THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 129 



Beginning late in the last century, however, there was a revival in 

 peach-planting in Delaware, especially the northern part of the State, 

 and now a new peach-industry seems well started in which, through 

 energetic orchard-sanitation and diversified horticulture, yellows, for the 

 present at least, is held at bay. The palmy days of fabulous prices for 

 peaches and peach-lands, however, are past in Delaware. Here, as in 

 other communities ravaged by yellows, the value of lands has sunk to a 

 half or a quarter of what it would have brought a generation ago in the 

 height of peach-culttire. In some cases property, formerly valuable, has 

 lost all value — a peach-farm will not sell at any price. The best peach- 

 lands are seldom fit for other crops, so that in Delaware, New Jersey and 

 Michigan the whole community, including railroads and steamboat lines, 

 suffers to the verge of bankruptcy when yellows exterminates the orchards. 



Probably in no other State in the Union is the peach more perfectly 

 at home than in Maryland, it having held tmdisputed supremacy among 

 fruits in that State for over a centviry and a half. Yellows, though always 

 menacing, has not been so devastating as in Delaware to the north. Erwin 

 F- Smith thinks that yellows has been present in the northern counties of 

 eastern Maryland for many years — since 1844 or 1845. In his detailed 

 account of the disease in this State ^ he records but one destructive out- 

 break of yellows, this occurring in the summers of 1886, 1887 and 1888 in 

 the northeastern part of the State where in two counties along the whole 

 length of the Sassafras River it was destructively present. Smith notes 

 that yellows, at this time, " is moving southward on the peninstila.' Since 

 Smith's account, 1888, reports from Maryland show that, while the disease 

 is still present and is now in practically all parts of the State, either it is 

 not now so virulent or is kept in check by extirpating diseased trees. Still, 

 , however, the great decrease in the number of peach-trees in Maryland in 

 the last twenty years is largely due to yellows, there being 6,1 13,287 bearing 

 trees in 1889, but 4,017,854 in 1899, and only 1,497,724 in 1909. 



In the South, west of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific Coast, yellows 

 does not exist or if so is not epidemic. 



Would that it could be recorded, as we conclude this brief account of 

 yellows and its plague-spots in America, that in the hundred years of con- 

 flict some headway had been made in ascertaining from whence the disease 

 came, what its cause and what the cure. Would, too, that we could believe 

 that the final holocaust has passed. But we cannot bandage our eyes 



1 Smith, Erwin F. U. S. D. A. Div. of Bot. Bui. No. 9:68-79. 1888. 

 9 



