EARLY HISTORY 15 



from the near county of Bergen, New Jersey. Commercial 

 strawberry culture for the New York market began about 

 1820 in the vicinity of Hackensack, Bergen County, New 

 Jersey. Andrew M. Hopper, of Pascock, New Jersey, thus 

 recalls the circumstances : " When I was a boy of ten years, 

 I can well remember picking strawberries with my father. 

 At that time (about 1824) we had no crates, but packed the 

 baskets in larger baskets called hampers. In those days 

 there were no commission merchants in New York that 

 dealt in berries, so each farmer was compelled to go with 

 and sell his own fruit. There were no railroads then; 

 all the berries were carted to New York in wagons, crossing 

 the Hudson at Hoboken, or went by boat." The market 

 was very limited ; in the words of F. H. Hexamer,^ "A few 

 wagon-loads of Hackensack berries, brought across the 

 river in sailing sloops as often as twice a week, when 

 wind and tide permitted, constituted the entire supply 

 of New York ; and a period of three weeks comprised the 

 limits of the strawberry season.'' 



The methods of growing strawberries for the New York 

 market at that time were very crude. Near Boston the 

 industry began by enlarging the home garden ; the plants 

 still were grown in beds, carefully trenched and dunged 

 and all runners removed, in accordance with the most ap- 

 proved English practice. It was not field culture of the 

 strawberry, as we know it today, but merely an extension 

 of the home garden, culminating later in the intensive 

 market gardens of Belmont and Arlington. The New 

 York supply, on the other hand, which came mostly from 

 the sandy soils of Bergen and Monmouth counties, was 

 grown in open fields and on rough hill-sides. The plants 

 were simply set out and allowed to take care of themselves ; 

 1 Kept. N. J. Hort. Soc, 1881, p. 27. 



