1875 - Agriculture

Agriculture

The end of Comanche resistance opens the Texas prairie to settlement by white ranchers.

Illinois-born promoter John Warne Gates, 20, puts on a demonstration at San Antonio to show that barbed wire is safe and effective. He turns the main plaza of the town into a giant corral that can hold long-horned cattle (see Glidden, Haish, 1873). Barbed wire will begin the end of the open range in America and launch the career of "Bet-you-a-million" Gates (see 1877; 1898).

U.S. Grangers fail in a scheme to produce farm equipment (see 1872). The Grange has bought up patents for cultivators, seeders, mowers, reapers, and many other machines and implements and has begun to manufacture them, but the effort falls victim to patent suits, lack of capital, defective machines, and lack of cooperation in a society of rural individualists.

Combines come into use on some U.S. wheat farms.

The first American state agricultural experiment station is established July 20 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Luther Burbank establishes a nursery at Santa Rosa, California, with money obtained from the sale of his 1872 Burbank potato. He will develop new forms of food and ornamental plant life by selection and cross-fertilization (see Shull, 1905).

A Chinese orchardman in Oregon develops the Bing cherry.

Apples ripen for the first time in Washington's Yakima Valley.

Navel oranges produced at Riverside, California, are the first ever seen in the United States and will be called Washington oranges (because the first trees came from Washington, D.C.) as the seedless winter-ripening fruit proliferates to dominate California groves. The U.S. Department of Agriculture received a dozen budded seedlings from Bahia, Brazil, in 1871, and Riverside growers Jonathan and Eliza C. Tibbetts obtained two of the trees from the USDA 2 years ago (see Orange Growers Protective Union, 1885; Valencias, 1906).