14 BULLETIN 179, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
them the name of Miner, in honor of his father-in-law, Mr. Miner. 
D. L. Adair (1, p. 145), of Hawesville, Ky., says: 
This plum received its name from a Mr. Miner of Grant County, Wis. , who took the 
trees there from Ilinois. 
Whether Maj. Hinckley really obtained his trees from the brother. 
of William Dodd, who went to Galena, or from Mr. Knight, can 
scarcely be determined with certainty from the conflicting statements 
that have been published. Possibly both accounts are substantially 
correct and the variety was taken into Iilinois, first from Tennessee 
and a few years later from Ohio. Both accounts agree as to the pos- 
session of the trees by Maj. Hinckley. There can also be little doubt 
of how the name Miner came to be applied, and as early as 1869 the 
variety was widely known by that name. 
The first mention of the name Miner in a publication is apparently | 
in the April number of the American Agriculturist, in 1867 (54), where 
information concerning it is requested. This notice brought a reply 
printed in the July number from N. C. Goldsmith, Middletown, N. Y., 
which would indicate that the variety was quite widely disseminated 
under the name Miner even at that time. A year later, in the Feb- 
ruary number of the same paper, ‘‘W. W.” (73), Grant County, Wis., 
says: 
I have raised the Miner plum for five or six years; I got it from Mr. Miner, in Grant 
Co., Wis., who bought his trees of a man in Illinois, who did not have any name 
for them, so they were called the Miner plum. The true name is Chickasaw plum. A 
Mr. Isabell, of Joe Davis Co., Ill., has raised the same plum for more than twenty 
years. 
Grant County is in the extreme southwestern part of Wisconsin and 
joins on the north Jo Daviess, the county in which Galena is situated, 
where the Miner was supposed to have been taken in 1824 or 1825. 
The reference by Downing to Mr. Miner, of Lancaster, Pa., is undoubt- 
edly an error for Lancaster, Wis. 
This Mr. Miner seems to have desired to assume the credit for having 
originated the variety, according to the account written by Joseph L. 
Budd (12), who says: 
A certain Mr. Miner brought this plum to Lancaster, Wisconsin, some sixteen years 
since, with the statement that it was produced from pits planted by him of the Yellow 
Egg or Magnum Bonum Plum [a variety of European origin] a number of years previous, 
and that it had been disseminated alone from the sprouts taken from the or geal seedling 
tree as planted by him. 
The variety is figured and described in the November number of 
the Horticulturist (55),in 1867, but it is preceded in point of description 
by the Newman variety, described but not figured in the September 
number of the same journal (22). This note in the September 
number, from Mr. Elliott, of Cleveland, Ohio, is of interest in connec- 
