Nichols, H E

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Masthead Logo The Palimpsest
Volume 47 | Number 7 Article 6
7-1-1966
Pioneers in Horticulture
H E. Nichols
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Nichols, H E. "Pioneers in Horticulture." The Palimpsest 47 (1966), 300-309.
Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol47/iss7/6
Pioneers in Horticulture
There are many interesting stories dealing with 
phases of Iowa horticultural history. The follow­
ing are condensed from Pioneers in Iowa Horti~ 
culture written in 1941 by Kent Pellett of Hudson, 
Iowa, for the 75th birthday of the Iowa State 
Horticultural Society. He is the son of the late 
Frank C. Pellett, nationally known editor and 
author from Atlantic.
Lewelling's Travelling Nursery
The beginning of the fruit industry of the Pa­
cific Northwest owes its start to Henderson Lew­
elling. The Lewelling family, sometimes spelled 
Leuelling, had been nurserymen for several gen­
erations before their arrival at Salem in Henry 
County, Iowa.
Henderson and John Lewelling prospered in 
Iowa, selling trees to the thrifty fruitgrowing 
Quakers settling in their area. Salem became the 
apple-growing center of early Iowa. The Lewel- 
lings made 14 trips to Indiana and other eastern 
points for new tree stock and plants. In ten years, 
Henderson acquired a competence at Salem sell­
ing fruit stocks to the settlers as Iowa’s population 
doubled and redoubled. He built an imposing yel­
low limestone house and was a leadinq citizen.
300
PIONEERS IN HORTICULTURE 301
Lewelling had heard tales of the fertility of 
the Willamette Valley in Oregon. In 1845 he de­
cided to close out his Iowa interests and made 
plans to establish a nursery in Oregon. How to 
get the needed varieties of fruits across the plains 
and mountains was his problem. His method of 
transportation made history.
In the spring of 1847, Lewelling prepared his 
precious cargo of nursery stock by building two 
boxes, which were set in the bottom of the wagon 
and filled with a compost of charcoal and earth. 
Into this he set the grafted trees. There were ap­
ples, pears, quinces, plums, cherries, grapes, and 
common berry bushes—700 in all, from 20 inches 
to four feet high.
With seven wagons in his party, Lewelling, a 
partner, and his family set out for the west on 
April 17, 1847. Beyond the Missouri, the party 
joined a wagon train.
The plains were hot and Indian-infested, and 
the oxen grew lame. Lewelling buried his partner 
on the Platte River. Two of the oxen died on the 
Sweetwater. Others of the train now rebelled, tell­
ing Lewelling that he was holding them back. They 
were sure he would kill all the cattle with his heavy 
load and would never be able to get the trees over 
the mountains. They said he should throw them 
away. Lewelling answered with a thunderous 
“NO!” and kept on. After this the family left the 
wagon train and travelled alone.
302
He watered his trees every day. It was said he 
tended them more carefully than he did his own 
children. Half the trees were dead, but the re­
mainder had leafed out. Later the trees actually 
saved his little band when Indians attacked. The 
red men were mystified at the green growth in 
the schooner. Concluding the party must be un­
der the special care of the Great Spirit, they moved 
away.
Lewelling reached The Dalles October 1. There 
he transferred his goods to boats and floated down 
the Columbia River. On November 17, seven 
months after they had started, Lewelling with his 
strange cargo moved into the Willamette Valley. 
The family settled in a squatter’s cabin. The sur­
viving trees had grown three feet enroute. He 
took as a partner, William Meek, who had come 
out from Iowa the same year.
The orchard Henderson planted started to bear 
fruit in 1851 and bore increasingly larger crops. 
In 1853 Henderson took his crop of apples to San 
Francisco and sold them for one dollar a pound. 
The nursery was soon furnishing thousands of 
fruit trees to the early Oregon settlers. Later Hen­
derson was joined by his brother, Seth, who took 
over his financial interest in the nursery. In their 
orchard a sweet cherry tree which had grown from 
a seed brought across the plains started to bear 
fruit. The fruit was a large, dark-colored cherry, 
nearly black, and of excellent quality. Seth decid-
THE PALIMPSEST
PIONEERS IN HORTICULTURE 303
ed to propagate it and named it after a Chinese 
workman in the nursery by the name of Bing. To­
day the Bing cherry is the leading variety of sweet 
cherry grown in the United States.
