310 ILLINOIS STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



brought one dollar per bushel in our best fruit districts, and no one lost 

 any apples for the want of a market. This teaches the first lesson : that 

 we should increase our cider and vinegar mills, or diminish our supply of 

 fall fruits. This year we have had a short supply or crop of fruit — only 

 about one-quarter as many as last year — and our market has been sup- 

 plied by importations from east of us, which, after paying freight, have 

 brought fair prices and supplied us at rates but a trifle higher than our 

 own brought a year ago. Our apple crop has sold at too high figures 

 generally, taking cost of production into account, for a permanent market 

 price. Our largest producers generally sell at the best figures ; and here 

 cometh the second lesson : that to sell to good advantage we should mass 

 our products and let some man sell the main crop. 



The utilizing of winter fruit will, in a great degree, depend upon 

 our facilities for keeping it in good order ; the building of fruit houses 

 requires capital, and no plan seems to be perfected yet. If we build 

 cellars above ground, and build a larger building over them to keep sun 

 and storms from them, we may get the two necessary conditions for its 

 keeping well, viz. : an even temperature and a dry atmosphere. A cellar 

 14 X 16, seven feet high, may be built for fifty to seventy-five dollars, of 

 brick or stone walls ; then put joists on and lay a floor over, and cover 

 with dry earth eighteen inches deep, (the dryer the better ; this is an 

 essential point ). A building put over this to keep sun and storms off, may 

 be of rough, cheap lumber, or may be built ornamental, as may be desired ; 

 it may be filled with apples in barrels, and if these are covered with 

 dry straw, hay or corn fodder, four feet thick, the apples will keep as good 

 as in any way they can be kept, until late spring. The cellar will hold 

 one hundred and sixty barrels of apples, and the building above as many 

 more. Our cellars under the house are too warm in the fall, and are too 

 often opened, to keep apples in ; and they are filled up with cabbages, 

 turnips, onions and other savory products that often decay there before 

 removing, rendering them perfectly unfit to store apples in. The old 

 method of drying apples is still available, and by a little ingenuity on 

 our part, can be used much more economical!}' than any patent process 

 we have yet seen. 



The proprietors of the Alden process have forever debarred the 

 public from receiving any benefit of their patent, by holding it as a 

 monoi)oly; for the primary object of the patent law is the public good. 

 Fruit from this establishment has been sent out as genuine, to customers, 

 which is but little, if any, better than that dried by the old process. 

 These patent monopolies are what the people have their eye on now, and 

 we can not encourage them in any form. 



The process of canning fruits and vegetables of all kinds is so far 

 perfected that it seems to be the most available for family use of any 

 others, and it seems to me that we should encourage its use by all means 

 in our power, as by it we can bring within the reach of all this best of 

 God's gifts to man. Every family should eat fruit at least once a day the 

 year round with their meals, and as the use of fruits increases in the 

 family, the use of hog and hominy decreases, and civilization and refine- 



