The peach-industry began in Delaware about 1830 and there are few references to peach-yellows until a decade or two after that time, though Dr. John J. Black says that the disease had been known in the State "since the war of 1812."[248] The yellows-sweep really began in the northern part of Delaware in New Castle County, in the early forties, when, according to John Delano, Isaac Reeves' peach-trees were dying of yellows by the score "maugre all his care, cultivation and circumspection."[249] In 1846, James W. Thompson, in a splendid account of the peach-industry in Delaware, names the borer and yellows as the two devastating enemies of this fruit and speaks of the latter as a "constitutional, consumptive or marasmatic disease for which no other remedy is known or to be practiced, but extirpation and destruction."[250] "By 1855 the yellows had taken possession of nearly all the orchards, and peach culture in this section was at an end."[251] Yet in the same county, about Middletown, but a few miles to the south, the disease though present was not epidemic nor did it become so until twenty years later. With the passing of the orchards in northern New Castle, the southern part of the county became the center of the industry in Delaware. Here, in the early seventies, there were from 1,000,000 to 1,750,000 trees covering from 10,000 to 17,500 acres.[252] Yellows, according to numerous accounts, became virulent about 1870, was at its height in 1875, after which the progress and outcome of the epidemic is essentially the same as in the northern part of the county--the yellows-sweep was driving slowly but surely southward. Thus, in 1880, the center of the industry was in Kent County, second south of the three counties in Delaware, there being in 1879, according to the census of 1880, nearly 2,000,000 trees covering nearly 20,000 acres in this county. Yellows, present and widespread at an early date in Kent, was not alarmingly destructive until the summers of 1886 and 1887, when in the northern two-thirds of the county the disease "spread like wild fire." At this time and as late as 1890, there was little yellows in southern Kent and northern Sussex, but before the end of the century the whole State had been swept by yellows. There are no census figures for peaches until 1890 when the number of bearing trees in Delaware was 4,521,623. The toll taken by yellows, augmented by San Jose scale, is indicated by the falling off in number of trees in the next decade, at the end of which there were 2,441,650 trees and after another decade, 1909, but 1,177,402 trees.