EARLY HISTORY 13 



Near Boston. — The first commercial strawberry grow- 

 ing began about 1812 in the vicinity of the four largest 

 towns of that period — Boston, New York, Philadelphia 

 and Baltimore. At that time none of these cities had a 

 population of over 50,000, except New York. In his 

 "Travels in New England," written before 1817 but not 

 published until 1821, Dr. Timothy Dwight notes that 

 five kinds of strawberries were cultivated in New England : 

 "Red Meadow, White Meadow, Field, Hudson and Haut- 

 boy." Red Meadow was the common wild strawberry; 

 White Meadow was a white-fruited form of that species, 

 then, as now, quite plentiful in the Berkshire hills. He 

 considered Red Meadow the best of the five kinds, and said 

 he had "cultivated it for more than twenty years, and 

 during that time it has increased to twice its original size, 

 being four and a half inches in circumference." Soon 

 after this, certainly no later than 1820, commercial culture 

 in New England began, and the Red Wood and "Early 

 Virginia," which is Large Early Scarlet, emerged as the 

 standard commercial sorts of that section. A reminis- 

 cence of this period was given by James F. C. Hyde in 

 1869 : 1 



''Those of us who are now actively engaged in straw- 

 berry culture can remember when there were only two 

 varieties of this fruit in cultivation in the best gardens of 

 Massachusetts, and when it was grown in very limited 

 quantities for market. We well remember when some of 

 our neighbors picked daily fifty to one hundred boxes, 

 and that was all that could be disposed of at fair prices. 

 The varieties then cultivated were the Wood and Early 

 Virginia, the former an imported variety, the latter an 

 American sort. In time, some more foreign sorts w^ere 

 1 Amer. Jour. Hort., V, p. 2 (Jan., 1869). 



