40 THE PEARS OF NEW YORK 
pared product, the pear surpasses the apple only as a canned fruit. Failing 
in comparison with the apple, as a commercial product, pears are largely 
left to fruit connoisseurs, and with these a generation ago the pear was 
the fruit of fruits, many splendid collections of it having been made in 
regions where pears could be grown. With the expansion of commercial 
fruit-growing, collections of pears, and with them many choice varieties, 
have gone out of cultivation — more is the pity — and pear-growing has 
expanded least of all the fruit industries in the United States. 
With this brief discussion of the present status of pear-culture in this 
country, we can proceed to trace the history of the pear with more 
exactness by reason of knowing its limitations under American conditions. 
The peach is the only hardy fruit that belongs to the heroic age of 
Spanish discovery in the New World. Pears, apples, plums, and cherries 
came to the new continent with the French and English. The early 
records of fruit-growing in America show that the pear came among the 
first luxuries of the land in the French and English settlements from Canada 
to Florida. Pioneers in any country begin at once to cultivate the soil 
for the means of sustenance. Naturally, cereals and easily-grown nutri- 
tious vegetables receive attention first as giving more immediate harvests 
and more sustaining fare to supplement game and fish. Agriculture and 
gardening usually precede orcharding, and this was the case in early settle- 
ments in America, but not long. The first generation born in colonial 
America knew and used all of the hardy fruits from Europe; as many records 
attest, and of which there is confirmatory proof with the pear in many 
ancient pear-trees of great size near the old settlements, some of which 
were planted by the first settlers from Europe. Of pears, many notable 
trees planted by the hands of the first English and French who crossed 
the seas to settle the new cotintry were conspicuous monuments in various 
parts of America in the memory of men still living, if, indeed, some of the 
old trees themselves are not still standing. 
Of these ancient pear-trees, New England furnishes the most notable 
monuments to mark the introduction of this fruit in the New World. For- 
tunately, their histories have been preserved in several horticultural annals, 
and of these accounts the fullest and best is by Robert Manning, Jr., in 
the Proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1875, pages 100 
to 103. Manning's notes throw so much light on the early history of the 
pear in New England, as well as upon the varieties then grown, that they 
are published in full. 
