FOURTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 189 



A family tliat receives two or three quarts of peaches in a 

 day think they have got all they want, but if a package could 

 come in, holding twice as much, then all the members of the 

 family would eat a great many more. The fruit package 

 we have got to come to with our peaches, is something that 

 will go right from the dealer to the family as it comes from 

 the orchard. The one great secret of success of southern 

 peach growing, of late years, has been that to reach the mar- 

 ket at all they had to pack in a medium size package, four 

 quart basket, and when it got to the market the smaller pack- 

 age was a little over the quart or two the family had been 

 buying previously, but not so much as to hinder them from 

 buying it, and so it has doubled the peach consumption in 

 every part of the country, and that package, the "Georgia 

 fruit carrier," as it is known commonly, has helped more 

 than any one thing to increase the consumption of fruit in 

 the United States. It is a package the wholesaler can ship 

 by express, by rail, 25 or 100 miles in small quantities, and 

 the fruit not be bruised when handled by the expressman. 

 We need to get here in New England for our peaches, for 

 our plums, for our apples, some package which the people 

 will buy and carry home with them. The western New York 

 people have doubled and created consumption in grapes by 

 getting up a handy package that anybody could lug home as 

 easy as they could a bundle of dry-goods, and I look to see 

 the time when the retail stores will have stacked up, when 

 the fruit is in season, our native apples in nice convenient 

 packages, so that the people may get the apple eating habit, 

 you may have it four quarts or a peck, but something less 

 than half a bushel, that the people will take home and will 

 buy during the apple season. Our western friends have 

 developed the box idea because it was the best package to 

 load in refrigerator cars, and the best package to handle. I 

 was in Kansas City and Chicago and St. Louis, and I saw 

 Colorado apples of good quality and good color and good 

 style, selling in carload lots at from $2.25 to $2.50 a box, 

 from five to eight hundred miles from where they were grown, 

 and I saw New York state apples selling in the same mar- 

 kets from $1.60 to $2.00 a barrel, so you see there was prac- 



