Then we began to study the Government bulletins on how to produce good walnut kernels, and there is a good bulletin on that; all of you are acquainted with it, probably. When we began to harvest those nuts and hull them as quickly as we could and wash them and dry them out thoroughly and then crack them before they got too dry, we organized what was called the Walnut Club. This Walnut Club mostly was composed of some of the women of the community who lived up in one little cove where the limestone outcroppings seem to favor the walnut and the air drainage or whatever it was seemed to favor the crop yields rather regularly. We don't have an every-year good walnut crop.
Well, these women got finally so that they could get 35 cents a pound for their walnut kernels, then 45 cents a pound. Then we found a good friend in Pennsylvania who would take those kernels, all we could send her, and put them up in little pound packages and sell them for whatever she could get and send us all the money. That's altogether contrary to Hoyle I guess.
You merchants, if there are some of you here, who are dealers in walnut kernels know that our people were just getting spoiled. Anytime now that a merchant says, "I will give you such-and-such a price for the walnuts and then I will sell them for such-and-such a price," he looks to them like a robber. They want to sell them for what the people pay who eat them. That isn't quite fair, maybe, but we got $1.39 a pound last year for all the kernels we could produce, and the year before it was $1.40, I believe, and it stays about that price.
That is about the story of the community project. It is a direct contact by way of a benevolent friend between people in the mountains in Tennessee and people in Pennsylvania who say that these kernels taste better than black walnut kernels in Pennsylvania taste. I don't know whether any Pennsylvanians here agree with that or not. I think they are wonderfully mild-flavored, a good many of them very light-colored kernels. Though Mr. Chase has made some beautiful exhibits of how the color changes depending on how long a time you leave them in the hull, we still have some that stay lighter than others. Some of them have rather gray-colored kernels.
There is one of those trees that Mrs. Ledbetter has, on her husband's farm. He was about to sell that tree for a log and a stump. They come along and grub the stumps out and sell the stumps and all for veneerwood. But she wouldn't let him sell it, and over the course of the last few years they sold enough kernels more than to pay for that walnut tree and it is still going to yield a good many years, probably better and better as time goes on.
I think that possibly the community angle of this is a little bit misrepresenting. It's not the entire community, but it is a little group of the community who are interested in the wild black walnut.
Last spring we were very fortunate in having some help in grafting some of the seedlings. This Mrs. Ledbetter's husband got interested in walnuts, and he planted a whole pasture with walnuts spaced every so often, and this spring we went there with the help of God and were able to graft those to Thomas black walnuts. They were just little seedlings, so we hope to go into the named black walnuts as time goes on.
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President Davidson: May I ask, Mr. Taylor, the people, of course, now comply with the Government regulations on pasteurization and so on?
Mr. Taylor: Never heard of it. You will have to tell me about that after a while, if you will, please.