THE MINNESOTA 
HORTICULTURIST. 
VOL. 28. NOVEMBER, I900. No. 11. 
~ Biography. 
CHARLES G. PATTEN, 
CHARLES CITY, IOWA. 
The subject of this sketch’ is well known to all our readers, if for no 
other reason, at least through the name of that hardy variety of apple, Pat- 
ten’s Greening, which is now so generally planted throughout the north- 
west. As a nurseryman and experimenter and originator of new fruits, no 
man is better or more favorably known in this region. 
Mr. Patten was born in northern New York, on what then might have 
been called the frontier, in the year 1832. From his earliest years he must 
have shown an interest in pomology, as he knew every orchard in his vicini- 
ty, although, as he writes, he “was almost too timid to enter one unless 
strongly urged by the owner to do so.” That he began to make observa- 
tions in fruit growing early is also shown by the fact that he noted that 
cherries were at home on the islands of the St. Lawrence river and its adja- 
cent shores, while a few miles inland they were scarcely to be found. 
At the age of sixteen he removed with his father’s family to the neigh- 
borhood of Burlington, Wis. The first thing to attract the attention of 
young Patten in his new surroundings was the fruit growing there. Peach 
trees six inches in diameter were to be found on the Fox river a few miles 
below Burlington, and he soon made the acquaintance of an old resident 
who had a small orchard of peaches, apples, plums, pears and cherries. 
During the summer that he was seventeen years of age, he worked for 
a farmer who lived four miles south of Burlington, on a place adjoining the 
nursery of a Mr. Bell. That his thoughts were even then strongly turned 
in the direction of what afterwards became his life work is apparent, as he 
says, “I worked for Mr. Gardner about three months, and though while 
longing to get into the nursery, I never had the courage to do so, and con- 
tented myself by looking over the high board fence from the loads of hay or 
grain in harvest time.” It was in the woods near this farm, while hunting 
blackberries, that Mr. Patten found the wild crab that afterward set him 
thinking about the development and improvement of the native apple, a re- 
sult of which is the Soulard Hybrid, produced in 1874. 
