PEACH-YELLOWS
Yellows is a disease or malignant condition, it is not known which, virulent and contagious whatever it may be, and is the possession primarily of the region north of the Ohio and Potomac and east of the Mississippi. At one time or another it has been a cause of decline of the peach-orchards in every part of the region outlined. Epidemics of yellows have wholly obliterated thriving peach-industries which in some cases covered counties. The changes wrought by yellows come so quickly and are so final, so complete and so widespread in their consequences that the disease stands alone among the troubles of plants in the extent of its influence on the crop affected. Under somewhat better control now, its havoc is less than formerly, but in the past it has outdone all other accidents combined that have happened to peaches in America, including frosts, floods, drought, insects, fungi and injuries due to man and quadrupeds. The mystery of yellows in most of its aspects makes its known history all the more significant. We lack knowledge of what it is, or whence it came, nor do we know of any cure; we know only some of the circumstances and the terrible consequences to the peach. Yellows began its siege of the peach in the very beginning of commercial peach-growing in America. Much of the history of the peach is written in the hundred-years-warfare that has ensued.
Judge Richard Peters of Philadelphia first described and gave name to peach-yellows. February 11, 1806, he read a paper "On Peach Trees" before the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. In this paper we have the first clear account of yellows:[212]
"About fifty years ago, on the farm on which I now reside, my father had a large peach orchard, which yielded abundantly. Until a general catastrophe befell it plentiful crops had been for many years produced with very little attention. The trees began nearly at once to sicken, and finally perished. Whether by the wasp then undiscovered, or by some change in our climate, I know not. For forty years past I have observed the peach trees in my neighborhood to be short-lived. Farther south, in the western country, and, it seems, in some parts of New Jersey they are durable and productive as they had been formerly here. * * * The worm or grub, produced by the wasp depositing its progeny in the soft bark near the surface of the ground, is the most common destroyer. * * * When trees become sickly I grub them up. I find that sickly trees often infect those in vigor near them by some morbid effluvia. Although I have had trees twenty years old, and knew some of double that age (owing probably to the induration of the bark rendering it impervious to the wasp, and the strength acquired when they had survived early misfortunes), yet in general they do not live in tolerable health after bearing four or five crops. * * * Fifteen or sixteen years ago I lost one hundred and fifty peach trees in full bearing in the course of two summers by a disease engendered in the first season. I attribute its origin to some morbid infection in the air. * * * The disorder being generally prevalent would, among animals, have been called an epidemic. From perfect verdure the leaves turned yellow in a few days, and the bodies blackened in spots. Those distant from the point of infection gradually caught the disease. I procured young trees from a distance in high health and planted them among the least diseased. In a few weeks they became sickly, and never recovered. * * * After my general defeat and most complete overthrow, in which the worm had no agency, I recruited my peaches from distant nurseries, not venturing to take any out of those in my vicinity. I have since experienced a few instances of this malady, and have promptly, on the first symptoms appearing, removed the subjects of it, deeming their cases desperate in themselves and tending to the otherwise inevitable destruction of others."
In the last few lines of this account, Judge Peters gives the only means so far discovered to check the spread of the disease—the prompt destruction of affected trees—a striking commentary on the baffling nature of yellows when we consider what science has done, since Judge Peters wrote, toward the control of other plant-diseases. In a note of later date, page 23 of the same article, Judge Peters speaks of "the disease I call the yellows," thus giving name to a trouble that until then had been known as "decay" or "degeneracy" in the peach.
Later Judge Peters writes:[213] "I am pursuing my old plan of re-instating my peach trees lost last season (1806 or 1807) by my unconquerable foe, the disease I call the yellows. I obtain them from different nurseries free from this pestiferous affection. The worm or wasp (Ægeria) I have in complete subjection. I should be perfectly disinterested in proposing that the society offer a premium for preventing the disease so fatal; for I shall never gain the reward."
And again:[214] "I still think that the disease so generally fatal (more so this year than any other in my memory), called the yellows, is atmospherical. * * * Compare this account (of thrifty orchards in Delaware) with the actual state of the peach in our country, and judge whether we live in a region favorable to its growth. Mr. Heston's attempt at cultivating this tree in the Southern manner begins already to fail. His trees are evidently infected, and many are on the decline. The yellows are universally prevalent this season throughout the whole country (i. e., around Philadelphia)."
