108 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
ing the wife and little ones and often all of their worldly effects, with but 
very little money; enduring hardships, trials and disarrangements, which 
they bore with a heroism and fortitude that should command the admira- 
tion of the world. Their first work was to erect shelters for their families, 
and to put in grain and vegetables to furnish food for their future use. 
This done,they commenced hewing outand fashioning a home after a pat- 
tern of the home of their childhood which was photographed in their 
hearts. The ‘ideal home” was surrounded with trees that budded, 
bloomed and yielded up their fruits to its occupants, and the new home 
would never be complete without its orchards and gardens of trees, plants 
and vines. And now commenced the difficulties. Many of them had 
brought along seeds, but they had been saved from favorite varieties 
whose vitality had been greatly impaired through long propagature by 
modern methods, or had their origin in a climate differing very materially 
from this,and they had to plant them in the virgin untamed soil that pro- 
longed their annual growth into the verge of winter, and year after year 
they would he killed back to the snow line. Many procured and planted 
trees from the nearest available nurseries which, were far away, and the 
means of transportation soslow,that much of the stock was dead or barely 
alive before it reached its destination, and such as lived made a feeble 
growth and were of varieties that required a long season to mature their 
growth and get ready for winter, so that rarely any of them ever survived 
thethird year. Then, unfortunately, ‘‘croakers” raised the cry that Minne- 
sota was not nor ever would bea fruit state, so that at one time it seemed 
as if the oily tongued tree peddler could invent no new lies to beguile the 
unwary, and he would have to put up his plate book, fold his tent and 
depart for other shores. _ 
Still, there were among these early settlers a few would-be pomologists 
who had determined to grapple with this most difficult problem that ever 
had confronted man in any land or age of the world. Their watchword 
was, ‘‘Onward!”’ They had nailed their flag to the mast, and surrender 
they would never. It.is a pity that their names have not been written in 
letters of living light, or deeply engraved on monuments more enduring 
than granite, and the story of their persistency, self-sacrifice and heroism 
written on imperishable tablets, to be read by those generations who shall 
occupy the land when Minnesota shall be acknowledged the best apple 
country on the whole earth ; for such it will be, if the spirit of the fathers 
is inherited by the sons. 
As before hinted, of the earliest efforts at fruit growing in this region 
but few have been recorded. About all we know of the efforts put forth 
previous to the occurrence of the events that led to the organization of 
this society, is, that a few men, strangers to each other, and in different 
parts of the state, did plant and re-plant trees,and struggle against great 
odds, for many years—with trials great but triumphs few. Among the 
earliest was L. M. Ford, who started the growing of trees by planting 
seeds at Groveland between Minneapolis and St. Paul, in 1850, and at that — 
time, or soon after, began selling trees that he had imported from Iowa, 
Illinois and New York. These trees seemed to do very well, until the 
winter of 1855-56, when a large portion of them were killed to the snow 
line, and others received a shock from which they never fully recovered. 
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