provision of law whereby any educational, scientific or charitable
association can be incorporated and become a body corporate with all of
the rights of any other corporation, so far as the corporate entity and
liability is concerned. The provision of the District Code is a very
liberal one and drafted to encourage such societies as this. The
committee therefore thought it better to incorporate under this
provision of the law than under that of some other state.
The advantages of incorporating a society of this kind are several. It
makes the action of the organization that of a legalized corporation and
takes away liability of individual members. If anyone should desire to
donate money to the organization, we would have a corporate entity that
would be responsible under the law for the safe handling of such funds.
Under the law we can hold such funds up to the point where the income is
not more than $25,000 a year. In the District of Columbia a corporation
can take title to real estate, transfer property and do all necessary
things in accordance with its by-laws. We therefore concluded that there
could be no objection to incorporating under such laws. So with the
consent of the other members of the committee, I prepared in my office
the proper certificate of incorporation which, under the requirements of
the Code of the District, are as follows:
KNOW ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS, That we, the undersigned, all of
whom are citizens of the United States and a majority of whom are
residents of the District of Columbia, desiring to associate
ourselves for scientific and educational purposes and for mutual
improvement; and to organize a corporation under sub-chapter three
(3) of the Incorporation Laws of the District of Columbia, as
provided in the Code of Law of the District of Columbia, enacted by
Congress and approved by the President of the United States, do
hereby certify:
FIRST: That the corporate name of this company shall be The
Northern Nut Growers Association, Incorporated.
SECOND: The term for which is it organized is perpetual.
THIRD: The particular business and objects of the society are the
promotion of interest in nut-bearing plants, their products and
their culture, and, in general, to do and to perform every lawful
act and thing necessary or expedient to be done or performed for
the efficient conduct of said business as authorized by the laws of
Congress, and to have and to exercise all the powers conferred by
the laws of the District of Columbia upon corporations under said
sub-chapter three (3) of the Incorporation Laws of the District of
Columbia.
FOURTH: The number of directors of the said corporation for the
first year of its existence shall be five.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF we have hereunto affixed our hands and seals
this 27th day of September A. D. 1923.
Karl W. Greene (Seal)
Albert R. Williams (Seal).
Thomas P. Littlepage (Seal).
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, TO WIT:
I, Alice B. Watt, a Notary Public in and for the District
aforesaid, do hereby certify that Karl W. Greene (of the District
of Columbia), Albert R. Williams (of the District of Columbia) and
Thomas P. Littlepage (of the State of Maryland), parties to the
foregoing and annexed certificate of Incorporation of _THE NORTHERN
NUT GROWERS ASSOCIATION, INCORPORATED_, bearing date on the 27th
day of September, 1923, personally appeared before me in the
District aforesaid the said Karl W. Greene, Albert R. Williams and
Thomas P. Littlepage, being personally known to me to be the
persons who made and signed the said certificate and severally
acknowledged the same to be their act and deed for the purposes
therein set forth.
WITNESS my hand and seal this 27th day of September, 1923.
ALICE R. WATT,
Notary Public.
My commission expires December 17, 1923.
The smallest number of members with which corporation is possible, is
three; so I secured two members, Mr. Greene and Mr. Williams, who,
together with myself, prepared this, and put it in proper form. We then
filed it with the Recorder of Deeds, keeping a copy for the files of the
incorporation. The Recorder received it, and the fact that he received
it was proof that it was satisfactory. We are now, therefore, a
corporation.
Of course, we want to put that machinery into action, but in order to do
so a board of directors has to be selected. Then will follow the
election of officers of the Association. Therefore, I have prepared a
report of the meeting of the incorporators, which I will read. As I
said, however, we did this to get the machinery into operation. Next
year the directors will be elected by the members.
MEETING OF THE INCORPORATORS OF THE NORTHERN NUT GROWERS ASSOCIATION,
INCORPORATED.
The organization meeting of the Incorporators of the Northern Nut
Growers Association, Incorporated, was held at Washington, D. C.,
September 28th, 1923, at 10:00 o'clock a. m.
