The Savannah Tribune

SEEDLESS ORANGES

Are Responsible For Millions of California's Wealth.

The introduction of the seedless navel orange has revolutionized the orange industry of the United States. It has drawn 13,000 men from other pursuits and transformed vast areas of sunbaked land in California into orange groves.

It has been the prime factor in the growth of a dozen towns of 5000 and 10,000 persons in southern California and has added directly more than $43,000,000, and indirectly $60,000,000 more to the taxable wealth of the State.

The first seedless orange trees were apparently freaks of nature and their counterparts have never been found. Early in the '70's William Judson, United States consul to Bahia, Brazil, heard an account from natives of a few trees in the swamps on the banks of the Amazon, some sixty miles away. He sent a native up the river to get some of the fruit and to bring him some of the shoots of the tree.

When the native returned the consul was delighted with the specimens and sent six of the shoots, carefully packed in moss and clay, to the Department of Agriculture at Washington. The trees did not excite much interest at the department. Two which were planted in the department grounds died for lack of care and others were forgotten for months.

The crop of the first years netted sixteen seedless oranges, and those were exhibited all over California. There were about a box of oranges in the second yield and they were even better than the first crop. The planting of groves of seedless oranges propagated from the buds from the two original trees began in earnest in 1882. The following year the demand for buds from the Tibbet trees were so large that a dozen buds sold frequently for $5, and some growers paid even as high as $1 apiece for them.