lOO THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



fortunes of those engaged in growing peaches. Indeed, in following the 

 history of this imit on the Peninsula, one is forced to declare that peach - 

 growing is gambling pure and simple. Take, for example, the building 

 of the Delaware railroad. Peaches were scarcely planted in the interior 

 parts of the Peninsula, away from water-ways, until the building of this 

 road in the sixties and seventies, when the yield increased so rapidly that 

 4-I75-500 baskets were shipped by rail in 1875, the total yield being 8,782,716 

 baskets ' — fortunes followed the completion of the railroad only to be 

 lost in subsequent over-production. 



New Jersey, eastern Petmsylvania, and southeastern New York rather 

 slowly followed the lead of Delaware in commercial peach-growing. New 

 Jersey, according to census reports, reached her zenith in peach-growing in 

 1899 when there were 4,413,568 peach-trees in the State which produced 

 2,746,607 bushels of fruit giving her third rank among the states of the 

 Union in production. Ten years later the State had dropped to fourteenth. 

 The peach seems to have been neglected in eastern Pennsylvania as a 

 commercial crop, possibly because a good start was never made on account 

 of the early appearance of yellows. In southeastern New York and on 

 Long Island, peach-growers have usually followed the fortunes of their 

 neighbors in New Jersey who have ever grown on a much larger scale. 



To show how quickly the peach gives returns and how great the return 

 from the capital invested, the following figures, savoring a good deal of 

 American boastfulness of dollars and cents, are illustrative: ^ " The peach 

 farms in Upper Delaware and Maryland have returned to their owners 

 the most fabulous amounts for their investments far exceeding in profit 

 any other staple crop that has been raised in the Middle States, and on a 

 scale never before heard of in this or any other country. Some of the 

 orchards containing from 1000 to 1300 acres have netted their owners from 

 $20,000 to $30,000 annually. A peach orchard in New Castle county, 

 Delaware, of 400 acres, netted the owner in one crop, $38,000. One in 

 Kent county, Maryland, of some 600 acres, produced a crop paying $31,000, 

 and the same orchard in 1879 yielded $42,000. In 1873, the Delaware 

 Peach Growers' Association reported that there were sent from the 

 Delaware peninsula to the northern markets of Philadelphia and New 

 York 1,288,500 baskets of peaches, or 2577 car-loads by the railroad. 

 Adding the quantity shipped by steamers and sailing vessels, and the 

 amount canned, the actual quantity amounted, in the aggregate, to 

 2,000,000 of baskets. In 1872, the whole district, comprising the Eastern 



' Am. Farmer July, 1878. 



' Ruttcr Cull. & Diseases nf the Praih 81, 82 



