The pears of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

[21] Reimer, F. C. Reprint from 1916 annual report of Pacific Coast Association of Nurserymen, 7. 1916.

[22] Some very good preliminary work on harvesting and storing pears has been done by the Oregon Experiment Station, and is reported in Bulletin 154, June, 1918, from that Station.

[23] For costs and profits in growing apples see Bulletin 376, New York Agricultural Experiment Station.

[24] Hesler and Whetzel. Manual of Fruit Diseases 330-331. 1917.

[25] Marshall P. Wilder contributed to all fields of American horticulture as an ardent amateur grower and as a most generous patron. But it was as a pomologist and especially as a grower of grapes and pears that he established a permanent place for himself in the horticulture of the country. He was born in New Hampshire in 1798 and died in Boston in 1886, having lived in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, for upwards of a half century. By vocation a merchant, he was a captain of industry in his day, yet most of his life, especially after the prime had been passed, was devoted to the avocation of horticulture. He was one of the founders of the American Pomological Society and had the great honor of being its president, excepting a single two-year term, from the first meeting in 1850 until his death. During the last years of his presidency, Wilder actively engaged in the reform of pomological nomenclature which the Society was then carrying on. He was an active member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for fifty-six years and its president from 1841 to 1848. He was also one of the founders of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society, of the United States Agricultural Society, and was a trustee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Besides membership and activity in these agricultural organizations, he served as colonel and commander in a military company and as president of the New England Historic and Genealogical Society from 1868 until his death. Wilder was a zealous collector and introducer of flowers. He specialized in camellias, azaleas, orchids, and roses. A rose bearing his name is still a garden favorite. Many floral novelties of his day owe their origin or introduction to Marshall P. Wilder. He was ever enthusiastic over American grapes and tested all of the many new varieties introduced about the middle of the last century. But the pear was even more to his fancy than the grape, and he endeavored to grow every native variety of any promise whatsoever. All told, he tested over 1200 varieties, and in 1873 exhibited more than 400 varieties. He originated several new pears and to him is due the honor of having introduced the Beurre d’Anjou in 1844. At his death he left the American Pomological Society $1000 for Wilder medals for new fruits and $4000 for general purposes. To the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, he left $1000 to encourage the introduction of new American pears and grapes. Among many distinguished American pomologists who sought to improve the pear, Marshall P. Wilder deserves most of any recognition for his services and a place is therefore accorded him for his likeness in the frontispiece of The Pears of New York and the book is thereby dedicated to him.

[26] The name is spelled by many writers Beurré d’Aremberg.

[27] General Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, who followed the vocation of a soldier, statesman, and author, chose as his avocation horticulture and in several of its fields became eminent. A native of New England (1783-1851), son of General Henry Dearborn of Revolutionary fame, he was early educated to the profession of law and pursued that vocation until the war with Great Britain in 1812. Services in this war brought him the rank and title of general. After the war he served as Collector of the Port of Boston, in Congress, and as Mayor of Roxbury, Massachusetts, which office he held at the time of his death. But it is as a patron, friend, and lover of horticulture that the life and work of General Dearborn interest pomologists. He was one of the charter members in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and a prime mover in its organization. He was elected its first president March 17, 1829. In the history of the Society published in 1880, of all the famous members of this truly remarkable organization, General Dearborn’s portrait was chosen for the frontispiece. He was early interested in experimental gardens and rural cemeteries. The plans for experimental gardens advocated by him were never fully carried out, but no doubt his enthusiasm for such gardens, with his own garden as a model, did much to stimulate the planting in America in the early half of the nineteenth century of the many famous gardens which adorned and enriched every center of culture along the Atlantic seaboard. He helped to establish the Mount Auburn and Forest Hills cemeteries, famous among Boston cemeteries, and the first of rural cemeteries in this country. His life-long devotion to rural art as exemplified in gardens and cemeteries knew no bounds. On these subjects and on pomology he contributed many articles to the agricultural and horticultural papers of his time. Few men, it can be said, could better concentrate their thoughts and feelings on paper than he seems to have done. Besides the many papers from his own pen he published several translated treatises from the French, chief of which was a monograph on the Camellia in 1838 and another on Morus multicaulis in 1830, the "Mulberry Craze" being in full swing at this time. General Dearborn was an ardent pear-grower and helped to test the hundreds of seedlings then being brought from Belgium and France and grew as well considerable numbers from his own seed-beds. Of all his seedlings, however, only Dearborn survives.

