FOURTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 51 



Cherries seem to be at home in our country. , Although 

 I know of no one who has tried cherry growinj^ on a commer- 

 cial scale, yet there are tons and tons of cherries shipped from 

 \\'inchester every season. There is this queer fact about our 

 local situation : I do not know of a single cherry tree in that 

 whole section planted by hand. The road-sides and fences 

 are filled with cherry trees, planted by the birds dropping the 

 seeds, and many of those trees have attained immense size, 

 measuring as much as two and a half feet across the stump, 

 with wide spreading branches, and big as a sycamore per- 

 haps, and bearing- sometimes anywhere from 20 to 30 or 40 

 bushels of cherries of very fine quality. The method of gath- 

 ering cherries is sometimes very much like that of the boys 

 who go nutting. In the spring of the year a company of young 

 people will g-o out and the men will climb the cherry trees, 

 obtain all they can, and then they will saw oiT the limbs and 

 let them down with a rope to the girls. After a season of 

 such treatment as that those old cherry trees look as though 

 they had been dehorned, but they seem to come along the next 

 year and produce a new crop. The final and inevitable result 

 of that sort of treatment for the trees, of course, is that they 

 die, but they do not do so for a long time. I am inclined to 

 think that in the future the cherry orchards of the country 

 will be found in Virginia, on the foothills of the Blue Ridge 

 Mountains. I do not know of any place where cherries seem 

 to develop as they have been doing with us. 



The small fruits are grown with us almost not at all. In 

 fact, I am in doubt whether our heavy soil is suited to the 

 growing of berries. We hardly grow strawberries or any of 

 the smaller berries in sufficient quantities to furnish a supply 

 for our own home consumption. 



The subject of marketing our fruits is too complex and 

 too important to be discussed within the limits of this paper 

 It is possible that you may have an opportunity later on in 

 your meeting to discuss that very important question, and 

 with a view of some possible discussion later on I want to 

 give you some figures to think over. We may have some dis- 

 cussion on it to-morrow. I have heard several of our growers 

 say that they would be satisfied if they could get a dollar, net, 



