WAYNE COUNTY— THE ORCHARD OF NEW YORK. 



taneouslj'-; is reliable for the market, and its quality cannot be surpassed, as our premi 

 ums witness when in competition occasionally at the state Fair. In favorable seasons our 

 county exports not far fron ten thousand bushels of dried peaches, but these are mostly 

 from our common peach orchards, Rare Ripes, &c. Some of our private fruit growers 

 number from sixty to seventy selected varieties of the peach, already in fruit, while a 

 great portion of our citizens have from ten to twenty of the choicest varieties around their 

 dwellings. We cannot, of course, compete with our New-Jersey and Delaware fi-iends in 

 the extent of our peach orchards, and yet many are growing this fruit in various parts of 

 our county quite extensively, for market. One of our farmers, Mr. Odell, in the extreme 

 north-east portion of the county, has already a rare peach orchard of fifteen hundred of' 

 the best varieties of trees, in bearing I am told, and for which he designs to seek a market 

 by the help of a small schooner, via Oswego. Our poorest families can, many of them even 

 now, indulge plentifully in the finest George IVth and Crawford Peaches, and the num- 

 ber is rapidly increasing. 



Of cherries, it need only to be said that we raise them in abundant quantities, of un- 

 surpassed flavor and size, and of the finest varieties. 



^Ve have a very large quantity of plums, including most of the new and best kinds, 

 grown in our county; and the exports of dried plums from our county, in favorable sea- 

 sons, will not vary much from three thousand bushels. But within a year or two, the 

 black wart has most virulently and fatally attacked our plum trees, and threatens entire 

 destruction to this fruit. The Peach Plum, and some other kinds, seem as yet to escape, 

 but the genuine Green Gage, and most other kinds, are going rapidly. We do not so much 

 regret this, as it has been a favorite argument with some dealers for years past, that com- 

 pared with the peach it was hardly worth growing; being of the same season, of more dif- 

 ficult cultivation, and inferior fruit in all respects. This, however, has not prevented our 

 enterprising amateurs from obtaining most of the desirable varieties. 



We now come to our most important fruit, the apple, which, perhaps, no where grows 

 more freely with little care, than with us, and yet our finest fruit growers alwaj^s give the 

 best cultivation. We have examples around us of high cultivation, that would do honor 

 to the Hudson river districts; for instance, a retired merchant in a neighboring town, first 

 purchased a side-hill of ten or fifteen acres, for a fruit orchard, and liberally supplied it 

 with about five hundred loads of manure, the same quantity of leached ashes, and about 

 an equal amount of swamp muck and coal-pit bottoms — after which he trenched it, and 

 thorough drained the whole with pipe, until now I much doubt whether our county or any 

 other, can any where produce an orchard of trees of five years old, of such extraordinary 

 size and productiveness, as that of Mr. Yeomans, of Walworth. I understood Prof. Nor- 

 ton to say as much of this fine orchard, when we together visited this place last fall. 



But to return, I can add while the apple always gratefully repays superior care, yet it is 

 also true, that our orchards, left almost to nature with us, produce a fair quantity of ex- 

 cellent fruit. 



Our orchards often largely overrun the estimate of production, a striking instance of 

 which occurred last fall, where an intelligent farmer and his neighbors estimated the pro- 

 duct of his orchard at one hundred barrels, and so sold it to the speculator, who succeed- 

 ed in obtaining, however, more than five hundred barrels from it. Numerous other in- 

 stances of orchards yielding two and three times as much as estimated, came under my 

 own observation. Our single port of Palmyra, during the last season, cleared more than 

 ght thousand barrels of grafted fruit east, and ten to twelve thousand bush 

 I fruit, while cast of us, in our county, remains the large and flourishing villa 



