42 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY [1911-12 



were to sell it in the eastern market. Even then they did not 

 make much in the beginning, when every man was picking, 

 packing and selling his own little crop. They saw that if they 

 were to succeed in spite of the disadvantages they met with in 

 the way of distance from market and heavy freight rates they 

 must do so by co-operation, and they formed an association, 

 the Hood River Association, that now has 80 per cent, of the 

 apple growers belonging to it. They built a packing house that 

 cost them forty thousand dollars, and sent their apples there 

 to be packed by an expert, who did not know one man from 

 another, nor whose apples he was packing at any particular 

 time. They are packed in boxes, the same number of apples 

 of the same size in each box. They are graded from eighty-four 

 to two hundred and sixty-four apples to the box. When the 

 association first took up the matter of packing, the apples did 

 not run even and many of those brought in were not good. The 

 expert, disinterested packer soon regulated that, for the growers 

 found that it was no use to bring inferior fruit to the packing 

 house, it was graded down so that it might as well be left at 

 home. They sell their best apples and claim that they have 

 very few poor ones, but I found that they had a canning factory 

 and that it was possible to buy Hood River cider, so I concluded 

 that there must be some fruit that was not first class. They 

 adopt the wise course and utilize it in these ways on the ground, 

 instead of sending it east to break the market for their best 

 fruit and cause the buyers to lose confidence in it. 



This is the bright side of apple raising in the Northwest and 

 there is no doubt that those who were first on the ground have 

 made and are making money, but there is another side to life 

 in that country. You are away from neighbors, the houses are 

 rude and not very expensive, life there is very different from 

 life in our New England communities. I met a man who had 

 just sold his orchard, ten years old, for eleven thousand dollars, 

 and he said that he had a pretty good house on it, it cost him 

 four hundred dollars to build. That will give you an idea of 

 what their buildings are, although lumber is of course much 

 cheaper that it is with us. Raw land in the apple section now 



