6 HISTORY OF HORTICULTURE IN MINNESOTA. 



been attained, such as must finally place these men on record as benefactors 

 of the State, and the State itself in the front rank as one of the fruit growing 

 States of the great Northwest. 



In all this, we must remember that the climate, especially, has never lacked 

 disparagement ; never lacked those, both at home and abroad, always ready 

 to put its friends and advocates on the defensive if possible. And too ready 

 as our people are in many cases to accept the defensive, it has been one of 

 the chief difficulties against which horticultural ists here have long labored, 

 in vindicating their calling and position as residents of this portion of the 

 Northwest. Even after they have presented the noblest fruits of their labors 

 at horticultural fairs, and after the cavillers have been brought face to face 

 with these splendid trophies won by the hardest, even that has hardly sufficed, 

 when repeated from year to year, to redeem the results from being classed as 

 " exceptional;" as the result of chances such as cannot happen again. 



Fortunately, the time has arrived when the horticultural society and its 

 many friends and supporters, need only in a limited degree of labor to vindicate 

 their position, since their successes, in ample scope, speak for themselves. 

 When individuals of their number can point, annually, to hundreds of bushels 

 of choice apples, the product of single orchards in the State ; and when the 

 finest varieties of grapes grown anywhere, are raised here by the ton, the 

 chief thing at last left to do, is to make known to the whole State these 

 splendid results, whilst at the same time, still further prosecuting lines of 

 experiment, so as to give still greater varieties and still more certain results. 

 When our own people are constrained to see, and the people of other States 

 to .confess from undoubted evidence, how unmistakable is our success, we 

 may, as one of the valuable results, reckon upon a degree of enterprise and 

 emulation here, which in the abundance of fruit raised will leave us nothing 

 to desire. Serving, as this would do, to keep the money at home, now ex- 

 pended in such large amount for fruit imported from abroad, we might well 

 thereupon congratulate ourselves upon the greater comfort and wealth to 

 accumulate as a consequence ; whilst the facts in the case once ftiirly under- 

 stood, our population would receive still greater accessions from abroad. 



Let it he noted, further, and preliminary to a careful survey of the pro- 

 ceedings at large of the horticultural society, in these pages, that a long 

 period of experiences has shown conclusively, that however graduall}', yet 

 none the less surely the leading fruit growers of the State have been approx- 

 imating firmer ground, in establishing their success upon a sure basis. From 

 the first exhibition of fruits at Fort Snelling, at the Fair of 1860, when 

 premiums were awarded for a few crab apples, and for grapes and strawberries 

 principally, and from the next regular display publicly of apples from grafted 

 fruit, by that veteran pioneer in fruit culture, John S. Harris, of La Crescent, 

 at Rochester, in 1866, when he produced no less thau nineteen varieties — a 

 most creditable display at that time, — down to the recent meeting at St. Paul, 

 when a variety so rich and attractive covered the tables as really seemed 

 to leave nothing to desire, the advance, all must acknowledge, has been 

 unparalleled. 



