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AMERICAN POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
The Picholine is pressed into oil and this oil like that of the Mission is 
being introduced into eastern markets. 
Several olive mills have been established in Butte county alone and this 
holds true of other counties where the olive is extensively grown as in Placer 
and Yolo and some others. 
The olive thrives so well under adverse circumstances, on dry lands, and 
with limited cultivation, that it is a favorite with many who are unable to 
give their trees the care they really need. With good cultivation this tree 
shows excellent results, giving larger fruit and heavier crops. 
GENERAL VIEW OF CONDITIONS IN CALIFORNIA. 
In the consideration of the subject — “Tropical and Sub-Tropical Fruits” — 
assigned to this committee, the largest share of attention has been addressed 
to the present condition and future prospects of those fruits more generally 
known and which, in their season, are found in almost every market of the 
United States, viz. the orange, lemon, grape-fruit, lime, olive, fig, raisin, 
almond, guava, persimmon and loquat. 
There are many other fruits more nearly approaching the true tropical 
type (represented in the southern portion of the State especially) but in too 
limited quantities to suggest extended notice, but that many of them will 
ultimately figure in the commercial market will not for a moment be ques- 
tioned. 
The early American settlers in California found no orange trees except at 
Mission San Gabriel in the city of Los Angeles, and down to 1869 there were 
no groves of more than ten acres of bearing trees in the State, those being 
in the cities of Los Angeles and San Bernardino. 
The first groves of citrus trees in San Diego county were planted early in 
1869, but as there was no system of irrigation, people were timid in regard 
to planting fruits of which they had little or no knowledge, and it was not 
until 1887 when the great Sweetwater system of irrigation was finished that 
extensive plantings occurred: these were modest at first, but as the value of 
irrigation became better known, and the knowledge of when and how to 
use water was better understood, the planting of groves of oranges and 
lemons was rapidly extended till now a continuous grove of a thousand acres 
of lemon trees from three to five shears 0 ld may be seen. 
Orange trees amounting to thousands of acres are now growing where 
naught save brush and cacti grew, except where it was absolutely desert. 
In the early seventies and concurrent with the diversion of water from the 
Santa Ana river for domestic and irrigation purposes, a wonderful develop- 
ment of orange planting occurred at Riverside, at that time a portion of San 
Bernardino county, but now constituting a county by itself, and for more 
than fifteen years it was believed and claimed by its citizens to be the 
center of the true and only orange belt in California, and that it embraced, 
as indicated by its topography, about a dozen sections of land. 
Until a very recent period the growers of citrus fruits in the southern sec- 
tion of the State stubbornly refused to admit the possibility of producing 
the orange or lemon in the northern section, except as a curiosity, and then 
under the most favorable conditions, but time has demonstrated the fact 
that oranges and lemons by hundreds of car loads are annually shipped from 
that section, which extends to within a hundred miles of the south line of 
the State of Oregon. 
