REPORTS OF THE STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 359 



of their descendants for more than two hundred and sixty years 

 has been a prime factor of their sustenance and of their pros- 

 perity. 



The following spring and summer, however, developed to their 

 delighted gaze and to their longing appetites an abundance of 

 grapes, white and black, strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, 

 and many others ; plums, nuts, and a profusion of roses ; but the 

 apple, the pear, and the peach, were not indigenous to this country, 

 and the civilized hand had not stretched across the wide Atlantic 

 to sow their seeds. They found the soil, where the Indians had 

 cleared by burning and with their clam-shell hoes and their fish for 

 fertilizer had grown their corn, their beans and their pumpkins, 

 fertile and responsive to whatever was done for it. The colonists 

 were rather slow in introducing fruit trees, and it was not till after 

 1640 that these were propagated to any merchantable extent. 



Gov. Endicott was apparently one of the first to make this any 

 considerable business ; his farm was known by the name of 

 " Orchard." In 1645 he wrote his son that he had engaged to sell 

 fifteen hundred apple trees; and in 1648 he exchanged five hun- 

 dred apple trees with William Trask for two hundred and fifty 

 acres of land. 



An indication of the interest early shown in horticulture is 

 the act of 1646, imposing penalties for robbing an orchard or gar- 

 den, or injuring any graft or fruit tree. 



The general cultivation of fruit increased slowly, though in 

 1654, thirty-four years after the first settlement, Gov. Bradford, 

 in a rather rough poem, wrote — " Pears, apples, cherries, plums, 

 quince, and peach, are now no dainties, you may have of each." 

 But early in 1700, apples and also pears and peaches are spoken 

 of by Chief Justice Dudley as abundant. Apples were especially 

 so, for in one village near Boston, of only forty families, they made 

 three thousand barrels of cider in 1721, and in another town of 

 four hundred families, he says, "they made ten thousand barrels, 

 some apple trees making as many as six and seven barrels of cider ; 

 but this is not common, though from seven to nine bushels of 

 apples will yield a barrel of cider." Nearly another century 

 passed before any associated action was taken here to promote 

 horticulture, or thQ propagation and cultivation of fine fruits, 

 although in the milder and more genial climate, south of New 

 York, at Philadelphia, and below that, much had been done. 



