the last, on the 19th of February, 

 1852, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, he bade farewell to earth, in full 

 hope of his heavenly inheritance. 