Present: Karl W. Greene, Albert R. Williams, and Thomas P. Littlepage.
Upon motion, Thomas P. Littlepage became Chairman of the meeting.
Upon motion of Mr. Greene, seconded by Mr. Williams and unanimously
passed, the following were elected Directors of the Northern Nut Growers
Association, Incorporated, for the first year of its existence or
thereafter until the annual meeting of the company in 1924.
James S. McGlennon, of Rochester, New York.
W. C. Deming, of Hartford, Connecticut.
Willard G. Bixby, of Baldwin, Nassau Co., N. Y.
Harry R. Weber, of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Robert T. Morris, of New York, N. Y.
Upon motion of Mr. Greene seconded by Mr. Williams and unanimously
passed, by-laws of the corporation were adopted.
There being no further business, the meeting of the Incorporators
adjourned.
KARL W. GREENE,
ALBERT R. WILLIAMS,
THOMAS P. LITTLEPAGE,
Incorporators.
THE PRESIDENT: The next action, then, Mr. Littlepage, would be to get
the report of the nominating committee. I call for that now.
Mr. Littlepage: (Reads as follows):
MINUTES OF FIRST MEETING OF DIRECTORS OF THE NORTHERN NUT GROWERS
ASSOCIATION, INC.
The first meeting of the Directors of the Northern Nut Growers
Association, Incorporated, was held at Washington, D. C., September
28th, 1923.
Present: James S. McGlennon, Willard G. Bixby, Robert T. Morris.
Upon motion of Mr. Bixby seconded and unanimously passed, the following
officers were elected for the ensuing year, or thereafter until the
annual meeting of the Incorporation to be held in 1924:
President, Harry R. Weber; Vice-President, J. F. Jones; Treasurer, H. J.
Hilliard; Secretary, W. C. Deming.
There being no further business, the meeting adjourned.
WILLARD G. BIXBY,
Secretary of Directors' Meeting.
(The report was adopted by the convention).
REPORT OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE
_By Willard G. Bixby_
MR. BIXBY: The finance committee asks the association to instruct the
secretary in the printing of the next report to endeavor to reduce the
size to one-half of the present report.
(Adopted by the convention).
MR. BIXBY: I move as an amendment to Article Two of the By-Laws, that
annual membership be $3, or $5 including a year's subscription to the
Journal. Contributing members to pay $10, this including a year's
subscription to the Journal.
(Motion seconded and adopted by the convention, and the committee on
Incorporation discharged with the thanks of the association).
MR. LITTLEPAGE: I have nearly overlooked the fact that the organization
must now have a corporate seal, with an appropriate inscription. An
appropriate inscription would be "The Northern Nut Growers' Association,
Incorporated." All such seals generally carry some appropriate design,
and there are various ones to be had. I move that a committee of three
be appointed to determine upon the design of this seal, and then later,
if the chairman of the committee will send the design to me, I will have
the seal made and send it to the association.
(Motion seconded and adopted, and Dr. Deming, Mr. Bixby, and Dr. Morris
appointed as committee by the president).
After considerable discussion New York City was selected as the place
for the next convention and the dates Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,
September 3rd, 4th and 5th, 1924.
A vote of thanks to the president, Mr. James S. McGlennon, was adopted.
The secretary was also instructed to write to Mrs. Hutt expressing the
thanks of the convention for her address.
Dr. Oswald Schreiner of the Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Dept. of
Agriculture was then introduced and spoke as follows:
In the successful growing of pecan trees, the proper care of the orchard
is of enormous importance. (To illustrate this point, slides were shown
of a good orchard and a poor orchard on a rather thin soil in the
Coastal Plain Region. In the good orchard, the trees had been well cared
for, the soil fertilized by the growing of legumes and cover crops
plowed under; in the poor orchard, the trees had been neglected and the
soil impoverished by the continuous growing of cultivated crops, such as
cotton and corn. The two views very clearly showed which orchard was on
a paying basis and likely to prove a profitable investment). It is
needless to say that the crop from such a poor, intercropped orchard
would be meagre and unprofitable until the methods were changed. The
growing of legumes to furnish humus, and even the growing of winter
cover crops, such as rye, to be plowed under in the spring, cannot be
too strongly recommended as soil improvers.
