532 Agricultural Experiment Station, Ithaca, N. Y. 



exported, and there is very little, if any, commercial dried product 

 in Europe. C. H. Perkins & Co., Newark, N. Y., " tried the experi- 

 ment of exporting some of these goods to France several years ago, 

 but shipped only two or three cases of them. The goods are still 

 on hand in France, with no disposition to take them at any price." 

 Raspberries are dried to an important extent in southern Illinois 

 and in Michigan, and lately also in Arkansas. These dried rasp- 

 berries have as much merit in cookery as the fresh berries, and they 

 are used in the same manner in sauces and pies. 



Wayne county is the home of commercial fruit evaporation. In 

 the apple growing communities nearly every farm has an evaporator 

 of one kind or another. It is said that there are 2,200 * evapo- 

 rators in the county, and this estimate is probably none too high. 

 All this industry is the product of the last twenty-five years. 

 The beginning of the industry seems to have been the introduction 

 of a little machine from Ohio (probably the D. Lippy fruit drier. — 

 Jiept. Com. Patents, 1865, Hi, 378), by A. D. Shepley and George 

 Edwards in 1867. The right to use this evaporator was purchased 

 by Mason L. Rogers, near Williamson, and the following year, 1868, 

 he planted five acres of black raspberries, with the expectation of 

 evaporating the fruit — or drying it, as the operation was then called 

 — and this began the evaporated raspberry industry. Mr. Rogers 

 made some improvements on the machine, and about 1875 H. Top- 

 ping, of Marion, took up its manufacture, making alterations from 

 time to time. The direct descendant of this old machine is the 

 Topping portable evaporator of the present day (Fig. 106), which is 

 deservedly popular with beginners and for family use. The origi- 

 nal machine, as sold by Shepley and Edwards, was made in two 

 sizes, the smaller capable of drying three bushels of apples in eight 

 to ten hours, and the larger with a capacity of five bushels ! This 

 small beginning seems incredible when one compares it with the 

 great establishments of this time, in which scores of hands are 

 employed and thousands of bushels are consumed annually. 



The beginning of the modern industry, however, and the intro- 

 duction of the word " evaporated " to designate the product, dates 

 from 1870, when Charles Alden, of Newburgh, New York, patented 

 his tower evaporator. The decade from 1870 to 1880 was prolific 

 in the invention of capacious evaporators and accessories, some of 



* Statement of Charles Mills, Country Gentleman, April 18, 1895, p. 308. 



