53G TfaNSACTIOXS of the A3IERICAN INSTITUTE. 



Several of my correspondents may liave felt aggrieved at not receiving 

 prompt replies, but this lias arisen from the extent of my correspon- 

 dence, and the amount of work I have been called upon to perform. 

 I trust this letter may be accepted as an indication that their commu- 

 nications are being utilized for the common good. 



All communications addressed to me at the Department of Agri- 

 culture will be gladly received, and it may please you and the country 

 generally to know that the Hon. Horace Capron, the Commissioner 

 -of Agriculture, is quite alive to the vast importance of these subjects, 

 and aims at the prompt publication of trustworthy reports which may 

 tend to diminish the ravages by epizootics in the United States. 



Woman as a Fkuit Growee. 



Mrs. Mary Dungan, of Elizabethtown, Hardin county, Ivy., recom- 

 mends the region where she lives, forty or fifty miles due south of Louis- 

 ville, as a remarkable fruit country. She says : I do not wish to lose a 

 single number of my paper while the tillage question is being so ably 

 discussed by Horace Greeley and Dr. Trimble. My judgment 

 inclines me to favor the former, while my pocket may induce me to 

 follow the latter. I was induced to inove here by a Louisville mer- 

 chant, who was at my late residence in Washington county, Pa., two 

 years ago last fall, who could not cease admiring my beautiful bower, 

 loaded as it then was with Concord on one side, and Delaware grapes 

 on the other. He thought I had a taste for fruit, and on his return 

 home posted himself in southwestern fruit regions, and selected this. 

 This region is called Muldrow's or Muldrough's Hill. It is a spur 

 of the Cumberland mountain, 150 miles in length, and the fruit region, 

 but a few miles in width. It is peculiarly adapted to growing the 

 best of peaches and strawberries. Apples, pears, and all small fruits 

 do as well here as in western Pennsylvania. The pear tree has never 

 blighted here. The people here knoM^ nothing of the black knot that 

 defied me to grow plum trees and morella cherry trees in western 

 PennsylvfHiia. I paid $5,500 for 301 acres of land. It has about 

 ' 150 good bearing apple trees on it, eighteen years old, 1,000 peach 

 trees, four to six years old. I planted last November and December 

 160 pear, 150 plum and German prunes, eighty cherry, 300 to 400 

 peach, all of the best varieties ; have heeled in for February planting 

 100 French quinces, 500 best varieties of apples. I set my stakes 

 twenty feet* apart in each field, plant quinces, dwarf pears, and plums 

 in orchards by themselves this distance apart. All the apple trees and 



