46 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



Others are. Of this sort we make vinegar; wherefore we call them vinegar 

 peaches, and sometimes Indian peaches. 



" This tree grows to a vast bigness, exceeding most apple trees. They 

 bear well, though sometimes an early spring comes on in February, and 

 perhaps when the tree is fully blown, the cloudy, north-east winds, which 

 attend the end of that month, or the beginning of March, destroy most 

 of the fruit. The bigest apricot tree I ever saw, as they told me, was 

 grafted on a peach stock in the ground. I know of no other sort with us, 

 than the common. We generally raise this fruit from the stone, which 

 never fails to bring the same fruit. Likewise our peach stones effect the 

 same, without so much as once missing to produce the same sort that the 

 stone came from." 



Peaches in the colonies. — The first peaches in the American colonies 

 must have been planted at Jamestown for, in 1629, Captain John Smith 

 writes of " peaches in abundance." ' The trees, however, seem to have been 

 neglected for, continuing, Smith says: "Apples, Peares, Apricocks, Vines, 

 figges, and other fruits some have planted, that prospered exceedingly; 

 but their diligence about Tobacco left them to be spoiled by the cattell; 

 yet now they beginne to revive." The settlement in Virginia at that time, 

 so soon after the Indian massacres, was small and there could have been 

 but few trees so that Smith's " abundance " was but as a grain of sand on 

 the seashore with the many thousands of bushels required to make an 

 abundance at the present time. 



Despite the neglect of fruit to attend to tobacco which Smith 

 laments, the planting of orchards must have gone on apace, for in 1633 a 

 Dutch sea-captain named De Vries visiting Virginia describes the Menife 

 plantation, famous in the colony at that time, as having a garden con- 

 taining rosemary, sage, marjoram and thyme, the apple, pear and cherry 

 while the house itself was surrounded by peach-trees.^ Three years later, 

 1642, Berkeley became governor of the colony and we are told that about 

 his house at Green Spring there were fifteen hundred apple, peach, apricot, 

 quince and other fruit-trees.'^ Robert Evelyn, writing forty years after 

 the settlement of Jamestown says: " Peaches better than Apricocks by 

 some doe feed hogs, one man hath ten thousand trees." ■* 



Fruit-growing in colonial Virginia was not without promoters and one, 

 a Colonel Norwood, had the persuasive eloquence of the barkers for get- 



' Works 0} Captain John Smith, Ed. by Edward Arber, 887. 1884. 



' De Vries, David Peterson Voyages from Holland to America 50. 1853. 



' Neil, Rev. E. D. Virginia Carolorum 50. 1869. 



' Evelyn, Robert New Albion, Force Hist. Tracts. H: \o. 7:.^!. 



