Who invented peaches

Veal said, "Well, let's honor your wife and call it for her. You'll never have anything to surpass it on this continent. Elberta is its name. Samuel H. Moore, himself one of the earliest in Georgia to set out a commercial peach orchard.

Thus, in Samuel H. Rumph produced his Elberta peach. The fruit arrived in good condition, and brought a fancy price of fifteen dollars per bushel. The 'Elberta' was not long in finding its place in the markets, although it was not marketed in any volume until , when testing and propagation by budding were complete.

Samuel had proceeded to bud the Elberta extensively into his nursery stock and soon had a large growing orchard of the new peach.

The "Willow Lake Nursery," was established due to the great demand for Elberta trees. It is a peculiarity of the Elberta that it has adapted itself to all soils and climates, from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, the Atlantic to the Pacific, and there was not a commercial peach orchard in the United States where the Elberta was not largely represented. Rumph also contributed to the success of the new peach industry with the design of a box on casters which held six crates of peaches plus ice.

These were loaded in box cars, shipped to port and loaded on coastwise steamers for New York. He later conceived the idea of a railcar that would haul many crates of peaches with ice bunkers at each end. This he turned over to the railroads for development without asking a royalty. It is indicative of the unselfish character of the man that he gave these ideas to the world, never taking out patents on his models.

With this development peach growing expanded rapidly in Middle Georgia. Peaches probably reached East Africa about the same time as bananas and coconut, about AD , when Indonesian Muslim traders began to reach Madagascar, and they probably spread through Africa along with the new Islamic religion. When Portuguese soldiers conquered South America from the Aztecs and Inca in the s AD, they brought peaches with them, and people began to grow peaches in South America, too.

In the s, Spanish settlers also brought peaches to Florida, where the Cherokee and Iroquois soon learned to grow them. Cherokee and Iroquois traders sold peach seeds further west, and peach seeds gradually crossed North America to meet up with peach trees planted by Spanish settlers in Arizona and California.

Food , by Fiona MacDonald and others For kids, facts about food from all over the world. A little preachy. Pretty specialized, but the book tells you where foods came from, and how they got to other places, and what people ate in antiquity. Not just Europe, either! This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.

Learn how your comment data is processed. As a crop and a cultural icon, Georgia peaches are a product of history. And as I have documented , its story tells us much about agriculture, the environment, politics and labor in the American South. Augustine, Florida in the mids. By they were widespread around Jamestown, Virginia. The trees grow readily from seed, and peach pits are easy to preserve and transport.

Yet for such a hardy fruit, the commercial crop can seem remarkably fragile. It begins in February and March, when the trees start blooming and are at significant risk if temperatures drop below freezing. Larger orchards heat trees with smudge pots or use helicopters and wind machines to stir up the air on particularly frigid nights.

The southern environment can seem unfriendly to the fruit in other ways, too. In the s many smaller growers struggled to afford expensive and elaborate controls to combat pests such as San Jose scale and plum curculio. In the early s large quantities of fruit were condemned and discarded when market inspectors found entire car lots infected with brown rot , a fungal disease that can devastate stone fruit crops. In the s the commercial peach industry in Georgia and South Carolina nearly ground to a halt due to a syndrome known as peach tree short life , which caused trees to suddenly wither and die in their first year or two of bearing fruit.

In short, growing Prunus persica is easy. But producing large, unblemished fruit that can be shipped thousands of miles away, and doing so reliably, year after year, demands an intimate environmental knowledge that has developed slowly over the last century and a half of commercial peach production. Up through the midth century, peaches were primarily a kind of feral resource for southern farmers. A few distilled the fruit into brandy; many ran their half-wild hogs in the orchards to forage on fallen fruit.

Some slave owners used the peach harvest as a kind of festival for their chattel, and runaways provisioned their secret journeys in untended orchards. In the s, in a determined effort to create a fruit industry for the Southeast, horticulturists began a selective breeding campaign for peaches and other fruits, including wine grapes, pears, apples and gooseberries.

Its most famous yield was the Elberta peach. Introduced by Samuel Henry Rumph in the s, the Elberta became one of the most successful fruit varieties of all time.