We have given but little out of much that Judge Peters wrote on yellows, his observations and experiences covering nearly a generation. We have quoted sufficiently from his accounts, however, indubitably to establish the fact that peach-yellows was rampant about Philadelphia at least as early as 1800. Smith[215] puts the appearance of yellows in this region as probably some time prior to 1791. By this time there was a considerable body of scientific and practical agricultural literature in America, and we may assume, since no trouble that could possibly be identified as yellows had been described as existing elsewhere in America, though the peach-borer is frequently discussed, that the disease at this period, about 1800, was restricted to the neighborhood of Philadelphia.
We now find the yellows gradually extending into neighboring states—Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and New York. Wm. Coxe of New Jersey who in 1807 wrote Judge Peters, "I am perfectly ignorant of the disease to which you give the name yellows," in 1817 knew it only too well as "a malady which no remedy can cure nor cultivation avert," and devotes nearly two pages in his Fruit Trees to a discussion of its nature.[216] References to yellows in all of the states named by this time had become general. Our purpose to show the spread, effects, and early treatment of the disease is fully served by quoting at length from a single author—a keen observer, careful writer and the most notable horticultural and botanical authority of his time, Wm. Prince, of Flushing, Long Island.[217] To Prince, by the way, we are indebted for the first reference to what is now considered the most certain symptom of yellows—premature ripening of fruit. Prince says:
"This disease, which commenced its ravages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania about the year 1797, and in New York in 1801, and has spread through several of the states, is by far more destructive to peach trees than the worm, and is evidently contagious. This disease is spread at the time when the trees are in bloom, and is disseminated by the pollen or farina blowing from the flowers of diseased trees, and impregnating the flowers of those which are healthy, and which is quickly circulated by the sap through the branches, foliage, and fruit, causing the fruit, wherever the infection extends, to ripen prematurely. That this disease is entirely distinct from the worm, is sufficiently proved by the circumstance, that peach trees which have been inoculated on plum or almond stocks, though less affected by the worm, are equally subject to the yellows—and a decisive proof of its being contagious is, that a healthy tree, inoculated from a branch of a diseased one, instead of restoring the graft to vigour and health, immediately becomes itself infected with the disease. As all efforts totally to subdue it must require a long course of time, the best method to pursue towards its eventual eradication, is to stop its progress, and prevent its farther extension—to accomplish which, the following means are recommended, which have been found particularly successful.
As soon as a tree is discovered to possess the characteristics of the disease, which is generally known by the leaves putting on a sickly yellow appearance—but of which the premature ripening of the fruit is a decisive proof—it should be marked, so as to be removed the ensuing autumn, which must be done without fail, for if left again to bloom, it would impart the disease to many others in its vicinity; care is also necessary, in its removal, to take out all the roots of the diseased tree, especially if another is to be planted in the same place, so that the roots of the tree to be planted may not come in contact with any of those of the one which was diseased.
If your neighbour has trees infected with the yellows in a quarter contiguous to yours, it will be necessary to prevail on him to remove them, that yours may not be injured by them. By being thus particular in speedily removing such trees as may be infected, the disease is prevented from extending itself to the rest of the orchard, and the residue will consequently be preserved in perfect health at the trifling loss of a few trees annually from a large orchard."
The influence of yellows on the peach-industry of the country is shown by indicating when it appeared in the various states in which peaches are grown in eastern America and by noting the effects of epidemics of the disease.
In Pennsylvania, following the first outbreak, peach-growing all but disappeared, to reappear again from time to time in new regions or in old ones following an interval of years after a plague had passed. Periods and places of epidemics are indicated by such quotation as follow: Wm. G. Warren, Centre County, reports in 1851: "A majority of the peach trees have been destroyed by the yellows."[218] In the proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1852, a Pennsylvanian reports for the State: "Peaches have done but ill with us for some years past. The yellows have swept off thousands of trees."[219] In 1880 in a book on the peach, Rutter devotes many pages to yellows in Pennsylvania and speaks of "thousands of trees dead and dying from the disease in Chester and Delaware counties."[220] The epidemic in the eighties seems to have been particularly severe, there being at the end of the decade but 1,146,342 bearing trees in the State which by 1900 had increased to 3,521,930 trees.
