"The Hon. Timothy Pickering, eminent for his incorruptible integrity and immovable firmness, who successively held the offices of Adjutant-general and Quartermaster-general in the Revolutionary army, and of Postmaster-general, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President Washington, and continued to hold the last named office under President Adams, was a brother of John. At the breaking out of the Revolution he was Colonel of the Essex regiment, and on the day when this tree was grafted by John Pickering, who was an invalid, his more vigorous brother mustered his regiment and marched to intercept the retreating British troops. Timothy Pickering was also interested in agriculture, having been Secretary of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, the oldest agricultural society in the United States, and after his return to Massachusetts, was the first President of the Essex County Agricultural Society. The estate on which the old pear tree stands was devised by John Pickering, who died unmarried, to his nephew John, son of Timothy, the most eminent American philologist of his time. On his death, it descended to his son John, the present owner, to whom I am indebted for the facts here stated, as well as for the specimens of fruit exhibited at Chicago last September." Out of an embarrassing number of references in regard to the early introduction of the pear in New England one may choose the following: Francis Higginson, writing in 1629, notes that pears are under cultivation in New England.[6] In the same year, a memorandum of the Massachusetts Company shows that seeds of pears, with those of other fruits were sent to the colony.[7] Trees from these seeds grew amazingly fast in the virgin soils of the colony, for John Josselyn, who made voyages to New England in 1638 and 1639, writing in his _New England Rarities Discovered_, notes that "fruit trees prosper abundantly" enumerating, among others, those of the pear.[8] Josselyn further says "the Kernels sown or Succors planted produce as fair and good fruit, without grafting, as the trees from which they were taken," and that "the Countrey is replenished with fair and large Orchards." As early as 1641 a nursery had been started in Massachusetts and no doubt was selling pear-trees. These probably came from seeds, for trees were not imported until in the next century. Varieties were few then as for many years later. In 1726, Paul Dudley, one of the Chief Justices of Massachusetts, in a paper in the _Philosophical Transactions_, says, "Our apples are without doubt as good as those of England, and much fairer to look to, and so are the pears, but we have not got all the sorts." In another paragraph, Justice Dudley gives the following account of several varieties of pears in these first orchards in New England.