Now you want to know where these black walnuts are grown. Well, up about here (indicating the northeast) we have the towns of Greeneville and Rogersville and Morristown and Jonesboro, the counties of Washington County, Greene County, Hawkins County, say, ten counties; radiating around those ten counties you have in the past had great quantities of walnut kernels produced and sold. Now, go on down this valley past Knoxville, and McMinn County (southeast) has some years produced heavy crops of walnuts. So you have heavy production all through the valley.
There's another center, we might term it, of about six counties in this central basin. But I don't want you to get the wrong impression, because walnuts grow in almost any county in this state, but I am mentioning these greater producing areas. And this County of Williamson south of Nashville in years past has sent plenty of walnuts to market. So that's a walnut producing area. And up here in this Highland Rim we have some counties by the name of Pickett and Overton and Clay County. Well, they produce walnuts, and the people up there have in the past cracked out a lot of walnuts. And in Montgomery County they produce walnuts. So the normal trade centers where these walnuts move is really to a great degree here at this town of Morristown in East Tennessee, and Nashville in Middle Tennessee, and this Middle Tennessee center draws from Kentucky. In fact, these four or five large shelling concerns know about the walnuts pretty much all over the entire walnut producing territory.
Through the years the Agricultural Extension Service, University of Tennessee, with which I am connected, has been keenly interested in assisting in any way we can to get additional income out of walnut kernels, and in recent years the whole uncracked walnut. And even though I am a forester I can see the possibilities of this, and we like to carry it along. In fact, I consider walnut as kind of a dual-purpose tree, fine for timber production, also for production of nuts, walnut meats or kernels. You might term it a triple-purpose tree. I don't think there is any better tree than that for a shade tree in pastures, in the field, and around the home, because for one reason it makes what we term in this state a "cold shade," and it is not a hot shade like you get under a sugar maple. The maple has a dense foliage. And as Mr. Chance indicated this morning, walnut is usually associated with blue grass. Blue grass will grow under it.
I guess some of you here remember the years of the depression, and I remember in 1932, for example, we had a heavy crop of black walnuts in the state. Then I believe the price for kernels of 15 cents a pound would have been a good price during that year, and some of them probably sold for less. So if we had the time we would follow through all the years, beginning with 1927, but just to make it as brief as possible, I will leave those out, but I would like to mention the year 1941. It sort of disrupted things in the kernel industry, because at that time the Pure Food and Drug people came in here and set up regulations, and it interfered with the merchandising of these kernels, because the producer had to satisfy certain sanitary regulations, and it really sounded worse than it was. Anyway, it confused our people, and probably that is about the year in which we had this big shift from the production of walnut kernels cracked out at home to a sale of uncracked walnuts to these shelling plants.
Then another year that I think of (we always think of these as walnut crop years) was 1945, and that year we got better prices, probably, than ever before or since, and a lot of our country people were able to sell hulled uncracked walnuts as high as $6 per hundred pounds.
We will continue to be interested in this industry, but, of course, nowadays the wage scale is higher and money is not worth as much as it was in the past, so it really seems to me that in order to get out this crop we just have to try to make the price a little more attractive.
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President Davidson: "We are now going to hear from Mr. Shessler of Ohio, on his method of grafting, and I wish to assure you that he knows what he is talking about. He has done a lot of it.
Grafting Walnuts in Ohio
SYLVESTER SHESSLER, Genoa, Ohio