The Connecticut Pomological Society Sixteenth Annual Meeting pages 45-58
President Eddy: I take great pleasure in introducing the next speaker, who has come to us from a distant state and is well-known as a very successful Grower of fancy apples and has been given the title of the “Rome Beauty Man.” I am sure we shall all profit by Mr. U.T. Cox’s address:
By U.T. Cox, Rockwood, Ohio. President of the Ohio State Horticultural Society.
Mr. President and Fellow Fruit Growers of Connecticut and Ladies and Gentlemen: – I am glad to be with you. When the Secretary asked me to come and talk to you, I didn’t know better than to accept, and I am here, but a little the worse for the trip and the weather.
I view an interest in Connecticut as my grandmother was born here in Hartford in 1799. Her family and some other relatives immigrated to New York soon afterward and then later went across to Marietta, OH, and in the fall of 1816, they moved further down the Ohio River to Lawrence County, Ohio, near Proctorville and not far from Huntington, WV.
Little did your secretary dream that Mike’s success would be attributed to those same pioneers who went out from Connecticut, but such is the case. The famous Rome beauty apple that I am accused of growing so many of had its origin through the work of these same people and that of another New York, New England pioneer in the person, general Rufus Putman.
He settled at Marietta, OH, and started a nursery, and the Gillette family took home their supply of trees down to Lawrence County in the fall of 1816 and set them out the next spring.
Rufus Pittman and pruning his trees, overlooked or neglected to cut off a sprout that had come out below the graft or from the root of one of the trees when Joe to let bought those trees and took them to Marietta OH, in 1817, he cut that sprout off and gave it to his son Allison saying here’s a Democrat you can have that.
His son took it and set it out, and it grew to maturity and produced fine apples and was called Gillette’s seating seedling. It was soon after changed to Rome beauty, being named about 1832 to 1835, and it grew about 8 miles from where I live.
Soon after, the gold fever of 1850 and another one of the Gillette’s carried this apple to Oregon, and this is how it got into that part of the country.
To go back a little, the Putnam’s that settled in Marietta, OH, took a homeless boy in 1804 and got acquainted with the Gillette family. When they went down the river in the fall of 1816, that was too much for the boy. He went down in the spring of 1817 173 miles in a canoe to see the girl. Afterward, there was a wedding, and they settled in the rich Ohio River bottom, where my grandfather and my grandmother had pretty good success.
My father grew up across the river in West Virginia. One of my mother’s brothers went out on to the heels and took up some government land in 1847, set out a little orchard, probably got tired of working there, and went further West.
His father bought that land and gave it to my father and mother, and in 1854 they went there to make a living. They told along successfully, and in a few years, the trees that my uncle had set out began to bear, and they had pretty nice apples. My father took it into his head that he was going into the apple business and set out 60 acres about in 1860.
From that, he gradually increased his orchards. the people made fun of him, saying that he couldn’t pick so many and that if he got them picked, he couldn’t sell them or use them. The apples were picked and taken down the river in flatboats, and he did pretty well with them. There were not enough people right where he lived to use apples, but the people were down the river, and there the apples went and found a market.
That is how I happen to be in the fruit business, and I don’t know what else I could get into to make a better living. when my father first commenced setting those orchards, he plowed the ground and then sewed it to wheat and grass, and clover, and the trees went on burying every year, burying themselves to death.
They were all gone now except for a few trees. we can’t make the Rome Beauty trees live, as you can’t make your Baldwins live here in Connecticut, but they do work while they do live.
In a few years, the soil in some of those orchards began to wash considerably, and we began to learn that it would not pay to cultivate the land. The one thing I could see to do was mow the grass and leave it on the ground. I consider it worth more to feed the trees than to feedstock.
I came here to talk about the mulch system. Some may be opposed to it under certain conditions, but if I had not used it, I would have made a failure of my business.
In 1890 the Ohio experiment station decided to make some tests in spraying to keep off the apple scab. Professor Green came down to our place, and we had crude instruments, but he made some tests and approved conclusively that we could keep off the scab and codling moth also.
We sprayed with a mixture of 4 pounds of blue vitriol, 4 pounds of lime, and 4 ounces of Paris green 250 gallons of water. It didn’t hurt the foliage, and we went on for a few years with it. Then we tried arsenite of soda and later arsenite of lead, but there was too much cost in the latter.
Then I conceived the idea we would put just half strength of the arsenite of lead and arsenite of soda, and we had better success than ever before. I have been using that mixture and that strength ever since with very good success and the best success this year we ever had.
I have cut the amount of arsenite of lead from 3 pounds down to 1 1/2 pounds to 50 gallons of water and 1 pound in some cases. I have never recommended over 4 pounds of blue vitriol. I used three pounds last year and five pounds of lime.
The New York fellows used to recommend 6 pounds of blue vitriol and six pounds of lime, but lately, they have decided to cut down the blue vitriol to three pounds. I believe two pounds will do as effective work, and I think you will find it will not rust the fruit so much. If you can keep this mixture well stirred, you will find it will not burn your foliage.
There are some things on the market that will burn your foliage. The person using spraying mixtures must know his business. He must know the conditions. He can’t take somebody else’s advice and succeed unless he knows something about the conditions. If a man tells him how to do the work, he should not commence until he thoroughly understands it. After studying as yet, he is more apt to succeed.
QUESTION: Is there anything about the blue vitriol that is poisonous to animals when used for spraying?
MR COX: I have a friend up in Michigan who had an old horse, 25 years old, that he wanted to get rid of. He had turned it out to pasture in the orchard where he had been spraying the trees, thinking possibly that it might do the work, but instead of killing the old horse, he said it continued to grow fat and flourish on right along.
QUESTION: how many gallons of water do you use to three pounds of vitriol?
MR COX: 50 gallons.
QUESTION: how much lime do you recommend with the blue vitriol?
MR. COX: we have always used five pounds of lime, and I think that is better than three pounds. The Ohio experiment station made some tests in my orchards last year for codling moth with the following results: (goes on to charts, numbers, etc.).
[The questions and answers go on for several pages and have no genealogy value. I picked up back up where any history about Lawrence County, Ohio is printed-mm]
[page 56] QUESTION: How old are your oldest trees?
MR. COX: My uncle set the first trees in 1847, and a few of them are alive now. Those set in 1860, the Rome beauties, are all about dead, and from 1878 we have all ages from that down, and plenty of them not bearing yet.
[page 58] MR. COX: We used to drive to town with our products and sell direct from the wagon to the trade or the customer, but now we sell mostly over the telephone and send the fruit in the next morning. We had no telephone connection a few years ago. We established our own system and made connections with the towns. if your telephone service calls too much, you might put up your own lines and establish an independent system and get better service at less costs.
At the close of Mr. Cox’s splendid address with discussion, the audience was embodied to rise and join in singing “America,” which was heartedly done.
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