The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. A. M. Smith,[227] writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high-colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a prominent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before having produced a crop. Later, 1887,[228] Mr. Woodward, speaking for his neighborhood, says that yellows has "nearly finished the orchards."[229] To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, we have from Col. F. D. Curtis[230] the report, in 1887, that yellows had destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 1916, yellows may almost be said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York.

Peach-culture has been comparatively unimportant in Connecticut and Massachusetts until recent years but the toll taken by yellows has been proportionately as high as elsewhere in the hundred years of its trespassing. The history of its ravages is told in such statements as follows: "Yellows appeared in the vicinity of New Haven in 1820 and destroyed thousands of trees nearly putting an end to peach growing."[231] "The yellows are destroying our peach trees."[232] "Peaches are infected with yellows and are generally things of the past."[233] "Cultivation of the peach is now abandoned in consequence of that scourge to that fruit known as yellows."[234] The foregoing accounts apply to Connecticut but reports are much the same for Massachusetts, the following being typical: A writer in 1882 declares that yellows about Boston was unknown in 1837 but that "when it came it swept everything."[235] "Thirty or forty years ago (1842-1852) peaches were grown in great abundance in this vicinity (northeast Massachusetts) but for the last twenty years have been almost abandoned."[236] "In former years (said in 1854) peach trees have rarely suffered from yellows in this neighborhood (Cambridge) where now many trees are affected by it."[237]

Sweeping westward from New York, yellows appeared in Ohio about the middle of the Nineteenth Century, for, in 1851, an orchard of 600 trees at Saint Clairsville was said to have been destroyed by it.[238] In the same year the report came from Richard County: "Our peach trees are somewhat affected by yellows."[239] In the years that follow, down to the present time, the presence of yellows, its symptoms, affects and treatment are discussed in the voluminous records of agriculture in Ohio as a commonplace part in the culture of the peach though the disease seems not to have been quite so virulent nor so often epidemic in Ohio as in other prominent peach-growing states.

Nowhere has the haste and waste of yellows been more apparent than in the peach-belt of western Michigan. The history of the disease is well established in this region, the main facts being: The disease appeared about Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, Berrien County, in the late sixties of the last century. At first spreading slowly, its movement became more rapid "until by 1877-78 it was destructively prevalent in nearly every orchard in the county."[240] "The peach industry was literally swept out of Berrien County in one decade. There can be no doubt of this. From being the foremost peach county in Michigan, with an acreage more than equal to that of all other counties combined (6000 acres in 1874), it became ninth in order, and could boast of only 503 acres."[241] In 1877, T. T. Lyon declares:[242] "This violent and contagious disease has nearly destroyed the peach orchards at Saint Joseph." Three years later in the annual report of the State Pomological Society, Charles W. Garfield, secretary, says "there are scarcely any peach orchards left at Saint Joseph."[243] The depreciation of peach-lands at this time, due to yellows, was so great as to threaten the community with bankruptcy.

Pitiful was the case of the growers in Berrien County; pitiful enough that of those in Van Buren County, next on the north, but not so bad owing to the timely and strict enforcement of a "yellows law" early passed by the State legislature. The disease seems to have become established in Van Buren County about 1870 but did not become rampant until four or five years later "when about five per cent of the trees were found diseased and were taken out."[244] Then came such reports as these: "At least 5,000 trees have been destroyed by this disease the past season in this county alone."[245] "That dreaded ravage of the peach-grower, yellows, has made slow but marked progress during the years in this locality."[246] "If the yellows continues to spread, it will be only a question of years when peach-growing will cease on the lake shore."[247] These three reports, out of many such, give the condition of the peach-orchards in western Van Buren. In the eastern part of the county, especially about Lawton where the peach is largely grown, the disease was later in appearing, cutting out was more strictly attended to, and the damage, therefore, was markedly less.

