The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

A little later, 1740, Mr. Thomas Jones of Savannah wrote to Mr. John Lyde concerning the contents of his town-garden as follows:[117]

"As to our fruit, the most common are peaches and nectarines (I believe that I had a hundred bushels of the former this year in my little garden in town); we have also apples of divers sorts, chincopin nuts, walnut, chestnut, hickory, and ground nuts."

The third writer is Sir John Oldmixon who quotes a Mr. Archdale in regard to the fruits of Carolina. He writes:[118]

"Everything generally grows there that will grow in any part of Europe, there being already many sorts of fruits, as apples, pears, apricots, nectarines, etc. They that once taste of them will despise the watery, washy taste of those in England. There's such plenty of them that they are given to the hogs. In four or five years they come from a stone to be bearing trees."

The same author is worth quoting in regard to the early culture of the Melocoton peach in Virginia.[119] "Here is such plenty of peaches that they give them to their hogs; some of them, called malachotoons, are as big as a lemon and resemble it a little." The history of the word melocoton, by the way, is interesting. It comes from the Latin melum cotoneum, literally, apple-quince. The corruption is of Spanish origin and in Spain "melocoton" is a common name for the peach. The word, however, is now common enough in English, no less than 29 variant spellings being found in the dictionaries and every extensive list of peaches having a number of varieties with melocoton as a prefix or an affix to the name.

Passing now to the northern colonies we find that the history of the peach in Pennsylvania begins with the history of the State. William Penn founded Philadelphia in 1682 and a year later, in describing the new country, names the peach as one of its assets:[120] "There are also very good peaches, and in great quantities; not an Indian plantation without them, but whether naturally here at first, I know not. However, one may have them by bushels for little; they make a pleasant drink; and I think not inferior to any peach you have in England, except the true Newington."

It would be hard to find a part of the earth better fitted in soil and climate for sure and abounding harvests of peaches than the Chesapeake peach-belt extending up through Maryland and taking in Delaware, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. We may be sure, then, that if the Indians were growing peaches in the abundance described by Penn in what is now Philadelphia, peach-orchards were not less common in all of the Chesapeake belt. That the whole region was bountifully supplied with this delicious fruit when settled by whites is further indicated, however, in a letter written by Mahlon Stacy from the "Falls of the Delaware," New Jersey, in 1680, to his brother Revell in England. He says:[121]

"I have travelled through most of the places that are settled, and some that are not; and in every place I find the country very apt to answer the expectation of the diligent. I have seen orchards laden with fruit to admiration; their very limbs torn to pieces by the weight, and most delicious to the taste and lovely to behold. I have seen an apple tree from a pippin kernel yield a barrel of curious cider, and peaches in such plenty that some people took their carts a peach gathering; I could not but smile at the conceit of it; they are very delicate fruit, and hang almost like our onions that are tied on ropes."

We are told in Watson's Annals of Philadelphia[122] that one of the remarkable characteristics of Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1700 was that the whole of the main street, one mile in length, "was fronted with blooming peach trees."

An account of peaches in the Delaware region as late as the middle of the Eighteenth Century shows that even then the peach was regarded as indigenous "like maize and tobacco." This quotation, too, is interesting because it gives a glimpse of cultural methods, kinds, uses and danger from frost. The author was a Swedish clergyman, a resident of the region for some years. He writes:[123]