PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING. 287 



FUTURE OP PEACH-GROWING IN THE UNITED STATES. 

 BY MR. J. H. HALE OF CONNECTICUT. 



I was not sure whether the topic for discussion this afternoon was the 

 future of peach-growing in the United States, or Michigan, or what, and 

 the first thought that came uppermost in my mind, when thinking about 

 tallving to you and with you on this subject, was whether it really 

 referred to your future or mine, or the general future of the business in 

 this country. I have made a few notes of some points that I wanted to 

 talk upon, and, while I have those notes with me, I don't suppose I shall 

 use half of them and shall use a good many others that come along, 

 because you and I have found in peach-growing that we learn and 

 unlearn things almost every day; and while I am here to talk to you 

 today about what I believe and know and understand of fruitgrowing at 

 the present time, and believe of it in the future, I am frank to say to you 

 that there is not a thing that I believe today that I will promise to believe 

 tomorrow or next year, and it seems to me that you must reach this basis 

 in order to keep up with the procession. 



It is hardly well to talk of the peach-growing of the future without con- 

 sidering something of the past and of the present. Peach-growing 

 twenty-five years ago was confined to a few states and a few particular 

 localities, and the men who were so fortunate or so unfortunate, as the 

 case may have been, as to live in those regions, planted peach trees and 

 took whatever results came therefrom; but within the last ten or fifteen 

 years the work of horticultural societies and experiment stations and 

 progressive fruitgrowers has gone on at such a rapid rate, the building 

 of railways into new sections of country and the consolidation of lines 

 whereby through trains run over two or three different roads to make 

 quick time from far distant points to your markets or mine, have revo- 

 lutionized the business entirely, and now there are peach-growing regions 

 and there are peach orchards by the hundreds and by the thousands and 

 tens of thousands of acres in many states and sections where peaches 

 were not known before, when twenty years ago it was your few counties 

 here in Michigan, Maryland, and Delaware, and a few sections of New 

 Jersey that produced the peaches of the United States. 



You must wake up, my brothers of Michigan, to the fact that there 

 are many other sections that can grow as good peaches, that there are 

 men there trying to grow better peaches than you can grow. Beginning 

 in our Atlantic coast states, Georgia has developed within the last eight 

 or ten years a planting of many millions of trees; sections of South Caro- 

 lina are up in the hundreds of thousands; sections of North Carolina are 

 fast being developed; Virginia, some portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, 

 sections of Missouri, vast sections of western Colorado and Texas are 

 planting fruit heavily to compote with you and with me. The fact that 

 they are a thousand or fifteen hundred miles away does not cut much 

 figure in business; it has not in the past few years, and it is going to 



