 Cherry Currant | Rochester's Nurseries at their Prime |
Cherry Currant | Rochester's Nurseries at their Prime |
The nurseries of Rochester flourished more abundantly in the decades following the Civil War. The Directory for 1871 listed twenty-three nurserymen, three dealers, and five seed firms within the city and twenty-six others in the remainder of the county. While many of these specialized in flowers, the list did not include the small florist with his back-yard greenhouse. Several of the nurserymen reported upwards of one hundred acres, with Frost and Company’s three hundred acres on South Plymouth Avenue (Genesee Street beyond Brooks) and Ellwanger and Barry’s six hundred and fifty acres across the river topping the list. One report declared that, "Thousands of acres, within five miles of the center of Rochester, are devoted to the culture of fruit trees and ornamental shrubs, and millions of trees are annually sent abroad to other states and foreign lands. The annual product of these nurseries has been estimated at $2,000,000. A further expansion marked the next two decades, followed by a slow contraction, but by the end of the century when the Federal Census made its first report showing the statistics for each county, Monroe County still boasted 3,118.5 acres and reported sales amounting to $621,230 — a larger return than that of any state, excepting of course New York." There was no challenger bidding for the fame of the Flower City.The Mount Hope Nurseries invariably attracted first attention, both from the judges at the annual fairs and from the visitors to the city. One of the latter attempted to be cautious in his description, with the following result:
We think that we are speaking within bounds when we say that the Mount Hope Nurseries in this city, founded and perfected by Messrs. Ellwanger & Barry, are the most complete nurseries on the American continent. There are others, doubtless, that cover more acres, devoted to two or three specialties, as apples, pears, &c., but no other in which the various species of fruits, and ornamental trees, shrubs, vines and plants are so fully and so well represented.The post Civil War years had opened new markets in the South and the expanding West for Rochester nurserymen. Several large orders from seven southern states were reported in one day, late in 1865. These and other shipments soon became so large that arrangements were made with the New York Central to load the trees in Brighton on the southeastern edge of the city rather than to crowd their central offices with the boxes. Occasionally when a hailstorm or a bad frost depleted the supplies of local nurserymen, boxes of trees were brought to Rochester from outlying nurseries for inspection and reshipment in order not to disappoint distant buyers. Much of the work of distributing these products was handled for the larger nurseries by special agents or traveling salesmen, while three local brokers built up similar marketing agencies, contracting for the entire product of the smaller nurseries. One such broker, Chase Brothers, reported the total value of their shipments from Rochester in 1887 at half a million dollars.The professional horticulturist, florist and landscape gardener can find a better opportunity of examining specimens, and studying their peculiar merits, here than elsewhere, and the amateur who wishes to ornament his grounds with the choicest specimens that will grow in our climate will be more certain to find them here, than in any other nursery in our land.
In 1871, the proprietors made a statement of the number of acres devoted to nursery, the number occupied by the various branches and the force and machinery requisite to carry on their immense business, portions of which we copy.
They then had 650 acres in nursery, divided as follows: Fruit trees, 450 acres; ornamental trees, shrubs, plants, &c., 120 acres; vineyard for testing grapes, and bearing small fruit plantation, thirty acres; specimen trees, fruit and ornamental, twenty-five acres; lawn and ornamental grounds around office, and Plant-Houses, twenty-five acres.
The specimen fruit tree ground contains nearly 2,000 varieties, exclusive of grapes and small fruits. The specimen ornamental ground is proportionately extensive, and contains the most complete collection in this country. Every new tree or plant that promises to be of value for this country is promptly added.
The plant-houses are sixteen in number, and cover fully 30,000 square feet of ground. These houses are constructed in a solid block, so that visitors can pass from one to another, through the whole series without going out of doors. In addition, they have numerous pits and frames, and the box factory, carpenter shops, packing sheds, &c., occupy considerable ground.
To do the work of this immense nursery, they employ about 250 men during eight months, and fifty in winter. They keep some thirty horses, and hire more in the busy season. They also have a large number of traveling agents in their employ.
To simplify this large business and prevent those mistakes which frequently occur in some nurseries, they have a general out-door foreman; one for the fruit trees; one for the grapes and small fruits; a general foreman for ornamental department, a special foreman of roses, another of evergreens, and another of herbaceous plants and bulbs.
