54 THE PEARS OF NEW YORK 
colonies on the eastern coast were fighting for their independence. To 
these they brought the cultivated plants of Europe and among them the 
pear. Vancouver, in 1792, found all of the hardy fruits growing at Santa 
Clara and the mission of San Buena Ventura, California. Robinson, a 
little later, describes extensive orchards connected with the mission of 
San Gabriel in which there were pears in abundance. In 1846, Edwin 
Bryant found at the mission of San Jose six hundred pear-trees bearing 
fruit in great abundance and full perfection. The missions were secularized 
in 1834, and the orchards fell into decay. But the pear and the vine 
withstood negléct, drouth, and the browsing of cattle to furnish food to 
the Argonauts of '49. But little came of these early plantings that affects 
the present industry of growing pears in California either as to methods 
of culture or the introduction of new varieties. 
As an example of the remarkable recuperative power of the pear, 
however, the orchard which Bryant described in 1846 at the San Gabriel 
Mission is noteworthy. An enterprising pioneer, W. M. Stockton, grafted 
over the old orchard in 1854 to improved varieties, and by pruning, cultiva- 
tion, and irrigation succeeded in rejuvenating it so that the orchard became 
a profitable commercial plantation — the first commercial pear orchard in 
California. There are other instances given in the early accounts of 
fruit-growing in California in which the youth of old pear-trees was renewed 
by generous treatment, showing that the pear in a congénial soil and climate 
is most self-assertive in maintaining life. It could hardly be otherwise 
than that the health and vigor of these old trees stimulated the planting 
of fruits by the gold-seekers who rushed to this region in 1849. 
Meanwhile, orcharding had been established as an avocation. In the 
rich Willamette Valley in Oregon, where the growing of wheat and cattle 
was the vocation, the plantations of hardy fruits made by Henderson 
Lewelling, near Portland, Oregon, in 1847, included pears and marked the 
beginning of pear-culture in Oregon.’ Lewelling’s venture, so pregnant 
with results in pomology for the Pacific Northwest, has been described in 
The Cherries of New York, and needs no detailed description here. It is 
mentioned only to call attention to it as another landmark in the history 
of the pear. 
The padres began the cultivation of the pear at the missions. The 
pioneers of ’47 in Oregon and ’49 in California started a new era in the 
cultivation of this and other tree-fruits by introducing named and improved 
varieties and extending their cultivation along the coast from British 
