tions. It seems to me he has been lavish with you
people, especially in New York and all through the middle West and the
East. You have so many things. Why should you want to grab off the nut
business? But just for the sake of letting you have a little variety and
having some real good things to eat, I am willing to have you discover
some real good commercial nut and then the time will come when we will
have this national organization.

I am going to tell you a little bit about the history of the pecan. I
think you would be interested in that. The cultivated pecan is of
comparatively recent history. It is not so long since those who were in
the South dreaming of a commercial nut were in very much the same
position as this association is here, although the South seemed to be
the natural place for the pecan. There were no commercial pecan orchards
twenty years ago. There were wild groves in the river bottoms of Texas
which there are today, but there were practically no cultivated pecans.
There were actually no bearing groves of cultivated pecans. It is only
a matter of fifteen or eighteen years that the cultivated pecan has been
commercially planted.

I think our concern was among the earliest. I think we may claim to be
the very first who, in a large way, planted pecans. We did not start
with the intention of planting them in a large way. It was a sort of
natural growth. It was only sixteen years ago this month, sixteen years
ago, that I first heard of the paper shell pecan from John Craig of
Cornell University; right under the shade of where we are meeting
tonight I first heard of the paper shell pecan and was induced to put a
little money in planting groves. I think I may say that New York State,
through the instrumentality of old John Craig, can take credit for the
start of the great commercial pecan groves of the South. Since that time
pecan groves have been planted very extensively. I don't think that any
accurate statistics are obtainable of the acreage planted to pecan
groves in the district in which we are located in southwest Georgia, but
in an area of probably forty or fifty miles I imagine there are
seventy-five thousand acres of pecan groves. They have not all proven
successful. Some have been planted on soil that was not adapted and
there are some cases of insufficient or unwise care, and some of not
having the proper stock to plant. For one reason or another a good many
groves have not proven successful to