Northern Nut Growers Association Annual Report, 1917 | Page 4

include in his estimates of appropriations for the next fiscal year a sum sufficient, in his judgment, to enable the department to carry on a continuous survey of nut culture, including the investigation and study of nut trees throughout the northern states, such nut trees including all the native varieties of nuts, hickories, walnuts, butternuts and any sub-divisions of those varieties, and that a committee of three be appointed to interview the secretary personally to have this amount included in the appropriation.
[Motion carried.]
Mr. Olcott recalled that last year the National Nut Growers' Association secured an appropriation, and he suggested that this would make it easier for the Northern Nut Growers to do so this year.
MR. BARTLETT: It occurred to me that the boy scouts, with their great membership and being often out in the woods, would be valuable to the nut growers' association in hunting native nuts. I took up the matter with Dr. Bigelow of the Agassiz Association, who is also Scout Naturalist and I think he can tell us more about getting the boy scouts interested.
DR. BIGELOW: I would suggest that you enlist also the interest of other organizations for outdoor life. If I knew a little more definitely what is wanted it could be exploited in definite terms in Boys' Life, the official organ of the Boy Scouts of America, which has a mailing list of over 100,000, and which reaches ten or twenty boys each copy. So you have nigh on to 1,000,000 members who would be reached in this way. My predecessor, Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton, has organized the Woodcrafters, which consists of both boys and girls. It seems to me that their service should be enlisted. They have done remarkably good work. And there are other organizations such as the Camp Fire Girls. I would suggest that some of you formulate a resolution and let me have a copy of it to publish in Boys' Life.
DR. MORRIS: I will say one word in harmony with Dr. Bigelow and the possibility of enlisting the interest of these organizations. One of our members, I think Mr. Weber, has found on a tributary of the Ohio River a thin shelled black walnut that came down with the flood. He has found two specimens at the mouth of the stream and he knows that this particular thin shelled black walnut grows somewhere up that stream. He would give $50 to anybody who would find that black walnut tree.
I will give five dollars every year to any boy scout who wins any of our prizes. That is a permanent offer. Or I will enlarge it perhaps, after we discuss the matter further by including the Camp Fire Girls. I will add others to that list. I will give five dollars to any member of one of those organizations affiliated with us who wins any nut prize in any year, in addition to our regular prizes. Furthermore we will offer to name any prize nut after the discoverer, so that his or her name will go down in history, perhaps causing much fame.
DR. BIGELOW: I have had my attention called to the fact that in the West the beech trees are heavily laden with nuts. It suddenly dawned on me that in all of my boyhood experience as a hunter and tramper, I had never seen one edible beech nut in Connecticut. I know there are many beech trees around Stamford, but I have not been able to find any nuts. I have advertised for them but although I have received more than a hundred packages from over the rest of the country, I have not seen one single beech nut from Connecticut. Some of the old-timers say they were once plentiful. I wonder whether beech nuts have disappeared from Connecticut as have potato balls.
DR. MORRIS: In the lime stone regions they commonly fill well. I have a great many beech trees on my place from one year to more than one hundred years of age, and they came from natural seeding, but the seeds in this part of Connecticut are very small and shrivelled. They are not valuable like the ones in western New York, for instance, and I do not remember even as a boy to have known of eastern beech trees with well-filled nuts. Many of these inferior nuts will sprout, however.
MR. LITTLEPAGE: I think Dr. Bigelow has hit upon a point of a great deal of interest. For example, on my farm in Maryland I think there are perhaps three or four hundred beech trees of various sizes, probably none of them under ten years of age and up to fifty, and in the four years that I have been observing these beech trees, there has never grown upon them a single full, fertile beech nut.