The plums of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

[220] Orville Morell Lord was born in China, Wyoming County, New York, April 20, 1826. When he was eleven years of age the Lord family moved to Lapeer, Michigan, where the subject of this sketch attended the district school and then for a time was in a private school at Pontiac, Michigan. In 1852 Mr. Lord moved to Winona County, Minnesota, where he built a saw mill, and for some years owned and managed a lumber yard. It was only after middle life that he became interested in horticulture and he then chose the native plums as fruits with which to work. He was not a breeder of plums and the Rollingstone, brought in from the wild and sent out by him in 1882, is the only addition to pomology, in the way of a new variety, made by him. The work with this fruit which has given him a name as a plum specialist was in testing hardy varieties. He tried thoroughly all the native plums to be obtained, and much of the present information as to the hardiness of plums for the cold northwest is due to knowledge gained from Mr. Lord’s experimental orchard. He became a member of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society in 1884 and in 1889 was made an honorary life member of this organization. For some years he was a Farmers’ Institute lecturer on horticulture and was for a time horticultural editor of Farm, Stock and Home. He was not only known in the Northwest as a plum specialist but carried on correspondence with plum growers throughout the whole country giving much valuable information regarding this fruit. Beside giving attention to plums he tested many apples for his region and was the originator of one or two varieties now very generally grown in his State. During his life he filled several places of public trust, being a member of the Territorial Legislature in 1853-4 and of the State Legislature in 1873-4. He also served at various times in minor offices in his County and in his State being at the time of his death a member of the Forest Reserve Board of Minnesota. With Peter Gideon he was one of the pioneer fruit-growers in the Northwest and while he has left few fruits of his own breeding and few records in print of the work he did, yet his long and faithful service in developing fruit-growing in the Northwest makes him one of the men of note in American pomology. Mr. Lord died July 21, 1906.

[221] Of this fruit Burbank writes to this Station under date of December 6, 1909, as follows:

“I have this season also about 65,000 or 75,000 Plumcot seedlings,—a wholly new fruit which promises great things for localities where it can be grown. These Plumcots vary more astonishingly from seed than anything which I have ever produced. No pure Apricots or pure Plums are produced, but every possible variety and every possible combination and all qualities are brought out strongly. The range of colors is astonishing,—some new combinations of colors never before seen in fruits have been produced. The best California judges of fruits—the great growers and shippers—have pronounced some of these varieties the best fruit ever produced on this earth. Most of these fruits have a beautiful downy skin—many of them smooth—flesh orange, yellow, white, crimson or green; pits peculiar. The fruits vary from about the size of a medium peach down to the size of Green Gage plums, though the various ones are of every possible size, form, flavor, color, time of ripening, etc. The trees, in some cases, grow faster than any other fruit tree. Sometimes branches grow on even quite young trees twelve feet in length and an inch in diameter in a single season. Others are quite slow growers or even dwarfs.”

[222] Am. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 105. 1891.

[223] J. W. Kerr, one of the best informed and most enthusiastic cultivators of native and Triflora plums, was born in York County, Pennsylvania, January 23, 1842. He is of Scotch-Irish lineage paternally and of English ancestors maternally. His education at the village school was supplemented by several years teaching and much reading and study in horticultural literature, fondness for which seems to have been inborn. In his early manhood Mr. Kerr engaged in growing trees for sale, a business with which he soon combined a fruit plantation in which he collected and tested all the plums that could be grown in his climate, comprising the great majority of the varieties of American species and of the Oriental plums. This work began in 1870, since which time no man has done more to popularize and improve native plums than Mr. Kerr. His most valuable work has been in testing varieties, where his knowledge of this fruit, his judgment and his sense of discrimination have made his opinion, as set forth in his nursery catalog and in the reports of horticultural societies, authoritative. He has, too, done considerable work in breeding plums, Choptank, Sophie and Maryland probably representing the best of his endeavors in originating new plums. It is a duty and a pleasure to acknowledge here the great services rendered by Mr. Kerr in the preparation of The Plums of New York.