[28] The fame of Robert Manning as an accurate and discriminating American pomologist will long endure. Few Americans, one conceives, as his life is reviewed, have rendered greater service in any field of the nation’s agriculture. The quantity of his work was not remarkably large, but the quality was superfine. Systematic pomology in particular owes him much for his painstaking descriptions of fruits, and his corrections in nomenclature. Born in Salem, Mass., July 18, 1784, he made the town of his birth famous as a pomological center in America, where, at the time of his death, October 10, 1842, his garden probably contained a larger collection of fruits than had ever before been brought together in America. Manning began collecting fruits in 1823 when he established his "Pomological Garden" at Salem for the purpose of introducing and testing new varieties of fruits. He attempted to bring together all of the varieties of fruits that would thrive in eastern Massachusetts, and when his garden was fullest had about 2000 fruits, of which 1000 kinds were pears, to which fruit he gave most attention. He had many English, French, and Belgian correspondents from whom he received the most notable fruits grown in their countries. He is said to have had a most remarkable memory and could carry in mind the names, tree-habits, and qualities of any fruit he had ever seen and could identify it at sight. In whatever group of pomologists he chanced to be, his identifications and decisions on nomenclature were accepted as correct. Small wonder, therefore, that the Book of Fruits, published by Manning in 1838, at once took the place of authority for descriptions of tree-fruits and for such small-fruits, trees, and shrubs as the author described. It was the first, and is almost the only, American pomology in which the descriptions were all made with fruit in hand. The author intended this book to be the first of a series, but the books to follow never appeared. He was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Pear-growers are indebted to Manning for the work he did in testing the seedlings sent out by Van Mons, the famous Belgian breeder, most of whose pears came to American orchards through the agency of the Salem Pomological Garden. He also received and introduced valuable pears from the London Horticultural Society. His achievements mark Manning among the most notable American pomologists, of whom no other labored as devotedly for the attainment of better pears.

[29] Bernard S. Fox was a pioneer nurseryman and fruit-grower in California who gave much time to improving the pear through seedlings. During his stay of thirty years in the state of his adoption he was noted for his energy and enterprise in every industry that had to do with fruit-growing. Fox was an Irishman who came to America in 1848 and began work in the garden and nurseries of Hovey and Company of Boston. A few years later he emigrated with the gold-seekers to California where, shortly, he settled at San Jose as a nurseryman and fruit-grower. Eventually he became possessed of a considerable amount of land the increasing value of which made him a very wealthy man, and he took pleasure in being a patron of horticulture as well as a worker in its several fields. Early in his career at San Jose his interest was aroused in the production of new pears from seed. He was a most conscientious selecter and only the best survived in his orchards. He was at all times extremely anxious not to cumber the list of pears with worthless varieties. Out of a great number of seedlings, only three finally received his approval, P. Barry, Fox, and Colonel Wilder. All have high places in the pear lists of California and the United States, and do honor to an enthusiastic and painstaking breeder of pears. For many years before his death in July, 1880, he was the Vice President of the American Pomological Society for California. Bernard S. Fox was one of the first fruit-growers to bring fame to California, and Californians are justly proud of him.

[30] Peter Kieffer, a nurseryman of good reputation in his state, deserves pomological honors because of his keenness of vision in selecting for distribution the pear which bears his name. Few men would have recognized merit in the seedling from which the Kieffer pear came. Peter Kieffer was born in Alsace in 1812, whence he emigrated to America in 1834. In Europe he had worked for twelve years in the garden of the King of France and upon his arrival in America sought employment as a gardener which he found on the estate of James Gowen at Mt. Airy, near Philadelphia. In 1853 he started a small nursery at Roxborough, a short distance from Philadelphia. Much of his stock was imported from Europe, most of which came from Van Houtte, the famous Belgian nurseryman. From Van Houtte, Kieffer obtained seeds of the Chinese Sand pear from which came the Kieffer pear as described in the history of the variety. As a token of his faith in his new variety, Kieffer planted an orchard of this pear, some of the trees of which still live and bear. Peter Kieffer died in 1890, having made an important contribution to horticulture even though the variety sent out by him is far from perfect and has been much over-praised and over-planted.