Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/76

66 FRED LOCKLEY became head book-keeper at $150 a month. Still later I became manager of the store at $300 a month. Eventually I became one of the partners of the firm with Ben Selling and Frank Aiken. We sold out ni 1890. For 21 years I had worked steadily without taking a vacation and my health had become greatly impaired. I bought the ranch on which I now live, and drinking the water from the iron spring here and working outdoors restored my health completely. I had always been fond of nature and so took up horticulture as a hobby. I sent to France, Germany, England and to various other places for walnuts, as I believed that the Willamette Valley was adapted to grow- ing walnuts, although all my friends thought I was crazy. I bought 17 acres here at Dosch Station on Dosch Road 36 years ago. It is part of the old Clinton-Kelly donation land claim. When I was a boy in Germany the students of our school made two walking trips a year, spending a week at a time studying botany, horticulture and forestry. We stopped overnight at farmhouses or slept in barns. When I came to my place here, I remembered how greatly I had enjoyed studying horticulture and botany as a boy, so I began experimenting along horticultural lines. I made my vegetable garden support my family while I experi- mented with various fruits and nuts. I discovered that the reason that English walnuts had not done well in Oregon was that the right variety had not been brought here—that in many cases the male walnut blossom had bloomed and the bloom had dropped off before the female walnut flower blossomed. For 15 years I worked away at developing best types of walnut trees for the Willamette Valley and finally introduced the Franquette and Mayette walnuts. Then I began talking walnut growing. Charlie Ladd put out a lot of walnuts and so did Mr. Prince at Dundee. Then the McGill and McDonald nursery commercialized it and introduced them widely. Today California is send- ing to Oregon to secure Franquette walnut trees. From the few acres I planted for experimental purposes, the