Looking through the records of the hundred years of peach-growing in western New York, we find little to indicate that yellows has ever been the scourge in this region that it is pictured to have been eastward and southward or even westward in Michigan. The explanation? Growers, as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly-dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of every tree.[225] But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: "In Western New York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by cultivators that it be not introduced by importations."[226] In New York the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of fruit-growing than in other eastern states. This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. A. M. Smith,[227] writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high-colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a prominent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before having produced a crop. Later, 1887,[228] Mr. Woodward, speaking for his neighborhood, says that yellows has "nearly finished the orchards."[229] To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, we have from Col. F. D. Curtis[230] the report, in 1887, that yellows had destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 1916, yellows may almost be said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York.