220 TwENTY-FlEST BlENNIAL EePOBT 



lion without capital stock. Any person in tlie county or 

 city is eligible to membership. Subscriptions are volun- 

 tary, and any person subscribing $1.00 or more is en- 

 titled to vote as a member in the selection of the seven 

 directors of the association. The directory for the pres- 

 ent is composed of four members elected from the city 

 of Paducah, and three growers from the county. The 

 association was fortunate in being able to select as its 

 President a man who for twenty years was engaged in 

 the wholesale grocery business, and is familiar with the 

 selling and marketing end of the business, and who for 

 th6 last few years has, after having retired from the 

 grocery business, himself become a grower, and is one 

 of the most successful producers in the country. The 

 association was well under way in the early spring. 

 Its work for the first year will necessarily be prelimi- 

 nary, and fruitful of comparatively small results in a 

 material way, but it has accomplished this much, it has 

 a membership of over 150 growers and producers. It 

 has pledged about 500 acres of garden truck for the 

 present year from its members, and up to the first of 

 May over 50,000 apple trees had been delivered to its 

 members and planted in the county through the asso- 

 ciation, and which were bought by the association for 

 the members at about one-fourth what its members had 

 heretofore paid to fruit-tree peddlers for the same trees. 

 But more than this, the movement not only has the 

 sympathy and the well wishes of everybody in the city 

 and the county, it has the enthusiasm and determined 

 support of its members, and in a few weeks has broken 

 down the old spirit of distrust, petty jealousy and de- 

 spair over the hopelessness of the cultivator of the soil 

 really being able to better his condition and to share 

 materially in the welfare of his community. 



As I stated to you, I was going to confine myself 

 to the facts, and, therefore, what I am going to say now 

 I am sayinig not as a prophecy, but I am stating it to 

 you as a fact ; that this association during the first year 

 of its existence and by the time the fall market season is 

 over, will have brought into the pockets of its members 

 over $50,000.00 of new money coming into this com- 

 munity from cities and markets at a distance, and which 



