The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

As soon as a tree is discovered to possess the characteristics of the disease, which is generally known by the leaves putting on a sickly yellow appearance—but of which the premature ripening of the fruit is a decisive proof—it should be marked, so as to be removed the ensuing autumn, which must be done without fail, for if left again to bloom, it would impart the disease to many others in its vicinity; care is also necessary, in its removal, to take out all the roots of the diseased tree, especially if another is to be planted in the same place, so that the roots of the tree to be planted may not come in contact with any of those of the one which was diseased.

If your neighbour has trees infected with the yellows in a quarter contiguous to yours, it will be necessary to prevail on him to remove them, that yours may not be injured by them. By being thus particular in speedily removing such trees as may be infected, the disease is prevented from extending itself to the rest of the orchard, and the residue will consequently be preserved in perfect health at the trifling loss of a few trees annually from a large orchard."

The influence of yellows on the peach-industry of the country is shown by indicating when it appeared in the various states in which peaches are grown in eastern America and by noting the effects of epidemics of the disease.

In Pennsylvania, following the first outbreak, peach-growing all but disappeared, to reappear again from time to time in new regions or in old ones following an interval of years after a plague had passed. Periods and places of epidemics are indicated by such quotation as follow: Wm. G. Warren, Centre County, reports in 1851: "A majority of the peach trees have been destroyed by the yellows."[218] In the proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1852, a Pennsylvanian reports for the State: "Peaches have done but ill with us for some years past. The yellows have swept off thousands of trees."[219] In 1880 in a book on the peach, Rutter devotes many pages to yellows in Pennsylvania and speaks of "thousands of trees dead and dying from the disease in Chester and Delaware counties."[220] The epidemic in the eighties seems to have been particularly severe, there being at the end of the decade but 1,146,342 bearing trees in the State which by 1900 had increased to 3,521,930 trees.

Perhaps of all states, in proportion to area planted, New Jersey has suffered most from yellows. Beginning with the epidemic mentioned by Coxe in 1817, there have been several disastrous irruptions of the disease in that State. A particularly destructive epidemic must have raged in the early forties, for in 1846 W. R. Prince, Flushing, Long Island, says:[221] "Any one who visits the once splendid peach orchards in various parts of New Jersey will be struck by the desolate aspect of innumerable plantations of dead trees, with only here and there a sprig of verdure amid the mighty mass." Another writer, Colonel Edward Wilkins, says: "Fifty thousand acres in peach trees, in two counties only, had been destroyed by the yellows prior to 1850;" and in 1858, he further states that "at that time nearly the whole of the peach orchards of New Jersey had been destroyed by yellows."[222] He concludes, in the same article, that "in New Jersey the peach belongs to the past." We choose as the last of the many accounts of disaster from yellows in this State two quotations from Professor P. D. Penhallow written in 1882:[223]

"In New Jersey, where the ravages of the disease have been more seriously felt than elsewhere, the southern counties were formerly the center of the peach industry for the entire State, but, owing to the prevalence of the yellows the peach orchards have been gradually moving northward, until at the present time the counties of Morris and Hunterdon have the largest interest involved, and the prospect is that a few more years will see even these localities deprived of the industry."

"The peach growers of New Jersey consider an orchard worth nothing after the age of nine years. At that time they root out all the trees as they would so many corn stumps, and use the land for general crops, planting a young orchard of seedlings each year to make good the loss."

Still passing northward from the first center of infection, we come to New York, where, according to Wm. Prince, in a foregoing quotation, the disease appeared as early as 1801. The son of this writer, W. R. Prince, in the continuation of the article quoted on page 121, written in 1846, says: "In this island the malady became exhausted some years since by the utter destruction of the old orchards, and the determination not to plant new ones until it became extinct. This proved most fortunate as the disease has been for years banished from Long Island, and now new orchards are springing up everywhere, and every garden is becoming readorned with the finest varieties of the Peach 'redolent with health.'" A. J. Downing,[224] writing in 1849, reports: "Fifteen years ago there was scarcely a tree in the vicinity of Newburgh that was not more or less diseased with the yellows. By pursuing the course we have indicated (destruction by burning), the disease has almost disappeared." Thirty years later, Charles Downing, writing from Newburgh, states: "We have had the yellows here at intervals for over sixty years, some times continuing for five or six years and then several years free from it."

At present, 1916, peaches are freely planted along the Hudson in the region of which the Downings wrote, and, whether from following the method of A. J. Downing in burning the trees, or whether we are in one of the intervals of immunity noted by Charles Downing, peach-yellows, while present, causes but small losses. One might enlarge at length on the vagaries of yellows but we can concern ourselves only with the main facts of its history. We now follow the disease from eastern to western New York.

Looking through the records of the hundred years of peach-growing in western New York, we find little to indicate that yellows has ever been the scourge in this region that it is pictured to have been eastward and southward or even westward in Michigan. The explanation? Growers, as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly-dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of every tree.[225] But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: "In Western New York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by cultivators that it be not introduced by importations."[226] In New York the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of fruit-growing than in other eastern states.