THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 1 25 



in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 19 16, yellows may almost be 

 said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York. 



Peach-culture has been comparatively unimportant in Connecticut 

 and Massachusetts until recent years but the toll taken by yellows has been 

 proportionately as high as elsewhere in the hundred years of its trespassing. 

 The history of its ravages is told in such statements as follows: " Yellows 

 appeared in the vicinity of New Haven in 1820 and destroyed thousands 

 of trees nearly putting an end to peach growing." ' " The yellows are 

 destroying our peach trees." - " Peaches are infected with yellows and 

 are generally things of the past." ^ " Cultivation of the peach is now 

 abandoned in consequence of that scourge to that fruit known as yellows." '' 

 The foregoing accounts apply to Connecticut but reports are much the 

 same for Massachusetts, the following being typical: A writer in 1882 

 declares that yellows about Boston was unknown in 1837 but that " when 

 it came it swept everything." ^ " Thirty or forty years ago (1842- 1852) 

 peaches were grown in great abundance in this vicinity (northeast Massa- 

 chusetts) but for the last twenty years have been almost abandoned." '^ 

 " In former years (said in 1854) peach trees have rarely suffered from 

 yellows in this neighborhood (Cambridge) where now many trees are 

 affected by it." ' 



Sweeping westward from New York, yellows appeared in Ohio about 

 the middle of the Nineteenth Century, for, in 1851, an orchard of 600 trees 

 at Saint Clairsville was said to have been destroyed by it.** In the same 

 year the report came from Richard County: " Our peach trees are some- 

 what affected by yellows." ' In the years that follow, down to the present 

 time, the presence of yellows, its symptoms, affects and treatment are 

 discussed in the voluminous records of agriculture in Ohio as a common- 

 place part in the culture of the peach though the disease seems not to have 

 been quite so virulent nor so often epidemic in Ohio as in other prominent 

 peach -growing states. 



Nowhere has the haste and waste of yellows been more apparent than 



'A'. Y. Farmer and Hort. Repository g. 1831. 



« Yoemans, John L. Rpl. of U. S. Com. of Patents 166. 1852. 



' Conn. Bd. Agr. Rpl. 169. 1867. 



'Ibid.nz. 



' Trans. Mass. Hort. Soc. Pt. 1:140. 1882. 



<^ Houghton Farm Exp. Dept. Ser. 3. No. 2:27. 1882. 



' Proc. Am. Pom. Soc. 212. 1854. 



" Rpt. U. S. Com. Patents 369. 1851. 



' Ibid. 378. 



