Article IV
Amendments. By-laws may be amended by a two-thirds vote of members present at any annual meeting.
PROCEEDINGS AT THE
TWELFTH ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE NORTHERN NUT GROWERS ASSOCIATION
LANCASTER, PA.
OCTOBER 6 AND 7, 1921
The Convention was called to order at 10 a. m. Thursday, October 6, 1921, by the President, Hon. William S. Linton, of Saginaw, Michigan, in the convention hall of the Brunswick Hotel, Lancaster, Pa.
The President: It certainly is a pleasure and a privilege for us to meet in the prosperous and historic Pennsylvania City of Lancaster. I am sure that we will have a successful meeting, and I am certain also that during the past year progress has been made in our work which when read into the records will show that we have accomplished material good. Without further preliminary remarks, and with the statement that my address or report will come later during the session, we will proceed immediately with our programme.
I have the honor to call upon the representative of the Mayor of Lancaster, Oliver S. Schaeffer, for the welcoming address.
Oliver S. Schaeffer, Esq.: Mr. President, Members of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, Friends and Guests: On behalf of the Mayor and the people of Lancaster I extend to you their greetings and bid you a most hearty and cordial welcome.
We feel honored that you have selected for the second time this city for the holding of your convention. Your esteemed president referred to Lancaster City as an historic city, and no doubt all of you know that Lancaster is frequently called the garden spot of the world.
Historically Lancaster City was the capital of Pennsylvania for thirty-three years, I think from 1779 to 1812. During the Revolutionary War when the British troops occupied Philadelphia the Continental Congress met here for a while in a building that formerly stood at Center Square where you now see the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument.
I was talking to your secretary a few minutes in the hotel lobby this morning and he told me that while some of you were in the nut business with a majority of you it was a hobby. That is the altruistic spirit that counts in these days when most of us look upon things in a materialistic way.
There was a time when I thought that most nuts came from Brazil, but I am glad to learn that we grow the nuts we eat here in the good old U. S. A., and some right here in Pennsylvania and in Lancaster County.
I cannot help but think of the chestnut blight that has worked havoc throughout our state and some other states. It has occasioned a big material loss. Yet I think too of another side of the loss and that is the spiritual side because our "chestnut parties" are now becoming a past memory. It is up to men like you to retrieve that loss and to bring back to our youth the chance of experiencing that innocent pleasure the gathering of chestnuts.
As I look into your faces here this morning (and while you are not numerous you make up in quality what you lack in quantity), I cannot help but congratulate you on showing the spirit that means progress. I cannot help but feel also that you are optimists, and they are what we need at the present time.
I will not trespass upon your time any longer. I again bid you a most warm welcome to our city and on behalf of the Mayor hand you the symbolic key of this city to enable you to go where you please.
The President: Working with us unselfishly for the past two or three years has been a Michigan man who has had in mind the benefit of his locality, the State of Michigan and the United States. It was his privilege to introduce the first bill into a state legislature that became a law making it obligatory upon state authorities to plant useful trees along the roadside throughout the entire state that he represented so well in the Senate. I take pleasure in calling upon that member to respond to the eloquent words of the Mayor's representative. I would ask Senator Penney to reply to Mr. Schaeffer.
Hon. Harvey A. Penney: Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of this Convention, and Mr. Mayor: We all appreciate this warm and hospitable greeting. Some of us are a long way from home. Mr. Linton, and I come from a town somewhat the size of this. We have about sixty-five thousand people, a large and growing city with a lot of prosperous and very wealthy men in it. We feel that in coming here we are coming to a city something like our own. We have been very much impressed with your city since we have been here. I am glad to see that colonial spirit, the spirit of '76, which permeates your people here. Up in Saginaw, of course, we do not have the same things to remind us of the past that you have. You have your monuments and those things that call your attention continually to it; but I am sure that our people are as patriotic as your people. However, I think that the spirit of '76 which still permeates the East helps to keep the whole country in line for the patriotic upholding of our governmental institutions.
While most of the men here are interested especially in the scientific investigation and promotion of the nut industry, my friend Mr. Linton and I have been more particularly interested in road-side planting. Along with the promotion and building of good highways we fell into the idea of beautifying those highways. At the time the people in the East were having their trouble in the colonial days, the revolutionary days, our town was unheard of. It was simply way back in the forest and the wilderness and it was not until very early in this past century that Saginaw was even thought of. Mr. Linton and I talked last night about different things connected with the history of our country and we spoke of De Tocqueville, the great French traveler and explorer who came to America way back in 1831. He wished to go into the wilds of this country and see for himself what was here. He went to Buffalo and crossed the lakes to Detroit. Detroit was then a city of about two thousand inhabitants. And then he had the desire to go up into the wilds where nothing but wild animals and wild people lived; so he went up on a trail that led to what is now Pontiac perhaps thirty or forty miles northwest of Saginaw; that was about the end of the trail. There were one or two settlers who lived there. He picked up a couple of Indian guides and started through the trackless forest, sixty or seventy miles up through the northwest to what is now Saginaw. He had his desire fully satisfied. He was eaten up by mosquitoes and rattlesnakes in the swamps and marshes; he could not sleep nor anything else; so he came back. That was away back in 1831, fifty years or more after your people were fighting and struggling for the liberty of this country.
I wish to say in closing that we all highly appreciate the welcome that has been extended to us on behalf of the Mayor of this fine city.
The President: Next on the program will come the report of the secretary.
