STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 2T7 



lice budding, and that I would investigate the subject before buying. He next 

 tried me on small fruits. I told him I had enough for the present. He said "Come 

 and see what I have got." 80 I went with him, and I must say that greater devices 

 for taking the eye and tempting the palate of the unsophisticated farmer and lover 

 of fine fruits could hardly be devised. First, a grand display of pictures, showing 

 fruits of enormous size and brilliant colors. Then bottled specimens by the dozen; 

 huge arctic plums that were perfectly hardy as far north as Manitoba, for only one 

 dollar each; Mrs. Garfield, the largest and most productive strawberry grown; 

 Taylor's Prolific blackberry, the hardiest and best grown (mine freeze down most 

 every year); Crimson Beauty raspberry, etc. When he got through with his false 

 statements, I told him I had not patronized tree agents for several years, and did 

 not intend to soon; that I bought direct of nurserymen. And he left to seek for 

 other victims, of which he and his partner found so many that they sold several 

 thousand dollars' worth of stock which has been delivered and is reported by some 

 to be fine looking stock, probably from Ohio. And now, with anxious hearts, they 

 will watch and wait to see whether their Wolf River apple trees produce crabs, or 

 their Russian mulberry trees produce currants, as they did in Illinois. A short time 

 since one of my neighbors called my attention to some thorn bushes that he had 

 bought for evergreen hedge plants. They were as bare of leaves as a bean pole and 

 looked like Osage orange bushes. And so 1 might go on ud infinitum. 



Now let us take a retrospective view of the operations of these agents. They 

 came into the county as perfect strangers, representing a firm that the people had 

 never heard of, and selling kinds of trees and plants that were mostly unknown, at 

 enormous prices to the poor, hard working farmers who toil early and late to raise 

 wheat at fifty cents a bushel. I ask you in the name of justice if it is not high time 

 some way was devised to stop this wholesale swindling. Such men deserve to be 

 placed in a lower class than the highway robber of the plains. If they had their 

 just deserts they would be keeping company with the Younger boys. I see before 

 me nurserymen whom I know to be honorable men; and I say to you, it is a duty 

 you owe to yourselves as well as your patrons to help hunt down these unprinci- 

 pled knaves. I say to the farmer, organize neighborhood clubs, send to our home 

 nurserymen for price lists, buy stock of them that they have tested and know to be 

 the hardiest and best, and you will be surprised at the amount of money saved. 



We will now give our attention for a few moments to another style of humbug- 

 ging the lover of fine fruit. You know this is a day of monopolies, and the nur- 

 serymen of the country have not been alow to follow the ways of the other fellows. 

 Their usual method is to get possession of the whole stock of some new kind of 

 plant or tree, put an enormous price on it, and then flood the country with special 

 circulars illustrated with pictures of fruit of enormous size and brilliant colors, and 

 setting forth in glowing terms the originator's story of its wonderful productive- 

 ness, great hardiness, etc. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it will prove to the 

 deluded purchaser either an utterly worthless humbug of an old sort with a new 

 name, which might have been bought for a small sum. As examples I might men- 

 tion the Big Bob strawberry, boomed by a prominent Eastern nurseryman, famous 

 for such operations, who acknowledged the next year that several thousand spuri- 

 ous plants had been sold to him, and sent out by him to his customers. Then there 

 was Fay's Prolific currant; nearly as large as cherries and three times as productive 



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