124 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly- 

 dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western 

 New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past 

 by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by 

 farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and 

 energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching 

 at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread 

 by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 

 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the 

 pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the 

 shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of 

 every tree.^ But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: " In Western New 

 York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by 

 cultivators that it be not introduced by importations." ^ In New York 

 the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so 

 marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of 

 fruit-growing than in other eastern states. 



This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never 

 had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste 

 the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The 

 one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. 

 A. M. Smith, ^ writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high- 

 colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, 

 that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that 

 others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a promi- 

 nent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of 

 Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty 

 acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before 

 having produced a crop. Later, 1887,* Mr. Woodward, speaking for 

 his neighborhood, says that yellows has " nearly finished the orchards." ' 

 To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, 

 we have from Col. F. D. Curtis ^ the report, in 1887, that yellows had 

 destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially 



' N. Y. Farmer and Horl. Repository 46. 1831. 



' Cultivator 255. 1844. 



' Can. Hort. 15-16. 1878. 



' Mich. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 275. 1880. 



' U. S. D. A. Condition 0} Growing Crops August. 1887. 



" Ibid. 



