140 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



kindly hands and exchange experiences, I will try to do the next best 

 thing, and send this paper as a substitute. 



When my memory carries me back over nearly 60 years, when as 

 a boy of 10, I first, the youngest of our family of six, father, mother, 

 two sisters, brother Fred and myself, least and last, came to Missouri 

 and landed at St. Louis, I can hardly realize the vast changes which 

 have taken place since then, especially in Horticulture. St. Louis was 

 then a village of hardly 8,000, mostly built by the first French settlers, 

 and strung out along the banks of the Mississippi river, with one open 

 market place at the foot of Market street. The few fruits lo be found 

 there were mostly in the old French gardens and seldom seen in mar- 

 ket. I remember some immense pear trees in Vena hall gardens, the 

 southern part of town, then owned by the Soulard family, which bore 

 very good fruit, but were considered a great rarity. The tomato bad 

 just been introduced, but was scarce in market yet and only appre- 

 ciated by a few. To initiate us into farming father had rented 10 acres 

 4 miles south of town, on Payne's farm, v/here we cultivated vegeta- 

 bles for market the first summer, and my brother and mys-elf had to 

 start for market every morning at 2 o'clock to be there by daylight 

 ready for business. But I will not tire you with personal experiences, 

 only in so far as they are connected with the subject. The next spring 

 we moved to the backwoods, 4 miles south of Hermann, where father, 

 as stockholder of the German Immigration Society, had purchased 

 200 acres of land. The place .was an entire wilderness where a log 

 house had been erected during the winter, and about an acre of land 

 cleared around it from a dense grove of timber, which father intended 

 to have for an orchard. He had collected a few peach jets the pre- 

 vious fall of the best varieties he could find ; a friend had presented 

 him with a small apple tree as something very choice, which, when it 

 bore fruit, turned out the old Rawles Janet. These, with a seedling, 

 my mother found in the woods and some sprouts of apples from old 

 orchards, then the usual way to plant new ones, were carefully planted ; 

 all grew and laid the foundation for a family orchard. This was then 

 the usual manner to supply the families of the few early settlers with 

 fruit; grafting and budding were almost unknown sciences, and as the 

 old trees were all seedlings, the suckers reproduced themselves. The 

 woods were full of wild fruits of different kinds — the Virginia cherry, 

 wild plums, some of these very good, large and sweet; the neighbor- 

 ing thickets abounded with numberless varieties of the summer grape 

 (Vitis Nestivalis), and the creek bottoms with frost grape; some black 

 cap raspberries, blackberries and persimmons, the small prairies with 

 wild strawberries ; and it became my Sunday pastime and recreation 