Henderson moved to California, founded the 
town of Fruitvale, and planted an orchard and a 
nursery. His nurseries brought him great wealth. 
He sold his property at Fruitvale, bought a ship 
and supplies, and with a band of eager converts set 
sail for Honduras. Now for the first time luck de­
serted him. He went broke there. Returning to 
California he raised fruit, gave up his wandering, 
and died without regaining his old wealth. 
fames Hiatt and His Seedling Apple
New varieties of fruits are produced in a num­
ber of ways. Today a common method is to care­
fully select the characteristics desired and by hand 
pollination combine two parents. The seeds from 
this cross are carefully planted and the resulting 
plants allowed to produce fruit. From several 
hundred plants a few may be saved for further 
testing and, in a few instances, one that seems 
superior will be named and introduced as a new 
variety. Most of the newer varieties of strawber­
ries were developed in this way. But few apple 
varieties have resulted from such a method. Most 
commercial varieties of apples originated from 
either selected or chance seedlings. The leading 
fall apple of this area, the Wealthy, was the final 
choice of perhaps a hundred trees grown from a
304 THE PALIMPSEST
pound of apple seed by Peter Gideon of Excelsior, 
Minnesota, in the late 1860’s. He named it for 
his wife whose name was Weltha. Many of our 
apple varieties came through chance seedlings. A 
barefoot boy going down the farm lane past the 
family orchard picked up an apple, ate it, and 
tossed the core at a bird in the fence row. One 
of its seeds grew into a tree and finally produced 
a fruit which, perhaps this same boy, now grown 
into a man, thought as “the best apple yet.” He 
got a nurseryman to graft some trees from it and 
gave it a name. This is one possible way for a new 
variety to get started. It would be called a chance 
seedling.
It was in some such way that the Delicious ap­
ple was started. It originated as a chance seedling 
in the large farm orchard of Jesse Hiatt a few miles 
northeast of Peru in Madison County, Iowa.
Jesse Hiatt, the youngest of 12 children, was 
born February 19, 1826, in Indiana, of Quaker 
parents. His father, William Hiatt, owned a farm 
and orchard and was known among his neighbors 
as an authority on fruit. Jesse married Rebecca 
Jane Pearson, sold his farm, and moved his family 
to Madison County, where he bought two half­
sections of land. His brother, Aaron, already liv­
ed there and had laid out the town of Peru.
One of Jesse’s half-sections, on Clanton Creek, 
was in good timber. The other, north of Peru, was 
prairie with 40 acres broken and a one-room log
305
cabin. In this cabin, with the addition of only one 
room, he raised ten children. Jesse went through 
the usual pioneer hardships of scrimping, toiling 
to break land, splitting rails, sawing lumber, and 
putting up buildings.
In the meantime, he had not neglected fruit­
growing. He had bought a few trees from Indi­
ana. He and his brother hauled a wagonload of 
fruit trees from Oskaloosa. He kept adding trees 
until he had a large orchard.
Jesse, with the help of his growing family, grad­
ually accumulated land and property. As he grew 
older, most of the farm was turned over to his 
children. Jesse spent his time puttering around 
with grapes, melons, apples, and vegetables.
During these years, a seedling had been grow­
ing in his orchard, a seedling that was to be fa­
mous although it would not bring Jesse fame. No­
body knew just what kind of a seedling it was, 
although its fruit later had some of the qualities 
of his apples—Hiatt Sweet and Hiatt Black. He 
cut the seedling down in 1870—it was out of the 
row! That might have been the end of the De­
licious, but the next spring it was up again, larger 
than before.
He looked at it and said, “If you must live you 
may.” He had sympathy for anything withstand­
ing adversity. He trimmed off some thorns, cut off 
the top, and left it. When he saw it again it 
was making some progress, with a round, bushy
PIONEERS IN HORTICULTURE
306 THE PALIMPSEST
top. When the tree was ten years old, Jesse said, 
Ma, there is bloom on my new apple tree.”
