LESSONS FROM MINNESOTA FRUIT EXHIBITS. 357 



To show the progress of fruit culture in Minnesota, as indi- 

 cated by exhibits at fairs and expositions, I have little data at hand, 

 but will give you what I have. 



At the annual meeting of the State Horticultural Society in 

 December last, there were thirty-two exhibitors, of whom six were 

 nurserymen and twenty-six were farmers and amateurs. They 

 were awarded premiums on fifty varieties of named apples and four- 

 teen of crabs and hybrids ; the total number of places being about 

 1,000, of which a large number were unnamed seedlings. 



Now, having in mind the state fair figures, that being a Sep- 

 tember exhibit : 



September 12, 1883, when we won the Wilder medal of the 

 American Pomological Society, at Philadelphia, for the best exhibit 

 of apples and grapes for all North America, we showed only 140 

 varieties of apples, forty-eight of which, or a little over thirty-four 

 per cent, were crabs and hybrids, and thirty varieties of grapes. 

 This exhibit was all collected after the 12th of August. With two 

 weeks more time we might have gotten together perhaps two hun- 

 dred varieties of apples in all ; but taking the number as it was, 

 the advance from 140 varieties in 1883 to 331 in 1901 is, to say the 

 least, encouraging, and the reduction of percentages of crabs and 

 hybrids to apples from 34 per cent in 1883 to 12^ in 1901, is cer- 

 tainly remarkable as showing the present confidence of our people 

 that they do not have to restrict their apple growing to the under- 

 sized crabs. The smaller percentage of crabs and hybrids grown 

 is due to the fact that the growers have of late planted the best 

 varieties of them from choice, to get a certain desirable crab quality 

 which they want for home use and for which the market has in- 

 creasing demands. 



Right here we will take a glance at one more back number: 

 At the New Orleans Exposition in 1884-5, although we had only 

 about one hundred varieties of apples that we could show in the 

 winter we massed about 200 bushels, 100 bushels being very fine 

 specimens of our Wealthy, — sixty bushels being always in sight at 

 one view. But so little was generally known, even among our 

 own people, of what our state was growing then, that a party of 

 railroad men living in St. Paul and Minneapolis, headed by one 

 of the general passenger agents, said to me, with his finger laid to 

 his nose: "This is a grand exhibit, but of course we know these 

 apples were never grown in Minnesota," whereas they were not only 

 all grown in the state, but the most of them within twenty-five miles 

 of his office. 



