
          107

Steamers were chartered- others purchased; new and more distant
markets were supplied, including New York, Albany, Boston, and the
principal towns of N.E. and Canada.

"Yet thousands of baskets remained unpicked in the orchards.
The ruling price for the best, in the Philadelphia market, was
little over a quarter of a dollar the basket.  They became a drug
and at one time a cargo of 8,000 baskets could not be sold at ten
cents the basket.  As a measure of reflief the whole were thrown
into the river.

"Proceeding to Middletown, we pass through a continuous orchard
or a succession of orchards that seem to be one vast whole,
the trees everywhere bending or broken with their loads of high-colored
fruit.  Middletown is on the Delaware Railroad and is
the central station in New Castle Co.  On the track there is a
train of fifteen cars waiting for the days pickings.  Each car
carries about 500 baskets; and although early in the morning,
the peach teams are already coming in from all directions. ***
[Determine if possible, the peach acreage of New Castle Co. in 1870.]

"From Middletown to Townsend, where another peach train is
waiting, the whole available country is planted with peach-trees.
The ordinary farm crops appear to be neglected, while the labor is
wholly devoted to gathering and marketing the fruit.  In the alluvial
table-lands of this neighborhood the peach tree finds all
the elements for the production of fruit.  It is new soil, and
        