50 NUT CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES. 



pecans are grown with very thin shells that may be crushed in the fingers; in Victoria 

 County the more common pecan is large and round; in San Saba and Llano counties 

 the pecan nut is large and the meat is plump, shell moderately thin." 



The Texas pecan crop affords a large income for the inhabitants of some portions 

 of the State, mainly in certain counties within the area named above. As early as 

 1871 it was reported from some of the cotton-growing sections of Texas that the 

 pecan crop would be worth five times as much as the cotton crop of that year. Says 

 Mr. Koerber: "But for this industry of nut gathering, the people of some localities 

 must have starved for lack of remunerative labor. Hundreds of both white and 

 colored people go out with horses and wagons to gather these nuts." Charles Mohr 

 found that in 1880 there were marketed in San Antonio, Tex., the most important 

 center of the pecan trade, over 1,250,000 pounds of nuts. The price paid by the wag- 

 onload varied from 5 to 6 cents per pound. 



The best pecans of the State are produced in San Saba, Brown, and McCulloch 

 counties and along the Concho and Guadalupe rivers and a few other streams. By 

 the expression "best pecans" growers understand large nuts with thin shells. The 

 Texas pecans vary greatly in size, but are generally egg-shaped, about 1 to 1| inches 

 long by one-half to five-eighths inch in diameter. On the bottom lands of southern 

 Illinois, though the trees usually ripen their fruit, the nuts are smaller and less rich 

 in oil than those grown farther south. They are said to keep better, not becoming 

 rancid as soon as the more oily nuts. Of all the hickory family the pecan seems most 

 susceptible of improvement in the size and quality of its fruit, and marked improve- 

 ments by selection have already been made by several planters. 

 



EXTENT OF CULTIVATION. 



Sargeant 1 quotes Brendel, that " The pecan does not seem to have been known 

 on the Atlantic Seaboard before 1762, when some of the nuts were carried to New York 

 by fur traders from the Mississippi Valley. In 1772 William Prince planted 30 nuts 

 and succeeded in raising 10 plants, 8 of which he sold in England for 10 guineas each." 



The pecan has been planted very generally in collections of nut trees as far north 

 as New York, west to the Missouri River, and also in California. In 1871, 150 trees 

 were planted in Hinds County, Miss., by George Whitfield, and since that time orchard 

 planting of this nut has increased rapidly, especially during the last six years. The 

 largest planters of the pecan making reports to this division are F. A. Swinden, Brown- 

 wood, Tex., who has 400 acres planted with 11,000 trees. These are 40 feet apart each 

 way and were in January, 1892, 2, 3, and 4 years old. Large nuts with soft shells 

 were selected and planted where trees were to grow. He has cultivated cotton, corn, 

 and alfalfa in this orchard, and expressed himself much gratified with the growth of 

 the trees in 1890, notwithstanding the fact that he harvested from the same ground 

 110 bales of cotton, 300 tons of alfalfa, and 1,500 bushels of corn. At the close of the 

 season of 1891 Mr. Swinden contributed further of his experience: "I soon found out 

 that the yellow pine stakes I had put by each hill where the nuts were planted were 

 attacked by the wood louse, and these made their way to the nut and eventually to 

 the taproot, and thus killed the trees with their depredations. I lost nearly half of 

 the trees I had put out. I removed the yellow pine stakes and put cedar stubs about 

 a foot high in their place; but these, too, had to be taken away, as the rabbits fairly 

 cleaned up the balance of the trees by gnawing them to the ground in the winter. 

 These trees never did come up again. I began again and this time made a box crate 

 18 inches high of cypress wood and tarred the bottoms, and this ended my trouble 

 with the wood louse and the rabbit. The first year, while they grow in the boxes, they 

 must be closely watched to keep spiders or any other web insect from webbing in the 

 boxes. During the second and third years the bud worm works into the terminal bud 



1 Silva of North America, Vol. VII, page 140. 



