96 MINNESOvVA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
region so highly adapted to orchard culture that trees had to grow and 
couldn’t help it; one had only to stick a seed in a-hole, or pusha twig into 
the ground and nature did the rest. There I achieved a certain degree of 
success asan amateur horticulturist, growing dwarf pears, peaches. grapes 
and the smaller fruits, and had come to believe, adopting the timber ver- 
nacular, that fruit growing was ‘‘just as easy as rolling off a log.” I need 
svarcely add that I have had some reason to revise that opinion since cast- 
ing my fortunes with the fruit growers of Minnesota. 
In the fall of 1865, when I became a permanent resident of this state, 
the fact that it was comparatively destitute of fruit did notimpress me as 
an insurmountable, or even exceedingly great obstacle. It could not, I 
reasoned, have been in accordance with the plans of the Creator, to have 
endowed this glorious land with so many of the gifts that serve to make 
a people prosperous and happy,and have withheld that one great essential 
of fruit. A numer of other men were of asimilar mind, and together 
we united in March, 1867, in organizing the Faribault Fruit Growers’ Club, 
of which I was elected secretary. 
As this club, as I conceive, had asomewhat important bearing upon the 
fortunes of fruit growing in the state, I shall venture to digress some- 
what from the line of review of tiie state society in referring to its his- 
tory. Faribault numbered among its inhabitants some of the earliest ex- 
perimenters in the department of orchard culture in the state. Its origi- 
nal proprietor, Hon. Alexander Faribault, had planted an orchard of fifty 
trees in 1859 to which he had subsequently made considerable accessions, 
besides growing several varieties of grapes. I. N. Sater had established a 
nursery of ten acres of trees. Geo. Dorrance, of East Prairie, had also 
a successful orchard, and D.W. Humphrey and J. W. Harkness were en- 
gaged in the nursery business. Hon. John M. Berry, Judge of the Supreme 
Court, was also a very enthusiastic amateur fruit grower, whose faith was 
strong in the ultimate success of efforts to supply the state with home 
grown apples. With such material for a nucleus it was not difficult to 
organize a club, of which Hon. R. A. Mott was chosen president. It was 
thoroughly cosmopolitan, welcoming everybody to membership without 
respect to residence, color, sex or property qualifications, provided simply 
that the applicant could tender the modest fee of half adollar. The club 
proceeded to cast about for some undertaking that might best fulfill the 
fruit growers’ great aim of benefitting the human race and hit upon the 
project of adorning the village square with shade trees. This had been 
once done through a ‘‘bee” of the early settlers, but the trees inserted in 
ghallow holes in the sod of the virgin prairie very naturally and unani- 
mously died. To replace them the club proposed to raise funds by means 
of a strawberry show, and thus early the interests of fruit growing and 
forestry were linked together in a co-operative movement. The show 
was fixed for the 4th of July owing to the belief that the largest number 
of visitors could be secured on that day. The selection of the day, how- 
ever, came near proving disast: ous, for the season was unusually late, and 
there was a threatening prospect that no strawberries would be ripe. The 
club, however, with the liberality that usually characterizes men devoted 
to such a broad humanitarian pursuit, had left competition open to the 
world, and as the sum of premiums offered amounted to $16, they had 
hopes that cultivators from more favored regions might come and help | 
