54 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



the fruit had fallen from the trees in such quantities as to cover nearly 

 the whole surface. Part of it they left to rot, because they could not 

 take it all in and consume it. Wherever we passed by we were always 

 welcome to go into the fine orchards and gather our hats and pockets full 

 of the choicest fruit, without the possessors so much as looking after it." 



The soil and climate of Long Island and the lower reaches of the 

 Hudson, similar to those of the Chesapeake peach-belt, are so well adapted 

 to peaches that we may be sure that the early settlers in New York eked 

 out their scanty fare with this fruit soon after settlements were made. 

 Trade with the colonies to the south, where peaches were common before 

 the Dutch were established on Manhattan Island, began almost imme- 

 diately after the arrival of the Hollanders in America, and knowledge of 

 the adaptability of peaches to conditions in the New World was no doubt 

 quickly acquired from Virginia, if, indeed, the aborigines were not culti- 

 vating this fruit in the region as Penn found them doing on the site of 

 Philadelphia. Yet careful search in the colonial records of New York 

 shows no early accounts of peaches, there being few such accounts, by the 

 way, of any agricultural product, no one having undertaken the task of 

 describing the natural and agricultural resources of this State as was done 

 by several able observers for Virginia and the New England states. 



No doubt, however, orchard-planting as a general practice was long 

 delayed in New York because of political and economic conditions. The 

 Dutch came to America as traders and not as home-makers, and almost 

 from the day they landed were in trouble with both their savage and their 

 civilized neighbors so that actual or petty warfare prevented them from 

 planting orchards until in 1647 when the reins of government were taken 

 in hand by Peter Stuyvesant, a farmer as well as a soldier, who at once 

 set about encouraging the planting of fields, gardens and orchards. He 

 brought, we are told, fruits, flowers, farm and truck-crops from the neighbor- 

 ing colonies and Holland and these he not only planted on Manhattan 

 Island but sent to the settlements up the Hudson. The peach may readily 

 be grown in suitable soils from Albany down the river to New York, and, 

 by the end of the Seventeenth Century, we are told by travelers, naturalists 

 and missionaries that this fruit was in common cultivation by the whites 

 and was even rudely tilled by the Indians of the Hudson Valley. 



But, in eastern New York, away from the coast, the peach did not 

 find the climate as congenial as in the colonies to the south and then, too, 

 from the following record, the peach -borer early became troublesome. 