Perhaps of all states, in proportion to area planted, New Jersey has suffered most from yellows. Beginning with the epidemic mentioned by Coxe in 1817, there have been several disastrous irruptions of the disease in that State. A particularly destructive epidemic must have raged in the early forties, for in 1846 W. R. Prince, Flushing, Long Island, says:[221] "Any one who visits the once splendid peach orchards in various parts of New Jersey will be struck by the desolate aspect of innumerable plantations of dead trees, with only here and there a sprig of verdure amid the mighty mass." Another writer, Colonel Edward Wilkins, says: "Fifty thousand acres in peach trees, in two counties only, had been destroyed by the yellows prior to 1850;" and in 1858, he further states that "at that time nearly the whole of the peach orchards of New Jersey had been destroyed by yellows."[222] He concludes, in the same article, that "in New Jersey the peach belongs to the past." We choose as the last of the many accounts of disaster from yellows in this State two quotations from Professor P. D. Penhallow written in 1882:[223]
"In New Jersey, where the ravages of the disease have been more seriously felt than elsewhere, the southern counties were formerly the center of the peach industry for the entire State, but, owing to the prevalence of the yellows the peach orchards have been gradually moving northward, until at the present time the counties of Morris and Hunterdon have the largest interest involved, and the prospect is that a few more years will see even these localities deprived of the industry."
"The peach growers of New Jersey consider an orchard worth nothing after the age of nine years. At that time they root out all the trees as they would so many corn stumps, and use the land for general crops, planting a young orchard of seedlings each year to make good the loss."
Still passing northward from the first center of infection, we come to New York, where, according to Wm. Prince, in a foregoing quotation, the disease appeared as early as 1801. The son of this writer, W. R. Prince, in the continuation of the article quoted on page 121, written in 1846, says: "In this island the malady became exhausted some years since by the utter destruction of the old orchards, and the determination not to plant new ones until it became extinct. This proved most fortunate as the disease has been for years banished from Long Island, and now new orchards are springing up everywhere, and every garden is becoming readorned with the finest varieties of the Peach 'redolent with health.'" A. J. Downing,[224] writing in 1849, reports: "Fifteen years ago there was scarcely a tree in the vicinity of Newburgh that was not more or less diseased with the yellows. By pursuing the course we have indicated (destruction by burning), the disease has almost disappeared." Thirty years later, Charles Downing, writing from Newburgh, states: "We have had the yellows here at intervals for over sixty years, some times continuing for five or six years and then several years free from it."
At present, 1916, peaches are freely planted along the Hudson in the region of which the Downings wrote, and, whether from following the method of A. J. Downing in burning the trees, or whether we are in one of the intervals of immunity noted by Charles Downing, peach-yellows, while present, causes but small losses. One might enlarge at length on the vagaries of yellows but we can concern ourselves only with the main facts of its history. We now follow the disease from eastern to western New York.
Looking through the records of the hundred years of peach-growing in western New York, we find little to indicate that yellows has ever been the scourge in this region that it is pictured to have been eastward and southward or even westward in Michigan. The explanation? Growers, as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly-dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of every tree.[225] But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: "In Western New York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by cultivators that it be not introduced by importations."[226] In New York the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of fruit-growing than in other eastern states.
This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. A. M. Smith,[227] writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high-colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a prominent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before having produced a crop. Later, 1887,[228] Mr. Woodward, speaking for his neighborhood, says that yellows has "nearly finished the orchards."[229] To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, we have from Col. F. D. Curtis[230] the report, in 1887, that yellows had destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 1916, yellows may almost be said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York.
Peach-culture has been comparatively unimportant in Connecticut and Massachusetts until recent years but the toll taken by yellows has been proportionately as high as elsewhere in the hundred years of its trespassing. The history of its ravages is told in such statements as follows: "Yellows appeared in the vicinity of New Haven in 1820 and destroyed thousands of trees nearly putting an end to peach growing."[231] "The yellows are destroying our peach trees."[232] "Peaches are infected with yellows and are generally things of the past."[233] "Cultivation of the peach is now abandoned in consequence of that scourge to that fruit known as yellows."[234] The foregoing accounts apply to Connecticut but reports are much the same for Massachusetts, the following being typical: A writer in 1882 declares that yellows about Boston was unknown in 1837 but that "when it came it swept everything."[235] "Thirty or forty years ago (1842-1852) peaches were grown in great abundance in this vicinity (northeast Massachusetts) but for the last twenty years have been almost abandoned."[236] "In former years (said in 1854) peach trees have rarely suffered from yellows in this neighborhood (Cambridge) where now many trees are affected by it."[237]
Sweeping westward from New York, yellows appeared in Ohio about the middle of the Nineteenth Century, for, in 1851, an orchard of 600 trees at Saint Clairsville was said to have been destroyed by it.[238] In the same year the report came from Richard County: "Our peach trees are somewhat affected by yellows."[239] In the years that follow, down to the present time, the presence of yellows, its symptoms, affects and treatment are discussed in the voluminous records of agriculture in Ohio as a commonplace part in the culture of the peach though the disease seems not to have been quite so virulent nor so often epidemic in Ohio as in other prominent peach-growing states.
