ard Taylor of Alpine, Tennessee,
will next read a paper on The Marketing of Black Walnuts as a Community
Project. Mr. Taylor.

Marketing Black Walnuts as a Community Project

THE REV. BERNARD TAYLOR, Alpine, Tennessee

The Rev. Mr. Taylor: I suppose that every community where black walnuts
grow wild has a marketing of some kind, some kind of a plan of
marketing, maybe just what every boy or every man who has some spare
time or some of the womenfolks may do to make something out of the
walnuts that are lying around.

In the community of Alpine, which is in Overton County, people used to
go out on the ridge with wagons and bring home wagonloads of walnuts,
and they would sell them either in the shell or they would crack them
and sell them in pretty poor condition, however they could sell them.
When we first began selling walnut kernels in Alpine we got 19 cents a
pound for the kernels, and that was more than they were worth, I
believe, because they were dirty, greasy, and they had mildew gobs in
the bunches of kernels. So I don't know how the rolling stores that came
around that way could make anything out of them trading them in at that
price.

Then we began to study the Government bulletins on how to produce good
walnut kernels, and there is a good bulletin on that; all of you are
acquainted with it, probably. When we began to harvest those nuts and
hull them as quickly as we could and wash them and dry them out
thoroughly and then crack them before they got too dry, we organized
what was called the Walnut Club. This Walnut Club mostly was composed of
some of the women of the community who lived up in one little cove where
the limestone outcroppings seem to favor the walnut and the air drainage
or whatever it was seemed to favor the crop yields rather regularly. We
don't have an every-year good walnut crop.

Well, these women got finally so that they could get 35 cents a pound
for their walnut kernels, then 45 cents a pound. Then we found a good
friend in Pennsylvania who would take those kernels, all we could send
her, and put them up in little pound packages and sell them for whatever
she could get and send us all the money. That's altogether contrary to
Hoyle I guess.

You merchants, if there are some of you here, who are dealers in walnut
kernels know that our people were just getting spoiled. Anytime now that
a merchant says, "I will give you such-and-such a price for the walnuts
and then I will se