264 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Twenty years ago, even in the suburbs of Kansas City, there were 

 very few orchards, gardens or small fruit plantations, and even if there 

 had been there would have been small market for any great surplus. 



I well remember the first year I began clearing my ground and 

 planting out the berries and orchard. Right next to me lived an old 

 man, one of the first settlers of the community, who had been living 

 there for forty years. Every day he would come over where I was at 

 work and watch with curious eye everything I was doing, from the plant- 

 ing of the strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, on the fruit farm, to the 

 ornamentation of the front yard with hundreds of evergreens. " Well," 

 he said one day, "you are the biggest fool I ever saw. I have been 

 here forty years, and all that time I have been busy cutting down and 

 plowing up just such things as you are planting. You may depend 

 upon it that you will never make a dollar out of all this nonsense." 

 But he lived to see a wonderful change in all this, and even planted 

 some trees, grapes and evergreens on his own place. 



Since that time, when a few hundred cases of berries would supply 

 the whole market of Kansas City, until the present, there has been a 

 gradual growth of the fruit interests all over our country. And what a 

 wonderful change has there been all over our State in the last twenty- 

 five years. From a few hundreds of acres of orchards and small fruit 

 gardens then scattered over our State, mostly along the Missouri river, 

 now we see hundreds of thousands of acres everywhere, until even 

 the Ozark region of South Missouri is being covered with some of 

 the grandest fruits the country or the world has ever seen. 



Twenty years ago I traveled through some portions of the State 

 on horseback, and often it would be five, ten, fifteen miles between 

 houses, and scarcely an orchard to be found; but now you will find 

 this same beautiful land covered with happy homes and orchards in 

 abundance. 



Then it was said by those who should plant trees that their apples 

 and peaches brought only 25 to 50 cents per bushel, and when the 

 orchards now being planted came into bearing they would not be worth 

 the gathering. 



I have seen the time in Michigan when apples sold for 10 cents 

 per bushel, and yet five years later, when there were, ten times as 

 much fruit, they sold for 50 cents per bushel. 



I bought apples and peaches when I came to Missouri for 25 to 

 50 cents per bushel, yet this year peaches sold for from $1 to 63 per 

 bushel, while apples are now bringing 75 cents to $1 per bushel. The 

 fact is, the more you can get people interested in this fruit business, 

 the more will the masses consume, and we will have a demand for all 

 we can raise. 



