20 FIRST FRUITS OF THE LAND. 



I was not alone ; the mania was infectious; seemingly 

 nearly everybody was setting fruit trees and plums ; the 

 front yards and the back yards of the towns had them. 

 Shrewd business men set orchards to plums Meek & 

 Luelling, George Walling, Seth Lewelling, and others ; 

 later, P. F. Bradford, Dr. O. P. S. Plummer, S. A. Clarke, 

 Dr. N. G. Blalock, and a multitude of others too numerous 

 to mention. 



It was not until 1871 I put out twelve hundred peach- 

 plum trees. There was then a great demand for large- 

 pitted plums in the eastern market, and our grocerymen 

 called for them in considerable quantities at home, and 

 often said to me, "Set out pitting plums and peach-plums, 

 and don't set anything you can not pit, for the American 

 people don't want a prune with the pit in it. They don't 

 like them. A few of our large-pitted plums had reached 

 the Saint Louis market, and were selling readily at thirty- 

 rive cents per pound. We figured two hundred pounds to 

 the tree, then thought to be a conservative estimate, one 

 hundred and sixty trees to the acre, and forty acres in 

 plums, at fifteen cents a pound, dried. This was good, 

 better than a quartz mine ; divided by two it seemed good 

 enough. Time passed. Market reports East showed active 

 demand for pitted plums. Leading wholesale grocers 

 ordered, and said we need not fear an oversupply of plums 

 as per sample sent, and that there was nothing so fine on 

 the market. We sold at sixteen cents per pound, and were 

 assured that they could not drop much below that price. 



A correspondent, a grower, Mr. S. J. Brandon, of New 

 York, had discovered, or thought he had, that a heavy 

 clay soil, very like our hilled lands, was unfavorable to 

 the curculio, the blighting pest of the East that had dis- 

 couraged plum and prune growing in the States east of the 

 Rockies. Mr. Brandon, however, was growing successfully 

 a forty-acre orchard of Reine Claude plums on heavy clay 



