84 BUSE-FBUITS 



that it affords a means of making the grower independent of the 

 open market. 



" Yet the visitor might enquire in vain for dried raspberries in 

 many of the stores in this western New York country. In otlier 

 words, the product is not largely consumed in this state. It is 

 used mostly west and northwest of Chicago. Probably four -fifths 

 of the product is consumed in lumber and mining camps, and on 

 the plains, where fresh fruit is scarce. None of it, so far as I 

 know, is exported, and there is very little, if any, commercial 

 dried product in Europe. C. H. Perkins & Co., Newark, N. Y., 

 Hried the experiment of exporting some of these goods to France 

 several years ago, but shipped only two or three eases of them. 

 The goods are still on hand in France, with no disposition to take 

 them at any price.' Raspberries are dried to an important extent 

 in southern Illinois and in Michigan, and lately also in Arkansas. 

 These dried raspberries have as much merit in cookery as the 

 fresh berries, and they are used in the same manner in sauces and 

 pies. 



"Wayne county is the home of commercial fruit evaporation. 

 In the apple -growing communities, nearly every farm has an 

 evaporator of one kind or another. It is said that there are 

 2,200* evaporators in the county, and this estimate is probably 

 none too high. All this industry is the product of the last twenty- 

 five years. The beginning of the industry seems to have been the 

 introduction of a little machine from Ohio (probably the D. Lippy 

 fruit Aviev.—Bept. Com. Patents, 1865, in. 878), by A. D. Shepley 

 and George Edwards in 1867. The right to use this evaporator 

 was purchased by Mason L. Rogers, near Williamson, and the 

 following year, 1868, he planted five acres of black raspberries, 

 with the expectation of evaporating the fruit— or drying it, as the 

 operation was then called, — and this began the evaporated rasp- 

 berry industry. Mr. Rogers made some improvements on the 

 machine, and about 1875 H. Topping, of Marion, took up its 

 manufacture, making alterations from time to time. The direct 

 descendant of this old machine is the Topping portable evapora- 



*Statement of Charles Mills, Country Gentleman, April 18, 1895, p. 308. 



