The Pears of New York. U. P. Hedrick
The demand for evaporated pears is slight in comparison with that for evaporated apples, and although perry, the expressed juice of pears, is quite as refreshing as cider, this by-product of the fruit is little known in America. As a prepared product, the pear surpasses the apple only as a canned fruit. Failing in comparison with the apple, as a commercial product, pears are largely left to fruit connoisseurs, and with these a generation ago the pear was the fruit of fruits, many splendid collections of it having been made in regions where pears could be grown. With the expansion of commercial fruit-growing, collections of pears, and with them many choice varieties, have gone out of cultivation—more is the pity—and pear-growing has expanded least of all the fruit industries in the United States.
With this brief discussion of the present status of pear-culture in this country, we can proceed to trace the history of the pear with more exactness by reason of knowing its limitations under American conditions.
The peach is the only hardy fruit that belongs to the heroic age of Spanish discovery in the New World. Pears, apples, plums, and cherries came to the new continent with the French and English. The early records of fruit-growing in America show that the pear came among the first luxuries of the land in the French and English settlements from Canada to Florida. Pioneers in any country begin at once to cultivate the soil for the means of sustenance. Naturally, cereals and easily-grown nutritious vegetables receive attention first as giving more immediate harvests and more sustaining fare to supplement game and fish. Agriculture and gardening usually precede orcharding, and this was the case in early settlements in America, but not long. The first generation born in colonial America knew and used all of the hardy fruits from Europe; as many records attest, and of which there is confirmatory proof with the pear in many ancient pear-trees of great size near the old settlements, some of which were planted by the first settlers from Europe. Of pears, many notable trees planted by the hands of the first English and French who crossed the seas to settle the new country were conspicuous monuments in various parts of America in the memory of men still living, if, indeed, some of the old trees themselves are not still standing.
Of these ancient pear-trees, New England furnishes the most notable monuments to mark the introduction of this fruit in the New World. Fortunately, their histories have been preserved in several horticultural annals, and of these accounts the fullest and best is by Robert Manning, Jr., in the Proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1875, pages 100 to 103. Manning’s notes throw so much light on the early history of the pear in New England, as well as upon the varieties then grown, that they are published in full.
“The Endicott Pear. The tradition in the Endicott family is that this tree was planted in 1630. It is said that the trees constituting the original orchard came over from England in June, in the Arabella with Governor Winthrop, or in one of the other ships of the fleet arriving at Salem in June. The farm on which the tree now stands, not having been granted to Endicott until 1632, it is not probable that the trees were planted there before that time, but they might have been at first set in the Governor’s town garden at Salem, where the Rev. Francis Higginson, on his arrival in the summer of 1629, found a vine-yard already planted. The tradition further states that the Governor said that the tree was of the same date with a sun-dial which formerly stood near it. This dial, after having passed through the hands of the Rev. William Bentley, D.D., is now in the Essex Institute in Salem, and bears the date 1630, with the Governor’s initials. The farm, which early bore the name of ‘Orchard,’ was occupied and cultivated by the Governor and his descendants for 184 years, from 1632 to 1816, and was held solely by the original grant until 1828, a period of 196 years. Under these circumstances the history of the tree is more likely to have been handed down correctly than if the estate had changed hands. It is certain that Governor Endicott was early engaged in propagating trees, for in a letter to John Winthrop in 1644, he speaks of having at least 500 trees burnt by his children setting fire near them, and, in a letter to John Winthrop, Jr., a year later, of being engaged to pay for 1500 trees.
“As early as 1763 the tree was very old and decayed. It was very much injured in the gale of 1804. In the gale of 1815 it was so much shattered that its recovery was considered doubtful. It was injured again in a gale about 1843. For the last fifty years it has been protected by a fence around it. In 1837 it was eighty feet high by measurement and fifty-five feet in the circumference of its branches, and does not probably vary much from these dimensions now. Two suckers have sprung up on opposite sides of the tree, which bear the same fruit as the original, proving it to be ungrafted. It stands near the site of the first mansion of the Governor, on a slope where it is somewhat sheltered from the north and north-west winds. The soil is a light loam, with a substratum of clay. Grafts taken from the old tree grow very vigorously. From a pomological point of view, the fruit is of no value. It is hardly of medium size, roundish, green, with more or less rough russet, very coarse, and soon decays.
“It may be of interest to state that the farm on which the old tree stands is again in the Endicott name, having lately been purchased by a descendant of the Governor. The tree stands in the town of Danvers originally a part of Salem.
“For further facts concerning this tree, see the Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for 1837, and also an article by Charles M. Endicott, a descendant of the Governor, in Hovey’s Magazine of Horticulture, vol. xix, p. 254, June, 1853, from which the above account has been mainly derived. Each of these articles is illustrated with a cut of the pear.
“The Orange Pear. This tree is owned by Capt. Charles H. Allen, and stands in his yard on Hardy street, Salem. The Rev. Dr. Bentley, who died about 1820, investigated the history of this tree and found it to be then 180 years old, which would make it now 235 years old. The trunk is hollow, nine feet five inches in circumference in the smallest part near the ground; just below the limbs it is several inches more. The tree is more than forty feet high, and the limbs are supported by shores. It was grafted in the limbs, as a branch fifteen or twenty years old, shooting out several feet higher than a man’s head, produces ‘Button’ pears, and a large limb, part of which was ‘Button’ which grew out still higher up, was blown off several years ago. In the very favorable pear season of 1862 it bore thirteen and a half bushels of pears. It bears in alternate years, having produced eight and a half bushels in 1873. The brittleness of the limbs of old pear trees is well known, yet Capt. Allen, with a care worthy of imitation, gathers every pear, excepting about a dozen specimens, by hand.
“This variety was, until the introduction of the modern kinds, highly esteemed. It is above medium size, averaging fifty-six pears to the peck, globular obtuse pyriform, covered with thin russet, juicy when gathered early and ripened in the house; of pleasant flavor but rather deficient in this respect. It is ripe about the middle of September. It was considered by my father a native, and was called by him the American Orange, and after examination of the descriptions and plates, I cannot think it the same as the Orange Rouge or Orange d’Automne of Duhamel, Decaisne, and Leroy. The Hon. Paul Dudley, Esq., of Roxbury, in some ‘Observations on some of the Plants in New England with remarkable Instances of the Power of Vegetation,’ communicated to the Royal Society of London (I quote from the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ abridged, London, 1734, Vol. VI, Part II, p. 341), says: ‘An Orange Pear Tree grows the largest, and yields the fairest fruit. I know one of them near forty Foot high, that measures six Foot and six Inches in Girt, a Yard from the Ground, and has borne thirty Bushels at a Time, and this Year I measured an Orange pear, that grew in my own Orchard, of eleven Inches round the Bulge.’
“If this is, as believed, of native origin, it is the oldest American fruit in cultivation, unless we except the Apple pear, which is probably of about the same date. This is small, oblate, of pale yellow color, ripening in August. It is quite distinct from the Poire Pomme d’Hiver, of Leroy, and I think also from the Poire Pomme d’Été, of the same author. I had supposed the variety to be extinct, but last year discovered in a garden in Salem the remnant of an old tree with a trunk four feet in diameter, and still producing fruit.
“The Orange pear tree which produced the specimens exhibited, was inherited by the present owner from his father, to whom it came from his wife. It had descended to her almost from the first settlement of