Each of these men is held responsible for his own charge. Each department is large enough to warrant the appointment of a special head over it, who acquires skill and expertness in the performance of his duties, which would not be possible for those who are one thing to-day, and another to-morrow. They also have competent clerks in their office, who, as well as the foreman, have been in their service many years.
The products of this grand nursery have been scattered all over the United States, and been sent far beyond our borders. Scarcely a city, town, or hamlet in this country but that has been made more beautiful and enjoyable by its contributions. It must afford the honorable proprietors in this, the afternoon of their lives a great deal of pleasure, when they reflect how much they have contributed to the physical comfort, the refinement, and the moral elevation of their countrymen by a vocation which, while it has conferred such blessings upon our people, has brought a generous return to themselves.
While Rochester’s nursery trade did not show signs of declining in volume during the seventies and eighties, it was undergoing several important modifications. The great demand of the fifties and succeeding decades had come from the hundreds of western nurserymen who were then stocking their own establishments. Orders were naturally sent east to Rochester, and to Ellwanger and Barry in particular, because of their reputation for accurate labeling of varieties, and because their stock offered the most complete selection to choose from. Only forty-four out of the thirty-two hundred nurseries which in 1889 reported the date of their establishment had been in existence in 1850, while thirteen hundred others did not report their date of origin. For literally hundreds of these establishments Ellwanger and Barry provided the stocks which they in turn had brought from Europe in the early days. As late as 1884 Ellwanger and Barry were still importing from abroad, faithfully keeping their supplies up-to-date, but their imports were valued at less than three thousand dollars that year. A few years later George Ellwanger commented that the demand for rare varieties was rapidly falling off. The fact was that the task of supplying new nurseries had been in large part completed, while new public and endowed arboretums were taking the place of private nurseries as display gardens for the rarer varieties.
Ellwanger and Barry were among the last of the commercial nurseries to maintain an extensive selection of the many varieties of fruit trees. They were able to continue this policy, even after orders from new nurseries in America began to decline, partly at least because their own market was world-wide. As new lands were opened to horticulture — Australia and Korea, for example — orders came back to the Mount Hope nurserymen. Their displays regularly carried off the first prizes for fruit at agricultural and horticultural fairs, long after other nurserymen had taken precedence in the floral displays. From an early date Ellwanger and Barry had given special attention to pears and displayed the choicest collection at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, but their crowning achievement came in 1900 when their display of 118 varieties of pears won them a gold medal diploma at the Paris Exhibition.
Most of the other Rochester nurseries maintained supplies of the standard fruits of interest to orchardists, but more and more their special attention was turned to flowers and ornamental trees. The growing interest in private gardens and landscaped grounds favored this shifting emphasis. As many as forty thousand plants of hardy roses were seen in the seventies on one lot of the H. E. Hooker and Brothers Nursery on East Avenue, not far from a tulip patch of James Vick, an acre in size, and described as "made up of numerous small squares or parallelograms of gay contrasting colors producing a brilliant effect." Henry B. Ellwanger, following in his father’s footsteps, contributed to the new taste for floriculture by publishing a distinctive book on The Rose in 1882.
The increasing attention given by the later nurseries of Rochester to flowers and ornamental trees gradually destroyed the clear differentiation which had distinguished their establishments from the gardens and greenhouses of the seedsmen. A few of the latter, notably Crosman on Monroe Avenue, had continued through the years to thrive on the reflected glory of the nurseries of Rochester. By the eighties, however, the reputation of such Rochester seedmen as James Vick, Hiram Sibley the successor to Briggs and Briggs, and Joseph Harris had spread throughout the land, and their mail-order technique gave them advantages which the nurserymen could not enjoy. The middleman, who in the nursery business grew into a local proprietor, did not play an important part in the seed trade, and the large-scale seedmen of Rochester continued, even after the decline of the local nursery trade, to add to the reputation of the Flower City.
This is not the place to recount in detail the development of this accessory industry, for its independent contribution entitles the local seed business, as well as the local agricultural press, to separate treatment. But the close ties between this trade and that of the nurserymen have required at least a passing notice. In addition to relationships already noted, the seed firms, as they developed their own roots in Rochester, competed more and more with the nurserymen for the choice garden plots about the city. Thus when James Vick’s thirty-five acres on East Avenue proved insufficient, he acquired a second track of sixty-five acres north of the city overlooking Lake Ontario — an extent of territory which exceeded all but three local nurseries of the eighties.
