A FEW ITEMS FOR SETTLERS. 477 



FRUIT RESOURCES OF MISSOURI. 



The following excellent paper was read at the meeting of the State 

 Board of Agriculture in Lebanon last Friday, December 2ist, by D. S. 

 Holman, of Springfield, Missouri, Treasurer of the State Horticultural 

 Society: 



Mr. President: — By request I offer a short paper on a subject 

 worthy of more time and -better preparation than I have been able to 

 give to it. 



Missouri, Sir, needs no eulogy from me, nor exaggerated statements 

 from any. Her diversified surface, her soil and its products, tell plainly 

 and truthfully of immense resources, and very many of them. If we 

 were considering them all now, we would find Missouri wonderfully 

 made, possessing in all her parts a wealth of values inexhaustible. God 

 must have looked on Missouri when He said "It is good, very good." 

 Her minerals, her cereals; her grasses and her fruits present the same 

 fact. She is adapted to agriculture and especially so to horticulture. 

 The fruit resources of Missouri were very slowly developed in the years 

 of the country's settlement. Now it is being done rapidly and satis- 

 factorily. The annual fruit crop, when ripening in all its crimson and 

 golden beauty upon the trees, is very suggestive to the observing trav- 

 eler, of Missouri's fruit resources. Proof of this fact is also found in 

 packing houses and upon the railroads, where our fruits are handled and 

 shipped from orchards all over the state, and from the fruit market re- 

 ports in the south and west where Missouri fruits are largely sold. 



Nothing proclaims this fact more beautifully than fruit exhibitions 

 by horticultural or other societies at their meetings. In the last few 

 days, in the city of Nevada, at the Missouri State Horticultural So- 

 ciety's annual meeting, there were, for public inspection spread four very 

 long tables of beautiful fruits, representing the fruit growths of the state 

 most beautifully. 



Allow me to refer to the grand show of Missouri fruits in the 

 St. Louis Exposition last fall under the supervision and much labor of 

 the Missouri Horticultural Society. Nothing so convincing could have 

 been said — and no one could have said it so beautifully as did the fruits 

 themselves — that Missouri lands were fruit lands, and that the capabili- 

 ties of the whole state are immense. 