One apple hung on to maturity. It was large, 
streaked, and of strawberry color. He took his 
pocketknife, carefully pared and tasted the apple 
and exclaimed, “Ma, this is the best apple in the 
whole world!” He never changed his mind. After 
that the tree produced every year, until it was fill­
ing a barrel. He named it “Hawkeye.”
For years after this seedling tree started to bear 
fruit, Jesse tried to interest local nurserymen in it. 
All of them refused as they did not think the apple 
had a future. Jesse Hiatt did not give up. He still 
was certain he had the world s best apple.
After 11 years, in 1893, he sent four specimens 
to a fruit show at Louisiana, Missouri. There they 
fell into the hands of a man who was looking for 
just such an apple. He was C. M. Stark, senior 
member of Stark Brothers Nursery, who staged 
the annual show.
Stark always carried a little red notebook in his 
pocket. In it he was continually jotting down 
names he thought might be appropriate for new 
fruit varieties. He did not trust to memory. He 
noted the names as they occurred to him. So when 
Stark discovered a new variety, he usually had a 
name available in the little red book that would 
be suitable. For years his book had contained 
the name Delicious. He was holding the name for 
a fruit that would be worthy of it. When he bit
PIONEERS IN HORTICULTURE 307
into an apple from the Madison County lot, Stark 
had a sensation he never forgot. This was it. 
This was what he had been seeking. Here was the 
Delicious apple! Stark would have written Jesse 
Hiatt at once, but in the confusion of the show’s 
closing the name and address from the lot had 
been lost. Nobody knew where the apples had 
come from because exhibits for the show had arriv­
ed from all sections of the country.
Stark could do nothing but wait for another 
show on the bare chance that the unknown exhibi­
tor would enter again. While he waited, the fate 
of the Delicious apple hung in the balance. But 
not really, if there was one thing the old Quaker 
had learned it was patience. He forwarded more 
apples to the Missouri show the next year.
Stark went through the exhibits anxiously. He 
knew the apples with their streaked strawberry 
color the moment he unwrapped them. Now he 
wrote to Hiatt. The old man replied:
I am nearly 70 years old and have raised apples all my
life and would not willingly overestimate this apple . . . 
but if it is not a better apple than any in your large list,
it will cost you nothing . . . Once you introduce it there
will be little call for Jonathan. The original tree is now
about 22 years old . . . Both fruit and tree are perfect
models . . .
The Starks purchased rights to the tree and in 
1894 renamed it Delicious. Hundreds of trees
308 THE PALIMPSEST
were immediately propagated, and the new variety 
was given nationwide publicity. The Starks made 
a large commercial exhibit of the fruit at one of 
the horticultural expositions held in Council Bluffs 
in 1909 or 1910. It is said that the Stark Brothers 
spent three-quarters of a million dollars to intro­
duce the Delicious apple and during the next 25 
years sold nearly eight million trees. By 1922 the 
variety had gained so much fame that a monument 
was dedicated to it. The monument, a large boul­
der suitably inscribed, stands today in the city park 
in Winterset. The Armistice Day storm of 1940 
killed the tree to the ground, but several sprouts 
grew up from its roots. R. S. Herrick, then secre­
tary of the State Horticultural Society visited the 
site and selected two sprouts that he developed 
into trees. These two trees can be considered the 
original tree. Both have been bearing fruit for many 
years. Surrounded by a fence, the trees stand in 
a cornfield today. The farm is presently owned 
by Margaretha Tracy and her brother, Raymond 
E. Tracy.
The fruit of the original Delicious apple tree was 
heavily striped. After it had been planted in 
large numbers, especially in Washington, a limb 
or an entire tree bore fruits of a solid red color 
which developed early in the season. These are 
mutations but more commonly called bud sports. 
Today over 80 different bud sports of the Deli­
cious have been found and many of them commer-
309
daily propagated. The modem commercial or- 
chardist prefers to plant these solid red sports, 
as they not only have more eye-appeal, but much 
higher solid red color on the crops as a whole. 
Today, in 1966, there are nearly twice as many 
Delicious trees and its sports grown in commercial 
apple orchards of the United States than of the 
McIntosh, the second leading variety. Today 36.1 
percent of the nation’s commercial apple crop is 
Delicious, and the original tree still stands on an 
Iowa farm.
PIONEERS IN HORTICULTURE
H. E. N ichols


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