Nowhere has the haste and waste of yellows been more apparent than in the peach-belt of western Michigan. The history of the disease is well established in this region, the main facts being: The disease appeared about Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, Berrien County, in the late sixties of the last century. At first spreading slowly, its movement became more rapid "until by 1877-78 it was destructively prevalent in nearly every orchard in the county."[240] "The peach industry was literally swept out of Berrien County in one decade. There can be no doubt of this. From being the foremost peach county in Michigan, with an acreage more than equal to that of all other counties combined (6000 acres in 1874), it became ninth in order, and could boast of only 503 acres."[241] In 1877, T. T. Lyon declares:[242] "This violent and contagious disease has nearly destroyed the peach orchards at Saint Joseph." Three years later in the annual report of the State Pomological Society, Charles W. Garfield, secretary, says "there are scarcely any peach orchards left at Saint Joseph."[243] The depreciation of peach-lands at this time, due to yellows, was so great as to threaten the community with bankruptcy.
Pitiful was the case of the growers in Berrien County; pitiful enough that of those in Van Buren County, next on the north, but not so bad owing to the timely and strict enforcement of a "yellows law" early passed by the State legislature. The disease seems to have become established in Van Buren County about 1870 but did not become rampant until four or five years later "when about five per cent of the trees were found diseased and were taken out."[244] Then came such reports as these: "At least 5,000 trees have been destroyed by this disease the past season in this county alone."[245] "That dreaded ravage of the peach-grower, yellows, has made slow but marked progress during the years in this locality."[246] "If the yellows continues to spread, it will be only a question of years when peach-growing will cease on the lake shore."[247] These three reports, out of many such, give the condition of the peach-orchards in western Van Buren. In the eastern part of the county, especially about Lawton where the peach is largely grown, the disease was later in appearing, cutting out was more strictly attended to, and the damage, therefore, was markedly less.
Allegan County, north of Van Buren, along the lake shore at least, suffered from yellows rather less, though nearly as badly as the region to the south. The disease was less and less virulent as the peach-belt extends northward. At Traverse City, the most northern point in the peach-belt, yellows has never been epidemic. Passing eastward, the disease appeared about Grand Rapids, the center of peach-culture in Kent County, in 1883 and in the decade that followed took from peach-growers the toll usual in western Michigan. Eastward from Kent County, however, in the several small and rather isolated cases of peach-growing yellows either has not appeared or has been an unimportant factor.
The lowest ebb in Michigan orchards from yellows was reached in the eighties after which new plantings increased remarkably, the number of bearing trees in 1889 being but 1,919,104 and in 1899, 8,104,415. The disease still persists in Michigan wherever in former times it became established. Yellows seems, however, to have lost much of its old time virulency; or, perhaps, the fact that peach-growers are more prompt and thorough in destroying diseased trees accounts for the decrease of the disease. Then, too, the Michigan peach-belt has had the bitter experience in the last decade or two, of several winter freezes which have wiped out whole orchards, discouraged many planters, and, together with the keen competition of new peach-regions, reduced the size of orchards and scattered the plantations so that, in the lessened communal intensity, yellows has less opportunity.
Going back, now, to the place of first infection and passing southward, we find that yellows, though not more virulent in Delaware than in Michigan, was much more devastating. Destruction is the only efficient method in treating yellows. The necessity of this drastic measure has been proclaimed by every authority from Judge Peters, discover of yellows, down. The strong arm of the law in many states enforces destruction. In Delaware, however, growers were more dilatory in destroying yellows-trees than elsewhere—in fact for the first half-century made little attempt so to check the disease. When the scales fell from the eyes of orchard-owners in this State the industry was already ruined. From hundreds of accounts, the ups and downs of peach-growing in Delaware as caused by yellows may be shown by a few brief statements.
