1885.) Kitchen Garden Esculents of American Origin. 665 
command in the Genesee country in 1779, and brought to Con- 
necticut, whence it proceeded south. 
Sweet corn is neither mentioned nor hinted at in Jefferson’s 
Notes on Virginia, written in 1781. Timothy Dwight applied 
the synonym “ shriveled corn,” usually called “ sweet corn,’ and 
says that “maize of the kind called sweet corn was the most 
delicious vegetable while in the milky stage of any known in this 
country. At New Haven the sweet corn may be had in full per- 
fection for the table by successive plantings from the middle of 
July to the middle of November.’ Dwight traveled in New York 
and in New England in 1817 and before, and was in Yale College 
in 1795. (This quotation was contributed to me by O. P. Hubbard, 
New York.) Bordley? says: “It has appeared to me that the 
sort called sweet corn (having a white shriveled grain when ripe) 
yields stalks of richer juice than the common corn.” 
Sweet corn is first mentioned for sale, so far as we have seen, 
in Thorburn’s seed catalogue of 1828, one kind only, the sugar 
or sweet being named. It is not spoken of by name even in his 
Gardeners’ Kalendar for 1817 or 1821, nor in M’Mahon’s Ameri- 
can Gardeners’ Calendar, 1806, nor by Gardiner and Hepburn, 
1818, nor in a Treatise on Gardening," 1818, nor in Fessenden’s 
New American Gardener, 1828. In 1829 several ears of a “new 
variety ” from Portland, Me., were exhibited before the Massachu- 
setts Horticultural Society. Bridgeman mentions one variety in 
1832; Buist, in 1851, speaks of two varieties, but Salisbury, — 
1848,' describes three, and Bement,’ 1853, two sorts. In Schenck’s 
Gardener’s Text-book, 1854, three varieties are named. In 1863 
Burr describes nine, and in 1866, twelve sorts, In an illustrated 
article of my own, contributed to the Rural New Yorker for 
1884, thirty-five varieties are described as distinct, and thirty-two 
are figured. : 
Sweet corn is not mentioned in Noisette’s Manual Compleat 
du Jardinier, 1829, not by Bonafous in his folio work published 
in 1836, so we may assume it had not reached French culture at 
the latter date. In 1883 Vilmorin names seven sorts, all of which 
are American named. 
1 Travels, 1821, I. 
? Husbandry, 1801, 
3 John Randolph. 
+ Trans. N. Y. Ag. Soc., 1848, 836. 
5 ib., 1853, 336. 
