Page:Tree Crops; A Permanent Agriculture (1929).pdf/259

 bama. Altogether the area within these boundaries includes something over a half million square miles, including parts of thirteen states.

Over this area there were many millions of wild trees. Mr. E. J. Kyle, Professor of Horticulture in Texas, claims seventy-five millions of wild trees in that state. For an unknown time these and previous millions of pecan trees have been producing hundreds of millions of pounds of nutritious crops. They went to decay or for the food of wild animals and to some extent to feed the American Indian.

Pecan trees of great size bearing excellent nuts grow wild in the Ohio valley, but by chance the pecan received earlier and more attention in the South than in the North. Accordingly it spread more rapidly eastward through the South than through the North. As a part of the pecan mythology it may be stated that as late as 1910 the belief was widespread that the pecan would grow only in the South, and there was no reason to expect its expansion north of the Cotton Belt.

This belief in Cotton Belt cxclusiveness is an example of the case with which patent error survives. For the first settlers of Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri found on their lowlands thousands of pecan trees from two to three feet in diameter and one hundred feet high. It was and is a common practice to leave them when clearing. Many stand in cornfields today. Stately pecan trees planted by George Washington in 1775 or-