Fruit-Growing in Texas.
R. T. Wheeler, Hitchcock, Galveston county, Texas.—I have examined and am very much pleased with your magazine, and particularly the department of agricultural correspondence. This is an exceedingly interesting and important feature, well calculated to accomplish much in the settlement and development of the South. Your journal has a high mission and is on the right road.
Unlike most of your correspondents I am a native of this State, and a lifetime resident of this section, and therefore naturally biased in favor of this country, climate and people, free, however, from any prejudice against any other portion of the country. While I am not in the strict sense a farmer, and have no skilled acquaintance with any branch of horticulture or agriculture, I have had ten years’ practical acquaintance with the cultivation of this soil, and my ten years’ residence at this station, fourteen miles from Galveston City, has given me the opportunity of observing its rapid progress and development within the past five or six years, from a purely stock country, a naked prairie, in which lands were worth not exceeding fifty cents per acre, devoted exclusively to raising ordinary Texas cattle, it requiring at a low estimate ten acres to support one cow of the value of about $6, to a prosperous and independent fruit and truck farming community, having over 150,000 pear trees set to orchard, over 100 acres in strawberries now ripening and ready for market, yielding from $300 to $600 per acre; some 300 acres more in cultivation in general vegetables, a church, good public schools, with an average attendance of over fifty scholars daily, good stores, about twenty artesian wells flowing good, pure, wholesome water in the greatest abundance, from a depth of about 600 feet, nurseries and rose gardens with several hundred varieties of roses now in full bloom in the open air, without a poor man or woman, and not one that is not making a good living, a community whose reputation is co-extensive with horticulture within the States and Canada, whose products are well-known in Chicago and other markets, and whose strawberries have sold as far West as Salt Lake City.
Very much of the wonderful development of this country is due Col. H. M. Stringfellow, who some nine years since introduced the Le Conte and Kiefer pears, and whose orchard, in the language of an ex-governor of Texas, is “simply a world-beater.” Last year, as we all know, was both a drouth and a panic year, and yet on his thirteen-acre orchard Mr. Stringfellow cleared considerably over $5000 on pear fruit alone, and much more on the sale of rooted pear cuttings, these pears being propagated by cuttings. I could write a book about this country and then be in the same trouble as the Queen of Sheba, but I fear that this letter is beyond reasonable length. Notwithstanding this extraordinary development, lands are still comparatively cheap; the best can be had from $20 to $50 per acre.