The peach-industry began in Delaware about 1830 and there are few references to peach-yellows until a decade or two after that time, though Dr. John J. Black says that the disease had been known in the State "since the war of 1812."[248] The yellows-sweep really began in the northern part of Delaware in New Castle County, in the early forties, when, according to John Delano, Isaac Reeves' peach-trees were dying of yellows by the score "maugre all his care, cultivation and circumspection."[249] In 1846, James W. Thompson, in a splendid account of the peach-industry in Delaware, names the borer and yellows as the two devastating enemies of this fruit and speaks of the latter as a "constitutional, consumptive or marasmatic disease for which no other remedy is known or to be practiced, but extirpation and destruction."[250] "By 1855 the yellows had taken possession of nearly all the orchards, and peach culture in this section was at an end."[251] Yet in the same county, about Middletown, but a few miles to the south, the disease though present was not epidemic nor did it become so until twenty years later.
With the passing of the orchards in northern New Castle, the southern part of the county became the center of the industry in Delaware. Here, in the early seventies, there were from 1,000,000 to 1,750,000 trees covering from 10,000 to 17,500 acres.[252] Yellows, according to numerous accounts, became virulent about 1870, was at its height in 1875, after which the progress and outcome of the epidemic is essentially the same as in the northern part of the county—the yellows-sweep was driving slowly but surely southward. Thus, in 1880, the center of the industry was in Kent County, second south of the three counties in Delaware, there being in 1879, according to the census of 1880, nearly 2,000,000 trees covering nearly 20,000 acres in this county. Yellows, present and widespread at an early date in Kent, was not alarmingly destructive until the summers of 1886 and 1887, when in the northern two-thirds of the county the disease "spread like wild fire." At this time and as late as 1890, there was little yellows in southern Kent and northern Sussex, but before the end of the century the whole State had been swept by yellows. There are no census figures for peaches until 1890 when the number of bearing trees in Delaware was 4,521,623. The toll taken by yellows, augmented by San Jose scale, is indicated by the falling off in number of trees in the next decade, at the end of which there were 2,441,650 trees and after another decade, 1909, but 1,177,402 trees.
Beginning late in the last century, however, there was a revival in peach-planting in Delaware, especially the northern part of the State, and now a new peach-industry seems well started in which, through energetic orchard-sanitation and diversified horticulture, yellows, for the present at least, is held at bay. The palmy days of fabulous prices for peaches and peach-lands, however, are past in Delaware. Here, as in other communities ravaged by yellows, the value of lands has sunk to a half or a quarter of what it would have brought a generation ago in the height of peach-culture. In some cases property, formerly valuable, has lost all value—a peach-farm will not sell at any price. The best peach-lands are seldom fit for other crops, so that in Delaware, New Jersey and Michigan the whole community, including railroads and steamboat lines, suffers to the verge of bankruptcy when yellows exterminates the orchards.
Probably in no other State in the Union is the peach more perfectly at home than in Maryland, it having held undisputed supremacy among fruits in that State for over a century and a half. Yellows, though always menacing, has not been so devastating as in Delaware to the north. Erwin F. Smith thinks that yellows has been present in the northern counties of eastern Maryland for many years—since 1844 or 1845. In his detailed account of the disease in this State[253] he records but one destructive outbreak of yellows, this occurring in the summers of 1886, 1887 and 1888 in the northeastern part of the State where in two counties along the whole length of the Sassafras River it was destructively present. Smith notes that yellows, at this time, "is moving southward on the peninsula." Since Smith's account, 1888, reports from Maryland show that, while the disease is still present and is now in practically all parts of the State, either it is not now so virulent or is kept in check by extirpating diseased trees. Still, however, the great decrease in the number of peach-trees in Maryland in the last twenty years is largely due to yellows, there being 6,113,287 bearing trees in 1889, but 4,017,854 in 1899, and only 1,497,724 in 1909.
In the South, west of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific Coast, yellows does not exist or if so is not epidemic.
Would that it could be recorded, as we conclude this brief account of yellows and its plague-spots in America, that in the hundred years of conflict some headway had been made in ascertaining from whence the disease came, what its cause and what the cure. Would, too, that we could believe that the final holocaust has passed. But we cannot bandage our eyes against the facts. We are as profoundly ignorant of yellows as at the start. And, while New York at the moment is nearly free from yellows, everywhere the sinister reminders of ancient epidemics, like skeletons at a feast that are never out of sight, bid us be on our guard for new outbreaks.