nament the lawn of his home at Mount Vernon.[1] Large, beautiful, healthy pecan trees are scattered through northern Virginia, northern Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania, in a climate typified by that of Philadelphia.[2]
- ↑ According to the Proceedings of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, 1925, p. 98. Thomas Jefferson presented George Washington with some pecan nuts which he planted with his own hand around Mount Vernon. March 25, 1775. According to the late C. S. Sargent, director of the famous Arnold Arboretum, these trees, now respectively 86, 97, and 98 feet high, "probably have not lived out half their lives." De Courset, a Frenchman who served with Washington, left a record that "the celebrated gentleman always had his pockets full of these nuts, and he was constantly eating them." It is amazing and also suggestive to know that Washington's fruitful diary speaks of them as paccane or IIlinois nuts.
- ↑ I know a pecan tree near Hughesville, in Loudoun County. Virginia, forty-five miles northwest of Washington, at an elevation of five hundred feet, in a climate almost identical with that of Philadelphia, except that it has greater extremes of cold (—30°F.). That tree is about eight feet in circumference, eighty feet high, with a spread of seventy feet, bearing fruit and according to the oldest inhabitant of a generation now gone, it is about a hundred years old. A few miles away at the county seat of Leesburg there is another old pecan tree with a girth of eight feet four inches and with a spread of ninety feet. Harry R. Weber, of Cincinnati, Ohio, reports a southern pecan tree about one hundred years old at Lebanon, thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, girth twelve feet eleven inches, spread ninety-three feet, height eighty feet. The Illinois origin of a perfectly healthy specimen at Mont Alto, Pennsylvania, altitude 1,100 feet, raises the interesting question of the origin of many of these northern pecan trees of great size. "In the village of Mont Alto, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a tree is growing with the following data: Diameter breast high (D.B.H.) 22 inches; total height, 55 feet: clear length of trunk, 15 feet: height of crown, 40 feet; width of crown, 40 feet; age, 47 years. This tree bears fruit every year. The quantity is, however, small considering the size of the tree. The owner said the yield was about seven quarts above the amount that his own and his neighbors' children ate. I must admit that I would not wish to estimate the annual consumption by the children. I was told by a reliable person that this tree grew from a small tree that was brought from Illinois by a son of the then owner of the property. The son was later elected mayor of Quincy, Illinois, but as, to whether he got the tree at or near Quincy, Illinois, I am not able to say." (J. L. Illick (now State Forester), Mont Alto, Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Department of Forestry, State Forest Academy, June 5, 1915.) A tree at Colemansville, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is nine feet, ten inches in circumference at two feet from the ground, stands on a rocky
