CHERRIES IN THE SOUTH
It would be interesting but hardly of sufficient profit to trace further the history of cultivated cherries in the states of the Atlantic seaboard. References to the cherry abound in the colonial records of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware but they bring out no facts differing materially from those abstracted from the records of the northern colonies. The Quakers and the Swedes in the states watered by the Delaware and the English in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, all early grew cherries as one of the easiest fruits to propagate and cultivate.
Space can be spared for but two brief quotations to show the condition of cherry culture in the South in Colonial days. The first is from Bruce's Economic History of Virginia.[31]
"In the closing years of the seventeenth century, there were few plantations in Virginia which did not possess orchards of apple and peach trees, pear, plum, apricot and quince.[32] The number of trees was often very large. The orchard of Robert Hide of York[33] contained three hundred peach and three hundred apple trees. There were twenty-five hundred apple trees in the orchard of Colonel Fitzhugh.[34] Each species of fruit was represented by many varieties; thus, of the apple, there were mains, pippins, russentens, costards, marigolds, kings, magitens and bachelors; of the pear, bergamy and warden. The quince was greater in size, but less acidulated than the English quince; on the other hand, the apricot and plum were inferior in quality to the English, not ripening in the same perfection.[35] Cherries grew in notable abundance. So great was the productive capacity of the peach that some of the landowners planted orchards of the tree for the mere purpose of using the fruit to fatten their hogs;[36] on some plantations, as many as forty bushels are said to have been knocked down to the swine in the course of a single season."[37]
The second quotation is from Lawson's History of Carolina.[38]
"We have the common, red and black cherry, which bear well. I never saw any grafted in this country, the common excepted, which was grafted on an indian plum stock, and bore well. This is a good way, because our common cherry trees are very apt to put scions all around the tree for a great distance, which must needs be prejudicial to the tree and fruit. Not only our cherries are apt to do so, but our apples and most other fruit trees, which may chiefly be imputed to the negligence and unskillfulness of the gardner. Our cherries are ripe a month sooner than in Virginia."