STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 57 



some of the horticultural journals and otherwise as "the land 

 of the big red apple." 



The soil is quite peculiar in some ways, I think, to that sec- 

 tion. It is rather a loose, porous loam, with considerable gravel 

 and rock in it. The subsoil, which is really more important than 

 the surface soil, is also loose and porous and very deep, and as 

 a rule the soil is quite fertile. 



They are doing things out there in the orchard line on a tre- 

 mendously big scale. The size of the orchards would impress 

 you. They reckon things by forties very largely — it is 40, 80, 

 or 160 acres, and so on, and while there are a good many small 

 orchards of ten to twenty acres, there are a great many of 100 

 or 500, and there are quite a good many orchards of 800 or 1,000 

 acres, and some under one management as large as two thous- 

 and or twenty-five hundred acres, — not all in one block but 

 under the same general management. The two northwestern 

 counties of Arkansas, Benton and Washington, according to the 

 last census, were the leading counties in the country in point of 

 number of apple trees. Benton county, which was the banner 

 one, was given credit for something over 1,600,000, and when 

 you get that number of trees in a single county, you are getting 

 a big lot of them. Washington county had only about 100,000 

 less at that time. Since the last census enumeration was made 

 in 1900, from which these figures are taken, very extensive plant- 

 ings have been made in these two counties, and I presume it is 

 a conservative estimate to say that at the present time there are 

 at least 2,000,000 trees in each one. 



Another thing which has been very noticeable in these sections 

 where the orcharding has been developed — and perhaps this may 

 be just a suggestion for the people here in Maine — the price of 

 land has advanced three or four-fold, and in some cases even 

 more. Fifteen or eighteen years ago, when this development 

 first begun, any quantity of good orchard land lying in close 

 proximity to the railroad could be bought for six and eight dol- 

 lars an acre. Now this same land is bringing anywhere from 

 forty to fifty dollars an acre — unimproved, no better than it was 

 fifteen or eighteen years ago ; but the possibilities of orchard 

 development have just simply "pushed up" the value of the land. 



