"As early as 1763 the tree was very old and decayed. It was very
much injured in the gale of 1804. In the gale of 1815 it was so much
shattered that its recovery was considered doubtful. It was injured
again in a gale about 1843. For the last fifty years it has been
protected by a fence around it. In 1837 it was eighty feet high by
measurement and fifty-five feet in the circumference of its branches,
and does not probably vary much from these dimensions now. Two suckers
have sprung up on opposite sides of the tree, which bear the same
fruit as the original, proving it to be ungrafted. It stands near the
site of the first mansion of the Governor, on a slope where it is
somewhat sheltered from the north and north-west winds. The soil is a
light loam, with a substratum of clay. Grafts taken from the old tree
grow very vigorously. From a pomological point of view, the fruit is
of no value. It is hardly of medium size, roundish, green, with more
or less rough russet, very coarse, and soon decays.
"It may be of interest to state that the farm on which the old tree
stands is again in the Endicott name, having lately been purchased by
a descendant of the Governor. The tree stands in the town of Danvers
originally a part of Salem.
"For further facts concerning this tree, see the _Transactions of the
Massachusetts Horticultural Society_ for 1837, and also an article
by Charles M. Endicott, a descendant of the Governor, in Hovey's
_Magazine of Horticulture_, vol. xix, p. 254, June, 1853, from which
the above account has been mainly derived. Each of these articles is
illustrated with a cut of the pear.
"The _Orange_ Pear. This tree is owned by Capt. Charles H. Allen,
and stands in his yard on Hardy street, Salem. The Rev. Dr. Bentley,
who died about 1820, investigated the history of this tree and found
it to be then 180 years old, which would make it now 235 years old.
The trunk is hollow, nine feet five inches in circumference in the
smallest part near the ground; just below the limbs it is several
inches more. The tree is more than forty feet high, and the limbs are
supported by shores. It was grafted in the limbs, as a branch fifteen
or twenty years old, shooting out several feet higher than a man's
head, produces 'Button' pears, and a large limb, part of which was
'Button' which grew out still higher up, was blown off several years
ago. In the very favorable pear season of 1862 it bore thirteen and a
half bushels of pears. It bears in alternate years, having produced
eight and a half bushels in 1873. The brittleness of the limbs of
old pear trees is well known, yet Capt. Allen, with a care worthy of
imitation, gathers every pear, excepting about a dozen specimens, by
hand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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