CHAPTER III
COMMERCIAL PEACH-GROWING IN AMERICA
Commercial peach-growing began in America early in the Nineteenth Century. About this time, it will be remembered, budded trees began to take the place of seedlings. Named varieties appeared as a consequence of budding and, as nurseries sprang up in the settled parts of the country, varieties multiplied at a rapid rate. After the year 1800 we read less about peaches as food for hogs and less about peach-products for assuaging the thirst for strong drink. As cities and towns built up, market demands increased and money-making began to quicken the charms of peach-growing. With the coming of extensive plantings and intensive culture in commercial orchards, new and menacing pests and other problems began to appear at every turn. Before the middle of the century, commercial peach-growing was in full swing in the Chesapeake peach-belt and in its infancy in several westward regions. Stories of great success now filled the papers, "peach kings" abounded, and, with the return of good times following the Civil War, fruit-growers indulged in a saturnalia of peach-tree planting. The rouge of speculation made the industry doubly attractive. An account of the rise of commercial peach-growing in America cannot help but be of interest and, besides, it is only by the study of the past of the industry that we can draw safe conclusions for the future.
Peach-growing on a commercial scale in the United States began in what is known as the Peninsula, consisting, technically, of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey but horticulturally, because of similitude of soil, climate and products, taking in a bit of Virginia, touching eastern Pennsylvania and running up to Long Island. All of this region, including the southern reaches of the Hudson, may be considered as one commercial territory. The peach began its undisputed supremacy among fruits in the orchards of the Peninsula as early as orchards were planted but, beginning with 1800, the industry pushed ahead with leaps and bounds so that the figures at times remind one of Alice in Wonderland when she drank from the magic bottle and immediately grew to gigantic proportions.
In 1800 an orchard of 20,000 trees was set in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the product to be used in brandy-making.[191] The last peach-grower to engage in the liquor business seems to have been a certain Mr. Bayley in Accomack County, Virginia, the tip of the Peninsula, who in 1814 planted 63,000 trees which six years later yielded fifteen gallons of brandy per 100 trees, worth $2 per gallon—not profitable unless the seed were sown in rows, as was probably the case, and the seedlings permitted to crowd rather closely.[192] One of the first large orchards planted in this region to supply city peach-markets was that of a Mr. Cassidy who set an orchard of 50,000 trees in Cecil County, Maryland, about 1830.[193] The product of this orchard went to market in sailboats and large wagons. The industry was not in full swing in this region until the fifties when orchards were planted all along the water courses in Cecil, Kent and Queen Anne counties, making a continuous forest of peach-trees two miles back from the rivers.[194]
The peach-industry in Delaware seems to have begun, according to Mr. Charles Wright,[195] in 1832 at Delaware City, when a twenty-acre orchard of budded trees was set by Messrs. Reeves and Ridgeway, which by 1836 had increased to 110 acres. The receipts from this orchard in a single season were as much as $16,000, the fruit bringing in Philadelphia from $1.25 to $3 per three-peck basket. Other notable orchards of these early times mentioned by Mr. Wright are those of Major Philip Reybold and Sons who, beginning in 1835, by 1846 had 117,720 trees on 1090 acres near Delaware City from which 63,344 baskets of peaches were shipped in August, 1845; in Kent County, John Reed began planting as early as 1829 and several years later had 10,000 trees of Red Cheek Melocotons. In 1848 the peach-crop in Delaware was estimated at 5,000,000 baskets, chiefly from New Castle County. Peach-yellows, first a serious pest around Philadelphia about 1800, became epidemic in northern Delaware in 1842 and, little by little, the center of the peach-industry shifted southward from Middletown in the late sixties to Smyrna; a few years later it had reached Wyoming and in the nineties it was as far south as Bridgeville.
It is interesting to follow the ups and downs of the peach-industry in the Peninsula. Epidemics of yellows, a succession of cold winters, over-production, transportation difficulties or expense, San Jose scale, have all been factors powerful enough at various times to make or mar the fortunes of those engaged in growing peaches. Indeed, in following the history of this fruit on the Peninsula, one is forced to declare that peach-growing is gambling pure and simple. Take, for example, the building of the Delaware railroad. Peaches were scarcely planted in the interior parts of the Peninsula, away from water-ways, until the building of this road in the sixties and seventies, when the yield increased so rapidly that 4,175,500 baskets were shipped by rail in 1875, the total yield being 8,782,716 baskets[196]—fortunes followed the completion of the railroad only to be lost in subsequent over-production.
New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York rather slowly followed the lead of Delaware in commercial peach-growing. New Jersey, according to census reports, reached her zenith in peach-growing in 1899 when there were 4,413,568 peach-trees in the State which produced 2,746,607 bushels of fruit giving her third rank among the states of the Union in production. Ten years later the State had dropped to fourteenth. The peach seems to have been neglected in eastern Pennsylvania as a commercial crop, possibly because a good start was never made on account of the early appearance of yellows. In southeastern New York and on Long Island, peach-growers have usually followed the fortunes of their neighbors in New Jersey who have ever grown on a much larger scale.
To show how quickly the peach gives returns and how great the return from the capital invested, the following figures, savoring a good deal of American boastfulness of dollars and cents, are illustrative:[197] "The peach farms in Upper Delaware and Maryland have returned to their owners the most fabulous amounts for their investments far exceeding in profit any other staple crop that has been raised in the Middle States, and on a scale never before heard of in this or any other country. Some of the orchards containing from 1000 to 1300 acres have netted their owners from $20,000 to $30,000 annually. A peach orchard in New Castle county, Delaware, of 400 acres, netted the owner in one crop, $38,000. One in Kent county, Maryland, of some 600 acres, produced a crop paying $31,000, and the same orchard in 1879 yielded $42,000. In 1873, the Delaware Peach Growers' Association reported that there were sent from the Delaware peninsula to the northern markets of Philadelphia and New York 1,288,500 baskets of peaches, or 2577 car-loads by the railroad. Adding the quantity shipped by steamers and sailing vessels, and the amount canned, the actual quantity amounted, in the aggregate, to 2,000,000 of baskets. In 1872, the whole district, comprising the Eastern Shore of Maryland, marketed 3,500,000 baskets. The late Col. Wilkins, on Chester river, Kent county, Maryland, had 1350 acres in with peach trees, numbering 137,000, producing in bearing years from $30,000 to $40,000 annually."
Commercial peach-growing in the South is of recent development—its history is known to all pomologists of the present generation. It began in the seventies, the impetus being given by the introduction of a number of early, bright-colored, very showy peaches that could be marketed in northern cities in May and June. It took years, however, to develop means to send these peaches to market and it was not until in the nineties that the perfection of refrigerator cars and rapid transportation was such that the southern crop cut any figure in the peach-markets. The introduction of the Elberta in the seventies may be said to be another stone in the foundation of the peach-industry in the South. After Georgia became a factor in the culture of this fruit in America in the nineties, the State was followed in lesser degree, by South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas. In most of these southern states the peach-orchard is so near the cotton-plantation—often the two are interplanted—that the owners rob Peter to pay Paul in the care of the two crops. But this is not always the case, and at its best the southern peach-orchard is the consummate flower of modern commercial peach-growing.