[224] Emmett Stull Goff was born at Elmira, New York, Sept. 3, 1852. He was educated in the public schools and in the Elmira Free Academy, graduating from the last named place in 1869. The following years were spent on his father’s farm until in 1880 he became Associate Editor of an agricultural paper, but finding the work uncongenial he returned to the farm for a short time leaving again to accept in 1882 a position at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station which had just been established. Here for seven years Professor Goff gave his attention to vegetables. His classification of a number of vegetables, the pea, tomato, cabbage and onion in particular, are still standard in American vegetable culture. During his work at this Station he did much pioneer work in spraying plants and invented a device for mixing kerosene and water. In 1889 Professor Goff moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he became professor of horticulture in the University of Wisconsin and horticulturist of the Wisconsin Experiment Station. Here for fourteen years he gave his attention to various phases of fruit-growing and vegetable-growing. His bulletin 87 on “Native Plums” is the outcome of several years’ experiments in testing and breeding plums of such of our native species as will grow in Wisconsin. His work with plums is particularly valuable, as he was able, in his location, to do much to ascertain the degree of hardiness of many varieties of the species of cultivated plums. From his work with sterility and fertility of varieties came valuable recommendations regarding the cross-pollination of such varieties as are self-sterile. He is the author of Principles of Plant Culture and Lessons on Fruit-growing, text books much used in high schools and agricultural colleges. Professor Goff was a modest and retiring man but singularly independent of view in all things regarding his work and all things that concerned men—a serene, lofty-minded, unselfish man. His death occurred at Madison, June 6th, 1903.

[225] Aug. Royer Annales De Pomologie Belge et Etrangere 63. 1859.

[226] William Prince, born in 1725, was the second proprietor of the famous Prince nursery at Flushing, Long Island, a nursery established by his father, Robert Prince, about 1730. The first of the American Princes was one of the Huguenots who settled at New Rochelle and on the north shore of Long Island, bringing with them a great number of French fruits and the love of the French people for horticulture. The nursery, one of the first, and certainly the most important one in America at this time, grew rapidly until the Revolutionary War. The establishment was of such public importance that during a part of the war the British placed a guard over it to protect it from depredation. With the establishment of peace came an increased trade and the nursery soon attained even greater prominence than before the war. An effort was made by William Prince, then in charge, to import all of the valuable European fruits beside which he grew many seedlings, selecting carefully from them new varieties. Thus in 1790 twenty-five quarts of Reine Claude plum pits were planted from which came Yellow Gage, Imperial Gage and probably the Washington plum. Prince died in 1802, his business having been divided between two sons; Benjamin Prince keeping the original place under the name The Old American Nursery and William Prince occupying a new place called the Linnean Botanic Garden and Nursery. William Prince seems not to have had the inclination to write as did his son and grandson but had, even more than they, business energy. His European exportations and importations made his name famous in horticulture abroad as well as at home. To him Americans owe the introduction of many varieties of foreign fruits and ornamental plants; his was the first of the great nurseries of the country, soon to be followed by others, to import and exchange plants with foreign countries; his is the first recorded attempt to breed fruits in America on an extensive scale and the fact that the three plums sent out by him are still valuable varieties indicates his judgment as to worth in fruits. The reputation made by his son, William Prince, the second, and by William Robert Prince, a grandson, as writers on horticultural subjects, is in large measure due to the information acquired for them and the training given them by the William Prince of this sketch.

[227] Gilbert Onderdonk was born in Sharon, New York, September 30, 1829. As a boy he showed a taste for horticulture and while a lad planted seeds of potatoes, made selections and developed several varieties more or less widely grown in the middle of the last century. Mr. Onderdonk was educated in the Cortland Academy at Cortland, N. Y., and in the State Normal College at Albany. After having taught in the district schools of New York for a few years, he found it necessary to go to a warmer climate because of bronchial trouble and in 1851 moved to Texas, where he became a cowboy, a rancher and finally a fruit-grower. In the region in which he had settled there were wild grapes and wild plums in abundance. The luxuriance of growth and the number of these fruits so impressed him with the possibilities of fruit culture in southwestern Texas that he began planting fruit trees. Of necessity these came from the north and for most part failed. Not to be discouraged, Mr. Onderdonk began the improvement of the wild varieties about his home. From 1855 to the present time his work has been the testing for the region in which he lives, of every variety of fruit to be had in Europe and America, and the improvement of the wild fruits growing about him. The plum, in particular, has received attention from Mr. Onderdonk, and his chief work with this fruit has been the hybridization of Triflora and Munsoniana varieties from the crossing of which he has grown some valuable plums. In 1887, the United States Department of Agriculture employed Mr. Onderdonk to work with plums, grapes and peaches in the southwest, the results of which are to be found in the reports of the Department immediately following the year mentioned. He has also done considerable work for the French in sending resistant vines to France. Mr. Onderdonk is one of several workers in horticulture who have unremittingly served Texas and the southwest in the production of new varieties of fruits and in testing varieties from other regions. The value of the foundation these men have laid for horticulture in the southwest cannot now be estimated.

[228] Mich. Sta. Bul. 118:52, 54. 1895.