122 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



In Pennsylvania, following the first outbreak, peach-growing all but 

 disappeared, to reappear again from time to time in new regions or in old 

 ones following an interval of years after a plague had passed. Periods and 

 places of epidemics are indicated by such quotation as follow: Wm. G. 

 Warren, Centre County, reports in 1851: "A majority of the peach 

 trees have been destroyed by the yellows." ' In the proceedings of the 

 American Pomological Society for 1852, a Pennsylvanian reports for the 

 State: " Peaches have done but ill with us for some years past. The 

 yellows have swept off thousands of trees." ^ In 1880 in a book on the 

 peach, Rutter devotes many pages to yellows in Pennsylvania and speaks 

 of " thousands of trees dead and dying from the disease in Chester and 

 Delaware counties." ^ The epidemic in the eighties seems to have been 

 particularly severe, there being at the end of the decade but 1,146,342 bear- 

 ing trees in the State which by 1900 had increased to 3,521,930 trees. 



Perhaps of all states, in proportion to area planted, New Jersey has 

 suffered most from yellows. Beginning with the epidemic raentioned by 

 Coxe in 1817, there have been several disastrous irruptions of the disease 

 in that State. A particularly destructive epidemic must have raged in the 

 early forties, for in 1 846 W. R. Prince, Flushing, Long Island, says : * 

 " Any one who visits the once splendid peach orchards in various parts of 

 New Jersey will be struck by the desolate aspect of innumerable planta- 

 tions of dead trees, with only here and there a sprig of verdtu-e amid the 

 mighty mass." Another writer, Colonel Edward Wilkins, says: " Fifty 

 thousand acres in peach trees, in two counties only, had been destroyed 

 by the yellows prior to 1850; " and in 1858, he further states that " at that 

 time nearly the whole of the peach orchards of New Jersey had been 

 destroyed by yellows." ^ He concludes, in the same article, that " in 

 New Jersey the peach belongs to the past." We choose as the last of the 

 many accounts of disaster from yellows in this State two quotations from 

 Professor P. D. Penhallow written in 1882: * 



" In New Jersey, where the ravages of the disease have been more 

 seriously felt than elsewhere, the southern counties were formerly the 

 center of the peach industry for the entire State, but, owing to the preva- 



' Report of U. S. Com. Patents 242. 1851. 



^Am. Pom. Soc. Rept. 81. 1852. 



•' Rutter Cull. & Diseases of the Peach 70. 1880. 



* Horticulturist I'.^iS. 1846. 



'Am. Farmer 100-102. 1875. 



' Peach Yellows, Houghton Farm F.xperiment Department Ser. 3. No. 2:27-28. 1882. 



