ANNUAL WINTER MEETING. 79 



for a good many years I was a member of your association. 

 Other duties have taken my time so that I have not been able 

 to attend your deliberations as I used to do; in fact, I have 

 been away so much in the winter time, and your winter session 

 has been held about the time I usually leave the city. 



Every time I come to a meeting of this kind and see the 

 progress made in the growing of fruits and flowers, I assure 

 you that I take more and more pride in the State Horticultural 

 Society of Minnesota. I never go to Boston that I do not visit 

 the horticultural society rooms. Every month they have an 

 exhibition of flowers or fruits there, one or the other. I vis- 

 ited the exhibit in the New York Life Insurance building this 

 fall in this city, and I never was more surprised in my life than 

 I was to see such a fine display of flowers. I came directly from 

 Boston, where I had visited the rooms of the State Horticult- 

 ural society, where I had seen an exhibition of flowers, espec- 

 ially of azaleas and chrysanthemums, and when I saw this 

 exhibit here in this city of Minneapolis, I said we are going to 

 beat Boston by and by. (Applause.) It was positively sur- 

 prising; we had a better exhibition of chrysanthemums than 

 they had in Boston. It would not be possible to get up a finer 

 -exhibit than we had here last fall. 



Now as I look about the room today and see the exhibit of 

 flowers we have here, my mind goes back to the time when I 

 believe that I pretty nearly alone started the first floral exhi- 

 bition in Minneapolis. It was held in Harrison hall on the 4th 

 day of July, about 1872, I think. We had a great many com- 

 mittees, and we had a great many more members of committees 

 than we had flowers, but we got the ladies interested and went 

 to work with a will. On the day before the 4th of July the old 

 Harrison hall did not look much like a flower garden, I assure 

 you. I employed an old German friend of mine, Mike Smith, 

 (most of you know him) to trim the room with evergreens, and 

 we piled in all the evergreens we could get, we thought 

 we would have something anyway, but no flowers came; 

 so I engaged all the expressmen I could press into service 

 to go about among the ladies of the town and get what 

 flowers they had, and that kind of interested the ladies a little, 

 and by 10 o'clock the morning of the fourth of July they began 

 to come in and help to arrange the hall and flowers, and when 

 twelve o'clock arrived we had quite a flower show. We had no 

 such display as you see on that table down there; we had no 

 gloxinias and agaleas, none of the rare flowers; we had plenty 



