Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/51

Rh I was not alone; the mania was infectious; seemingly nearly everybody was setting fruit trees and plums; the front yards and the back yards of the towns had them. Shrewd business men set orchards to plums—Meek & Luelling, George Walling, Seth Lewelling, and others; later, P. F. Bradford, Dr. O. P. S. Plummer, S. A. Clarke, Dr. N. G. Blalock, and a multitude of others too numerous to mention.

It was not until 1871 I put out twelve hundred peach-plum trees. There was then a great demand for large-pitted plums in the eastern market, and our grocerymen called for them in considerable quantities at home, and often said to me, "Set out pitting plums and peach-plums, and don't set anything you can not pit, for the American people don't want a prune with the pit in it. They don't like them. A few of our large-pitted plums had reached the Saint Louis market, and were selling readily at thirty-five cents per pound. We figured two hundred pounds to the tree, then thought to be a conservative estimate, one hundred and sixty trees to the acre, and forty acres in plums, at fifteen cents a pound, dried. This was good, better than a quartz mine; divided by two it seemed good enough. Time passed. Market reports East showed active demand for pitted plums. Leading wholesale grocers ordered, and said we need not fear an oversupply of plums as per sample sent, and that there was nothing so fine on the market. We sold at sixteen cents per pound, and were assured that they could not drop much below that price.

A correspondent, a grower, Mr. S. J. Brandon, of New York, had discovered, or thought he had, that a heavy clay soil, very like our hilled lands, was unfavorable to the curculio, the blighting pest of the East that had discouraged plum and prune growing in the States east of the Rockies. Mr. Brandon, however, was growing successfully a forty-acre orchard of Reine Claude plums on heavy clay