10 Peach-Growing 



Early records of peach-growing in Canada evidently are 

 rare since the first note to come to the attention of the au- 

 thors of a recent bulletin from the Ontario Department of 

 Agriculture ^ bears the date of July 2, 1793. It is taken 

 from the diary of one Mrs. Simcoe of Niagara, Ontario, and 

 reads : 



"We treated them with cherries, we having large May 

 Duke cherry trees behind the house and three standard 

 peach trees which supplied us last autumn for tarts and 

 desserts during six weeks besides the number the young men 

 ate." The next record here mentioned appears in the journal 

 of a Captain Langslow who visited Niagara in 1817 and who 

 spoke of peaches being "very plentiful." However, it was 

 not until as recently as 1890, according to these authorities, 

 that the planting of peaches became general in the province 

 of Ontario, and apparently but few have ever been planted 

 in Canada outside of this province. 



Dating from the close of the eighteenth or early years of 

 the nineteenth centiu-ies, the planting of peach orchards of 

 considerable size in different parts of the United States be- 

 came more or less common, though the commercial orchard, 

 as conceived of today, was an enterprise of later develop- 

 ment. The planting of peach trees in Maryland a hundred 

 years ago was doubtless typical of what was going on at that 

 time in fruit-growing in other states. A few illustrations 

 in this connection will suffice. The first large peach orchard 

 in Maryland appears to have been planted by James Rob- 

 inson about the year 1800.^ It was located in Anne Arundel 

 County some twenty miles south of Baltimore. This orchard 



1 Clement, F. M., and Harris, A. G. "Peach Growing in On- 

 tario." Bull. 241, Ont. Dept. of Agr., July, 1916, pp. 1-2. 



2 Md. Exp. Sta. Bull. 72. 



