The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

In 1758 Le Page Du Pratz, who lived on a plantation in Louisiana for several years and wrote a history of the French colony, says that the natives had peaches and figs when the French settled in Louisiana in 1698. He probably errs, however, in stating that the natives got their trees from the English colony of Carolina since the English did not settle in Carolina until 1670. No doubt the Indians had long before had peaches and figs from the Spaniards of Florida or Mexico. The account which this historian gives of early peach-culture in Louisiana is worth printing in full:[101] "The natives had doubtless got the peach trees and fig trees from the English colony of Carolina, before the French established themselves in Louisiana. The peaches are of the kind which we call alberges; are of the size of the fist, adhere to the stone, and contain so much water that they make a kind of wine of it. The figs are either blue or white; are large and well enough tasted. Our colonists plant the peach stones about the end of February, and suffer the trees to grow exposed to all weathers. In the third year they will gather from one tree at least two hundred peaches, and double that number for six or seven years more, when the tree dies irrecoverably. As new trees are so easily produced, the loss of the old ones is not in the least regretted."

There are many indirect references to peaches in the Mississippi Valley most of which can be traced to Father Hennepin's account of peaches in Louisiana. He says:[102] "The peaches there are like those of Europe and bear very good fruit in such abundance that the savages are often obliged to prop up the trees with forked sticks." It turns out, however, that Father Hennepin was the Baron Munchausen of the early French explorers, it being doubtful whether he was ever farther down the Mississippi than the mouth of the Illinois. Probably, therefore, we must put much of what early writers say of the great abundance of peaches in this region to the soaring imagination of this early religious explorer. Yet these reports are credited by so careful a man as Kalm, who writes:[103] "I have been told by all those who have made journies to the southern parts of Canada, and to the river Mississippi, that the woods there abound with peach-trees, which bear excellent fruit, and that the Indians of those parts say that those trees have been there since times immemorial."

A little later we have reliable information that the peach was naturalized in parts of the Mississippi Valley at least, for Thomas Nuttall, leading botanist of his time and a thoroughly reliable reporter, traveling in Arkansas in 1819, writes:[104] "The thermometer towards noon rises to seventy degrees and the peach and plum trees, almost equally naturalized, have nearly finished blooming." And, again,[105] "The peach of Persia is already naturalized throughout the forests of Arkansa." From this we may picture wild peaches as having grown for generations in parts of Arkansas and, no doubt, of the now famous Ozark region, where, we are told, peach-trees in abundance now decorate, with flower and fruit, primeval forests.

Reserving the best description of Indian peaches to the last we now turn from Arkansas to the Carolinas. Here, in 1700, John Lawson, a surveyor, who in his work had ample opportunity to know the country, wrote about the wild and cultivated plants of the region. Lawson, although not a trained naturalist, was a keen observer, a lover of nature and much interested in the agricultural development of the Carolinas. Moreover, he writes so simply, directly, and in a tone so temperate, in contrast to the declamatory style of the times, that one accepts without question what he says. We feel we are justified in quoting at some length Lawson's description of Indian peaches:[106]

"All peaches with us are standing; neither have we any wall fruit in Carolina, for we have heat enough, and therefore do not require it. We have a great many sorts of this fruit, which all thrive to admiration, peach trees coming to perfection, with us, as easily as the weeds. A peach falling to the ground brings a peach tree that shall bear in three years, or sometimes sooner. Eating peaches in our orchards makes them come up so thick from the kernel, that we are forced to take a great deal of care to weed them out, otherwise they make our land a wilderness of peach trees. They generally bear so full that they break great part of their limbs down. We have likewise very fair nectarines, especially the red, that clings to the stone; the other yellow fruit, that leaves the stone. Of the last I have a tree that most years brings me fifteen or twenty bushels. I see no foreign fruit like this, for thriving in all sorts of land, and bearing its fruit to admiration. I want to be satisfied about one sort of this fruit, which the Indians claim as their own, and affirm they had it growing amongst them before any Europeans came to America.

The fruit I will describe as exactly as I can. The tree grows very large, most commonly as big as a handsome apple tree; the flowers are of a reddish, murrey color, the fruit is rather more downy than the yellow peach, and commonly very large and soft, being very full of juice. They part freely from the stone, and the stone is much thicker than all the other peach stones we have, which seems to me that it is a spontaneous fruit of America; yet in those parts of America that we inhabit, I never could hear that any peach trees were ever found growing in the woods; neither have the foreign Indians, that live remote from the English, any other sort. And those living amongst us have a hundred of this sort for one other. They are a hardy fruit, and are seldom damaged by the north-east blast, as others are. Of this sort we make vinegar; wherefore we call them vinegar peaches, and sometimes Indian peaches.

This tree grows to a vast bigness, exceeding most apple trees. They bear well, though sometimes an early spring comes on in February, and perhaps when the tree is fully blown, the cloudy, north-east winds, which attend the end of that month, or the beginning of March, destroy most of the fruit. The biggest apricot tree I ever saw, as they told me, was grafted on a peach stock in the ground. I know of no other sort with us, than the common. We generally raise this fruit from the stone, which never fails to bring the same fruit. Likewise our peach stones effect the same, without so much as once missing to produce the same sort that the stone came from."

Peaches in the colonies.—The first peaches in the American colonies must have been planted at Jamestown for, in 1629, Captain John Smith writes of "peaches in abundance."[107] The trees, however, seem to have been neglected for, continuing, Smith says: "Apples, Peares, Apricocks, Vines, figges, and other fruits some have planted, that prospered exceedingly; but their diligence about Tobacco left them to be spoiled by the cattell; yet now they beginne to revive." The settlement in Virginia at that time, so soon after the Indian massacres, was small and there could have been but few trees so that Smith's "abundance" was but as a grain of sand on the seashore with the many thousands of bushels required to make an abundance at the present time.

Despite the neglect of fruit to attend to tobacco which Smith laments, the planting of orchards must have gone on apace, for in 1633 a Dutch sea-captain named De Vries visiting Virginia describes the Menife plantation, famous in the colony at that time, as having a garden containing rosemary, sage, marjoram and thyme, the apple, pear and cherry while the house itself was surrounded by peach-trees.[108] Three years later, 1642, Berkeley became governor of the colony and we are told that about his house at Green Spring there were fifteen hundred apple, peach, apricot, quince and other fruit-trees.[109] Robert Evelyn, writing forty years after the settlement of Jamestown says: "Peaches better than Apricocks by some doe feed hogs, one man hath ten thousand trees."[110]

Fruit-growing in colonial Virginia was not without promoters and one, a Colonel Norwood, had the persuasive eloquence of the barkers for get-rich-quick orchard-planting concerns of our own times. Colonel Norwood, an Englishman, visited Virginia in 1649 and on his return wrote:[111] "Oranges, Lemons, Pine-aples, Plantanes, Peaches, Apricocks, Peares, Apels, in a word all sort of excellent Fruits will grow there in full perfection: you may sleepe whilst they are growing, after their setting or engrafting, there needes no more labour but your prayers, that they may prosper, and now and then an eye to prevent their casualties, wounds or diseases." No doubt Norwood is over enthusiastic in his praises and yet it is true that there were few pests of the peach at this time, most of these coming, one by one, with the development of the fruit-industry. About all that any fruit needed at this time was, to use a modern political phase, "watchful waiting."