48 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



the middle and lower classes while the carousing population of the whole 

 country, and there seems to have been many liberal tipplers, slaked their 

 thirst with rum, apple-jack and peach-brandy. So much on drinking, 

 not to point a moral or adorn a tale, but to bring out the fact that fruit- 

 growing in America had its beginning and for two htmdred years had 

 almost its whole sustenance in the demand for strong drink, '^his is shown 

 in almost every page of the horticultural literature of the times and in the 

 laws of the colonies restricting prices and levying taxes on liquors made 

 from fruits. Peaches were grown in quantities wherever they could be 

 made to succeed in the colonies, not for the fruit itself, but for the making 

 of peach-vinegar, a sort of cider, and peach-brandy, a distilled liquor. 



By the end of the first hundred years in America the English seem to 

 have brought orcharding to a fine state of perfection in Virginia, the peach 

 succeeding then, by all accounts, rather better than now. Bruce ^ gives 

 an admirable summing-up of orchard-conditions at the end of the period 

 named: " In the closing years of the seventeenth century, there were 

 few plantations in Virginia which did not possess orchards of apple and 

 peach trees, pear, plum, apricot, and quince. The number of trees was 

 often very large. The orchard of Robert Hide of York contained three 

 hundred peach and three hundred apple trees There were twenty-five 

 hundred apple trees in the orchard of Colonel Fitzhugh. Each species of 

 fruit was represented by many varieties; thus, of the apple, there were 

 mains, pippins, russentens, costards, marigolds, kings, magitens and 

 batchelors; of the pear, bergamy and warden. The quince was greater in 

 size, but less aciduated than the English quince; on the other hand, the 

 apricot and plum were inferior in quality to the English, not ripening in 

 the same perfection. Cherries grew in notable abundance. So great was 

 the productive capacity of the peach that some of the landowners planted 

 orchards of the tree for the mere purpose of using the fruit to fatten their 

 hogs; on some plantations, as many as forty bushels are said to have been 

 knocked down to the swine in the course of a single season." 



Treasure after treasure of experience and narrative may be found in 

 tracing the history of the peach in Virginia but space permits only the 

 references that best illuminate the development and culture of this fruit 

 in America. Two accounts must serve to give an idea of the peach in 

 Virginia in the Eighteenth Century. Robert Beverly, in his History of 

 Virginia gives a good idea of the culture, kinds and uses of peaches in the 

 early part of the Eighteenth Century:^ " Peaches, nectarines and apricots, 



' Bruce, Philip Alexander Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century i :468, 469. 

 2 Beverly Robert History 0} Virginia. 259, 260. 1722. Reprinted in Richmond 1855. 



