wers on the tracks at 14th St. and New York Avenue at 12:45, which
will take you to Bell Station where you will see Dr. Van Fleet's roses
and chestnut orchard. A short walk from there is the old place of Judge
Gabriel Duvall, a former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme
Court, member of Congress and a great friend of Thomas Jefferson. The
unpublished manuscripts of Jefferson show that he took to Judge Duvall a
bundle of "paccan" trees, as he called them. Jefferson was one of our
great horticulturists and gave the first complete botanical
classification of the pecan. Those three big trees that Jefferson gave
Judge Duvall are growing out there today and from them are scores of
other small trees. I was very much surprised when I read these notes of
Jefferson and in looking through Washington's dairy about the same time
I read where he said that Thomas Jefferson gave him a bundle of "paccan"
trees. Now those of you who are to visit Mount Vernon on this trip look
and you will find that three of the most beautiful trees there are pecan
trees. Two of them this year have nuts on them one with a rather full
crop and one with a light crop. They are undoubtedly the western or
northern pecan. They show that in the character of the nuts and bark.
When Jefferson was over in Paris he wrote to his friend Hopkins to send
him a box of pecans and told him to send them in sand. Those of you who
are going to Paris next summer look around and you may find some of
Thomas Jefferson's pecan trees. It was perfectly apparent that he wanted
those nuts for planting.

After visiting at Bell Station we will take the car up to my place where
there really is not much to see. I have thirty acres there of northern
pecan trees, twelve acres two years old and they run all the way up to
six years of age. Most of the six-year old trees this year set pecans
which dropped off about the middle of the summer. They were all full of
catkins. One Busseron tree had fifty pecans on it and a number of Major
and Butterick trees had pecans but I do not believe they stuck. I had a
Stuart which had a sprinkling of pecans on it and they also fell off. I
can show you how not to grow trees. Some of them had no care whatever
and some had pretty fair care. You can see dead chestnut trees up there
showing that the blight is as bad as Dr. Van Fleet says. We find where
they stand in the woods for ten years surrounded by trees with the
blight and do not blight and the ne