THE BONNEWITZ GARDENS, VAN WERT, OHIO 
from the experiment station, and several of the county agents. 
They gave me a hearing and when I had stated my case, they un¬ 
animously agreed that the solution of my problem lay in dehydrat¬ 
ing my seed crop, exactly as California growers dehydrate walnuts. 
This I am preparing to do, but the story does not end here. 
I have a friend, Professor Essig, an Iris grower, who is one of 
the instructors in that same agricultural college, and I went over to 
call on him to talk Iris, and incidentally I told him the story of the 
corn. He was greatly interested, more so I believe than anyone else 
to whom I had previously told the story. Here was his reaction: 
“Mr. Bonnewitz, it is natural that the Atkinson family should think 
The planting of the corn shoivn in this basement test was finished at 11 A.M. on 
March 5 and the photograph ivas taken at 10 A.M., March 1A. This shows great 
vigor, but the corn planted in the field on April 2%, May A and May 11 did not 
grow so rapidly because the season was late. But you should have seen the very, 
very rapid growth when the warm spring days arrived. 
that the old, great, great grandfather procured that corn on one of 
his cattle trips in the East, but I am quite sure they are mistaken. 
There is no record of such a corn as you describe, and it is my belief 
that the old pioneer either procured his original planting stock 
from an Indian, or from some other person who had procured it 
from an Indian. I have read that one Indian chief alone, had over 
five hundred acres of corn, and we must remember that corn was 
a much more important article of food among the Indians than it 
is with us.” He advised me to study the history of the use of corn 
among Ohio Indians. In doing so I was rewarded by finding this 
reference to it in one of General Wayne’s last reports to the govern¬ 
ment after his final victory. In his report, Wayne speaks of the site 
as “The grand emporium of the hostile Indians, where the margins 
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