It would be hard to find a part of the earth better fitted in soil and climate for sure and abounding harvests of peaches than the Chesapeake peach-belt extending up through Maryland and taking in Delaware, New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. We may be sure, then, that if the Indians were growing peaches in the abundance described by Penn in what is now Philadelphia, peach-orchards were not less common in all of the Chesapeake belt. That the whole region was bountifully supplied with this delicious fruit when settled by whites is further indicated, however, in a letter written by Mahlon Stacy from the "Falls of the Delaware," New Jersey, in 1680, to his brother Revell in England. He says:[121] "I have travelled through most of the places that are settled, and some that are not; and in every place I find the country very apt to answer the expectation of the diligent. I have seen orchards laden with fruit to admiration; their very limbs torn to pieces by the weight, and most delicious to the taste and lovely to behold. I have seen an apple tree from a pippin kernel yield a barrel of curious cider, and peaches in such plenty that some people took their carts a peach gathering; I could not but smile at the conceit of it; they are very delicate fruit, and hang almost like our onions that are tied on ropes." We are told in Watson's Annals of Philadelphia[122] that one of the remarkable characteristics of Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1700 was that the whole of the main street, one mile in length, "was fronted with blooming peach trees." An account of peaches in the Delaware region as late as the middle of the Eighteenth Century shows that even then the peach was regarded as indigenous "like maize and tobacco." This quotation, too, is interesting because it gives a glimpse of cultural methods, kinds, uses and danger from frost. The author was a Swedish clergyman, a resident of the region for some years. He writes:[123] "Peach trees stand within an enclosure by themselves; grow even in the stoniest places without culture. The fruit is the most delicious that the mouth can taste, and often allowable in fevers. One kind, called clingstones, are considered the best; in these the stones are not loose from the fruit as in the others. Many have peach orchards chiefly for the purpose of feeding their swine, which are not allowed to run at large. They first bloom, in March, the flowers coming out before the leaves, and are often injured by the frosts; they are ripe toward the close of August. This fruit is regarded as indigenous, like maize and tobacco; for as far as any Indians have been seen in the interior of the country these plants are found to extend."