Allegan County, north of Van Buren, along the lake shore at least, suffered from yellows rather less, though nearly as badly as the region to the south. The disease was less and less virulent as the peach-belt extends northward. At Traverse City, the most northern point in the peach-belt, yellows has never been epidemic. Passing eastward, the disease appeared about Grand Rapids, the center of peach-culture in Kent County, in 1883 and in the decade that followed took from peach-growers the toll usual in western Michigan. Eastward from Kent County, however, in the several small and rather isolated cases of peach-growing yellows either has not appeared or has been an unimportant factor.

The lowest ebb in Michigan orchards from yellows was reached in the eighties after which new plantings increased remarkably, the number of bearing trees in 1889 being but 1,919,104 and in 1899, 8,104,415. The disease still persists in Michigan wherever in former times it became established. Yellows seems, however, to have lost much of its old time virulency; or, perhaps, the fact that peach-growers are more prompt and thorough in destroying diseased trees accounts for the decrease of the disease. Then, too, the Michigan peach-belt has had the bitter experience in the last decade or two, of several winter freezes which have wiped out whole orchards, discouraged many planters, and, together with the keen competition of new peach-regions, reduced the size of orchards and scattered the plantations so that, in the lessened communal intensity, yellows has less opportunity.

Going back, now, to the place of first infection and passing southward, we find that yellows, though not more virulent in Delaware than in Michigan, was much more devastating. Destruction is the only efficient method in treating yellows. The necessity of this drastic measure has been proclaimed by every authority from Judge Peters, discover of yellows, down. The strong arm of the law in many states enforces destruction. In Delaware, however, growers were more dilatory in destroying yellows-trees than elsewhere—in fact for the first half-century made little attempt so to check the disease. When the scales fell from the eyes of orchard-owners in this State the industry was already ruined. From hundreds of accounts, the ups and downs of peach-growing in Delaware as caused by yellows may be shown by a few brief statements.

The peach-industry began in Delaware about 1830 and there are few references to peach-yellows until a decade or two after that time, though Dr. John J. Black says that the disease had been known in the State "since the war of 1812."[248] The yellows-sweep really began in the northern part of Delaware in New Castle County, in the early forties, when, according to John Delano, Isaac Reeves' peach-trees were dying of yellows by the score "maugre all his care, cultivation and circumspection."[249] In 1846, James W. Thompson, in a splendid account of the peach-industry in Delaware, names the borer and yellows as the two devastating enemies of this fruit and speaks of the latter as a "constitutional, consumptive or marasmatic disease for which no other remedy is known or to be practiced, but extirpation and destruction."[250] "By 1855 the yellows had taken possession of nearly all the orchards, and peach culture in this section was at an end."[251] Yet in the same county, about Middletown, but a few miles to the south, the disease though present was not epidemic nor did it become so until twenty years later.

With the passing of the orchards in northern New Castle, the southern part of the county became the center of the industry in Delaware. Here, in the early seventies, there were from 1,000,000 to 1,750,000 trees covering from 10,000 to 17,500 acres.[252] Yellows, according to numerous accounts, became virulent about 1870, was at its height in 1875, after which the progress and outcome of the epidemic is essentially the same as in the northern part of the county—the yellows-sweep was driving slowly but surely southward. Thus, in 1880, the center of the industry was in Kent County, second south of the three counties in Delaware, there being in 1879, according to the census of 1880, nearly 2,000,000 trees covering nearly 20,000 acres in this county. Yellows, present and widespread at an early date in Kent, was not alarmingly destructive until the summers of 1886 and 1887, when in the northern two-thirds of the county the disease "spread like wild fire." At this time and as late as 1890, there was little yellows in southern Kent and northern Sussex, but before the end of the century the whole State had been swept by yellows. There are no census figures for peaches until 1890 when the number of bearing trees in Delaware was 4,521,623. The toll taken by yellows, augmented by San Jose scale, is indicated by the falling off in number of trees in the next decade, at the end of which there were 2,441,650 trees and after another decade, 1909, but 1,177,402 trees.