The Secretary: I regret the smallness of the secretary's accomplishment for the past year. Except for the editing of the annual report—which is much a matter of cutting out superfluous words—and the effort to get speakers for this convention, he has attempted very little.
This is not, however, for lack of things that could and should have been done. An energetic campaign for new members is the most obvious desideratum. The committee to prepare and issue a bulletin on the roadside planting of nut trees, arranged to give information for every part of the country, has been innocuous as well as useless. Perhaps this meeting will afford stimulus and material enough to get it to work.
I think that few of the members realize how the inactivity of the secretary has been more than made up for by the industry of the treasurer. Perhaps they are reciprocally cause and consequence. Not only has the treasurer discharged the usual duties of that office but he has also attended to most of the correspondence and clerical work. He has conducted the nut contests which, under his management, have developed to formidable proportions requiring immense expenditure of time and effort.
These nut contests have now become so widely known as to return us a good idea of what we may expect of the native nuts of the country. Undoubtedly we have not yet found the best nuts that this country produces, except perhaps in the case of the pecan. But Mr. Bixby's labors, continuing the work begun by Dr. Morris, have reached such results that I think he will be willing to say that we have nearly reached the limit of natural excellence in the nuts already discovered.
In fact it seems to me that we have reached the point where further improvement in nuts for cultivation is to be looked for especially from purposeful hybridizing by man. It should be another of the chief aims of this association to induce self-perpetuating institutions to get together the material necessary for such work. Such material already exists in incomplete form—incomplete, that is, especially in horticultural varieties—as in the Arnold Arboretum and in the Public Park at Rochester. The Arnold Arboretum, through our treasurer's efforts, has agreed to give more attention to nut growing and breeding. The St. Louis Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, through the efforts and generosity of Mr. Bixby and Mr. Jones, have made special plantings of horticultural varieties, and this summer the New York Botanical Garden was induced to set out a number of grafted and seedling nut trees given by Mr. Jones, Mr. Bixby, Mr. W. C. Reed, the McCoy Nut Nurseries and others.
But unless this association can keep their interest alive it is likely that some of these institutional plantings will be neglected, especially as regards the highest development of their possibilities. In one botanical garden visited this summer the casual nut tree plantings running back thirty years have been entirely neglected and the trees are stunted almost to extinction. I hope that our members will lose no opportunity to visit these institutions and ask to see the nut tree plantings. One or two such visits in a year will help to keep our wards in the institutional mind.
We cannot expect from these gardens, at present at least, interest in breeding experiments. That is more properly a function of agricultural experiment stations. These are so short manned and short funded, so absorbed in problems offering quicker results, that it is difficult to get them even to consider nut growing. I do not recall a single experiment station in the country where any nut breeding experiments are being conducted. A few manifest a little interest in planting horticultural varieties but the only breeding experiments that I know of, or at this moment recall, are those of Dr. Morris, Dr. Van Fleet, Mr. Forkert and Mr. Jones. All of these experimenters have produced results that more than indicate great possibilities.
Therefore I think that more of the energy of this association should be expended in influencing the self perpetuating horticultural institutions to see the importance of nut culture.
Attention should be called also to our treasurer's initiative, perseverance and industry in issuing Bulletin No. 5 on Nut Culture, in improving and reprinting our accredited list of nut nurserymen, in visiting, photographing and describing many of our important parent nut trees, in securing and distributing scions, in promoting experimental topworking of native nut trees in promising localities, in developing a varietal and experimental nut orchard which in time will be second to none in these respects, and in many other promotions of the objects of our association, unsparingly of his energy and his means.
It is curious that the biggest development in nut tree planting, for which we are responsible apparently, and practically the only considerable development of the roadside planting of nut trees, about which we have been talking so much, is on the other side of the earth, in China, where Mr. Wang, one of our members, and associated with the Kinsan Arboretum, is planting along the new model highway from Shanghai to Hangkow, a ton of black walnuts bought in this country and shipped to him through Mr. Bixby.
Two public horticultural institutions in Canada have written me about making nut plantings.
We seem, perhaps, in this land, too busy making what we call wealth, and armaments to protect it, too busy to give attention to the food supply of the future race.
To summarise, the association may feel that its purpose as originally stated, and never changed, "The Promotion of Interest in Nut Bearing Plants, their Products and their Culture," has been furthered consistently though results are slow. For the future we should work, 1. For a greater membership. 2. To stimulate interest in horticultural institutions, especially in nut breeding. 3. To give definite information that will encourage nut tree planting for profit by individuals. 4. To promote roadside, memorial and public place planting of nut trees. 5. To discover still more of our valuable native nut trees through our prize contests.
Mr. C. A. Reed has made a suggestion which I will lay before you and which may be considered at a later hour. He suggests that it might be better to have our conventions once in two years, every other one to be held in Washington.
This is so radical a proposal that it should have prolonged consideration before adoption.
The affairs of the association are not getting from the secretary the attention they deserve and he does not foresee better attention in the future. He wishes that some more active person could be found for the place and would be very glad to have the association elect another secretary.
The President: The secretary's report will be received and filed with the proceedings. Are there any remarks in connection therewith?
Personally, I wish to endorse emphatically what the secretary has said relative to Treasurer Bixby who has worked early and late and has promoted the affairs of this association to a very great degree. His work is along practical lines and brings results.
The secretary finds fault with himself. No member of the association endorses that particular phase of his paper because his work has been good, he has had the best interests of the association at heart at all times—that I personally know—and I sincerely hope that he may change his mind relative to his successor.
We will now listen to the report of Treasurer Bixby.