Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/89

Rh Eaton used the second mower beginning in 1857. The first thresher and separator was introduced north of the Columbia at Cowlitz Farms in 1856, by T. W. Glasgow, Daniel J. Hubbard, and John B. Forbes. This machine was brought to Thurston County in June–July, 1857. Mr. George H. Himes, now curator of the Oregon Historical Society, worked on the machine in August, 1857, on the farm of David J. Chambers, four miles east of Olympia. "The output of this machine," writes Mr. Himes in a recent note, "was five hundred bushels of wheat, or seven or eight hundred bushels of oats a day, as against fifty and seventy-five bushels when tramped out by horses and winnowed by the primitive method."

Apple and pear production in "train load lots" is a development of the last fifteen or twenty years. The pioneers grew apples for home and local consumption; in the mining days of California they shipped considerable quantities thither. But the "fancy" fruit packed in labeled boxes, filling whole box cars and train loads, is a late idea of realization.

The pioneers found the Willamette Valley a paradise for apples. A wild crab apple is native in Western Oregon, and this wild fruit and the finest of cultivated grew in equal luxuriance; indeed the late Harvey W. Scott, forty years editor of the Portland Oregonian, used to tell of beautiful large apples, grafted on the native stock, growing to fine fruit beside the little crab apples on the same tree. Throughout the three Northwest states apples are probably more widespread than any other fruit. From early pioneer times, Oregon was named the "Land of Big Red Apples." They had no enemies, neither worm nor aphis nor scale, and needed little tillage. The origin of the fruit industry is commonly ascribed as beginning with the "traveling nursery," which Henderson Luelling hauled from Missouri to Milwaukie, in 1847. In that same year J. C. Geer, Sr., carried to the Willamette Valley a bushel of apple seeds. Mr. Ralph C. Geer