At the thirteenth annual convention of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, held at Rochester, N. Y., September 7, 8 and 9, 1922, a committee was appointed to express the sorrow of the association at the death of its honorary member, Dr. Walter Van Fleet, at the age of sixty-four, on January 26th 1922, and to inform Mrs. Van Fleet of its action.
Dr. Van Fleet, at one time the only honorary member of the association, was made so in recognition of his services to nut growing in breeding blight resistant chestnuts and chinkapins, and of his unfailing courtesy to the association whenever asked to present the results of his investigations.
Although incomplete his experiments had already produced results of great promise and shown the way that his successors must follow. Many of us knew him personally and had visited his home and experimental grounds at Bell, Maryland, some of us more than once. Few of us knew his varied and high attainments in many other fields than plant breeding, though a moment's thought would have made a discerning person see that his modesty, self-effacement, kindliness and sympathy were things that most often come to those whose experiences of life have been the widest. His accomplishments in plant breeding and other fields, a bibliography of his writings, and the events of his life, were fully and sympathetically related in a communication written by Mr. Mulford of the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture at the request of the association and read at the meeting.
The association feels that no one can ever quite take the place of Dr. Van Fleet in the field of his life work, in experimental nut breeding and in the hearts of the members of this association who had the privilege of knowing him, and it wishes to put on record its great sorrow at his untimely death in the very midst of his beneficent activity for the benefit of mankind.
RESOLUTION ON THE DEATH OF
COLEMAN K. SOBER
At the thirteenth annual convention of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, held at Rochester, N. Y., September 7, 8 and 9, 1922, a committee was appointed to express the feeling of the association at the death of one of its life members, Coleman K. Sober, at the age of seventy-nine, at his home in Lewisburg, Pa., in December 1921, and to inform his family of its action.
Colonel Sober, as he was most often called, was a frequent attendant at the meetings of the association in its early history. He was a pioneer in the culture of the chestnut in America and the grower and distributor of a variety which he called the Sober Paragon. He developed the production of this valuable variety, and its nursery stock, on a large scale and had demonstrated chestnut growing as the first of the established nut industries in the northeastern United States. He devised methods of grafting and cultivating the chestnut and invented means and machinery for harvesting and shelling the nuts, for which he found a ready market at good prices.
A man of strong personality, capable of large operations and unaccustomed to failure he found it hard to admit defeat of his deeply cherished purpose, and success already within his grasp, by that great national calamity the invasion of this country by the fatal chestnut blight. Undoubtedly he foresaw, as did other advocates of nut culture, the great help and stimulus to the industry that would result from the commercial success of chestnut culture, and it was a bitter disappointment to him to find himself helpless before the irresistable progress of the blight. This failure came too late in life for him to recover and develop new fields in nut culture which, let us believe, he would have done if he had been younger, for we know that he was an advocate of the roadside planting of nut trees and a supporter of the efforts of those of us who are striving for the success of all forms of nut culture.
Nut growing and this association have lost an able and energetic worker.