THE PIONEER IN THE RAISIN INDUSTRY. 



LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF A CALIFORNIA FRUIT GROWER. 



By FRANK S. CHAPIN. 



BY exaggerating the real evils of farm 

 life, and dwelling upon imaginary 

 ills there has been caused a congestion of 

 population in cities, abandonment of farms 

 and consequent decline of citizenship and 

 public prosperity. 



Not all farmers are wrecks from other 

 trades cast upon the shore of that calling 

 where it is thought that any one can make 

 a living, nor do all weary the body, dwarf 

 the brain, and bury the soul in the tread- 

 mill of daily toil. 



The California farmer who would avail 

 himself of the wondrous possibilities 

 offered by our climate and conditions must 

 be a close student of the alchemy of 

 nature, and to attain the best results must 

 have a broad conception of the laws of 

 trade. 



He who visits the home of the late Dr. 

 Blowers, of Woodland, California, will not 

 wonder that Mt. Vernon had such charms 

 for Washington or Ashland for Clay. In 

 view of the importance of elevating pro- 

 ductive industry as a means of increasing 

 public prosperity, it is a question whether 

 equal talent devoted to the creation of 

 model houses at Mt. Vernon and Ashland 

 and to spreading knowledge calculated to 

 awaken like aspiration in others might not 

 have been as useful to the country as the 

 wonderful careers that those great men 

 lived. 



In 1851 Dr. Eussell B. Blowers came to 

 California and like other professional men 

 began mining. After three years he bought 

 a small farm in Yolo County, and soon 

 moved to a larger one four miles south 

 from Woodland. After farming a quarter 

 section for ten years he concluded he had 

 too much land and moved to the eighty 

 acres near Woodland which he afterward 

 developed to such a high state of cultiva- 

 tion. 



In 1857 he began to raise grapes, and 

 in '63 he secured from an importation by 

 Arpoad Harazthy, the famous muscatella 

 Gordo Blanco grape with which his repu- 

 tation as the "Father of the Kaisin Indus- 

 try" was founded. In 1868 he began 



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under an oak tree to pack raisins for 

 market and steadily improved until he was 

 able, in 1876, to take first honors at Phil- 

 adelphia in competition with the world. 



He was the first to introduce the form 

 for packing London layers whose mov- 

 able bottom enables the packer to face in 

 such a way as to present a perfectly even 

 surface to the eye. He was the first to 

 introduce fancy printing to compete with 

 the Spanish style of packing. 



In 1875 he had a car load of raisins 

 caught in a storm and cured them in the 

 Alden evaporators at Vacaville. That 

 machinery was calculated for curing fruit 

 at high temperatures, but his experience 

 there suggested the principle to him upon 

 which his invention of next year was 

 founded. This gave a rapid circulation of 

 dry air at a temperature not higher than 

 120. Under his careful manipulation 

 this process developed a raisin that was 

 hard to tell from those cured in the sun. 



The invention was patented in 1877. 

 Its essential features are a zigzag current 

 passing under each tier of trays uniformly, 

 and devices for the entry of air from hot 

 air chamber, its escape by the flue and 

 control by the blower in such a way as to 

 secure an upward or downward current at 

 will. The majority of raisin-dryers built 

 afterward embodied more or less of his 

 ideas, but he was so much interested in 

 the development of the industry and the 

 country that he never took action to secure 

 the royalty to which he was entitled. 



When the dryer was a demonstrated 

 success, he turned his attention to the sub- 

 ject of irrigation. He thought that the 

 sand streaks where his walnut trees failed 

 to grow and the palms and yuccas thrived 

 was once the channel of Cache Creek, the 

 inlet of Clear Lake, and still marked the 

 course of an underground current. A 

 well twelve feet across and twenty feet 

 deep supplied a centrifugal pump to irri- 

 gate his eighty acres of trees and vines. 

 To flood alfalfa he still used the waters of 

 the ditch which had for years been at his 

 disposal. 



