he acknowledged autocrat of all the native nuts is the hickory. Perhaps
not all the experts admit this leadership but it is certainly the
opinion held by most people. Of course, when I speak of the hickory nut
in this high regard, I refer to the shagbark hickory which, as a wild
tree, is native as far north as the 43rd parallel in Minnesota and
Wisconsin, and somewhat farther in the eastern states.

Wild hickory nuts have been commercialized only to a slight extent. Its
crops are almost entirely consumed in the locality in which they are
grown by those people who find great pleasure in spending fine autumn
days gathering them. The obvious reason why hickory nuts have not been
made a product of commerce lies in the nut itself, which is usually very
small and which has a shell so strong and thick that the kernel can be
taken out only in small pieces. The toughness of the shell makes
cracking difficult, too, and since only rarely is one found that can be
broken by a hand cracker, it is necessary to use the flatiron-and-hammer
method. It is quite possible, though, that some day the hickory will
rival or exceed its near relative, the wild pecan, in commercial favor.
The wild pecans which formerly came on the market at Christmastime in
mixtures of nuts were just as difficult to extract from their shells as
the wild shagbark hickory nuts are now. By means of selection and
cultivation, the pecan was changed from a small, hard-to-crack nut to
that of a large thin-shelled nut whose kernel was extractable in whole
halves. Among many thousands of wild pecan trees were a few which bore
exceptionally fine nuts, nuts similar to those now found at every
grocery store and called "papershell" pecans. These unusual nuts were
propagated by grafting twigs from their parent trees on ordinary wild
pecan trees whose own nuts were of less value. These grafted trees were
set out in orchards where they produce the millions of pounds of
high-grade pecans now on the market.

The question which naturally occurs is, "Why hasn't this been done with
hickory nuts?" Hundreds of attempts have been made to do so, by the
greatest nut propagators in the United States. They have been successful
in grafting outstanding varieties of hickory to wild root stocks but the
time involved has prevented any practical or commercial success, since
most grafted hickories require a period of growth from ten to twenty
years before bearing any nuts. This length of time contr