When nut trees are grown in orchards, they can no longer be considered
as forest trees to be left to take care of themselves until a rich
harvest of nuts is produced, but must be cared for just as much as any
other fruit tree or cultivated crop or the harvest of nuts will never be
forthcoming.
The fertilizing of nut trees, however, offers more difficulties than do
the annual crops. Experiments on this subject have been few and the
information obtainable is rather meagre. Consequently, a few years ago,
the Office of Soil Fertility Investigation, which is conducting
fertilizer investigations on a large number of the annual crops grown on
the prominent soil types or soil regions of the United States, started,
in co-operation with the Office of Horticultural Investigations of the
Bureau of Plant Industry, a number of fertilizer experiments on pecan
orchards, involving a study of several soil types suitable for nut
production and attempting to ascertain the proper fertilizer
requirements for the pecan on these soils. While these experiments have
been running only five years, which in point of time is very small in
the life of a pecan tree, yet the different fertilizers employed already
show some highly interesting results, sufficient to indicate that
certain fertilizer applications undoubtedly influence the growth of the
tree, its productiveness, and quality of the nut produced.
The experimental fertilizer mixtures are all prepared here in Washington
in a fertilizer-mixing plant on the department's Arlington Farm, on the
Virginia side of the river. The fertilizer house is well stocked with
all of the various fertilizer substances used in agriculture, ready for
mixing; nitrate of soda from Chili, potash from France and Germany, and
our own far western states; cottonseed meal from the South, tankage and
dried blood from the slaughter houses of Chicago and Omaha, Tennessee or
Florida phosphates, and acid phosphate, ammonium sulfate from the coke
ovens of Pennsylvania, Thomas slag from England, in short, all sorts of
commercial materials from near and remote sources, for study and use in
fertilizers.
(Slides were then shown of the exterior and interior of the plant where
literally thousands of experimental fertilizer mixtures are prepared to
study the requirements of the various soils and crops, and are then
shipped in freight cars to the various experiment places. Two slides
showing the application of fertilizer in a large orchard where tractors
are employed in carrying on the various cultural operations and also in
a small orchard where hand labor is employed, were also shown).
The scheme of fertilizer experimentation adopted in this work is rather
complete and so planned as to include fertilizers carrying the principal
fertilizer constituents, phosphate, ammonia and potash, singly, in
combinations of two elements, and in combinations of three elements, in
various proportions in a regularly graded manner. The following scheme
illustrates these mixtures of different analyses, the first figure
denoting the percentage of phosphate, the second the percentage of
ammonia, and the third the percentage of potash in the fertilizer. The
various mixtures are numbered consecutively.
1
---
20-0-0
2 3
--- ---
16-0-4 16-4-0
4 5 6
--- --- ---
12-0-8 12-4-4 12-8-0
7 8 9 10
--- --- --- ---
8-0-12 8-4-8 8-8-4 8-12-0
11 12 13 14 15
--- --- --- --- ---
4-0-16 4-4-12 4-8-8 4-12-4 4-16-0
16 17 18 19 20 21
--- --- --- --- --- ---
0-0-20 0-4-16 0-8-12 0-12-8 0-16-4 0-20-0
It is quite apparent that in this scheme the entire field of fertilizer
formulas is covered in a regular way. In addition to this formula plan
other experiments are also under way to determine the influence of the
different fertilizing materials, carrying the phosphate, ammonia and
potash, and the influence of lime, rock phosphate, various green
manuring crops, etc. The experiments are carried out in commercial
orchards on several soil types and in several localities.
While the years the experiments have been running are yet too few for
any final conclusions, and the details too numerous to present in a
brief sketch here, there have nevertheless been some very interesting
results from the use of fertilizers which is readily shown by a few
lantern slides. Here is, for instance, a view of a fertilized and an
unfertilized section of one of our experiments in Georgia. The views
were obtained in the fall, and one could tell at a glance, not only that
the unfertilized trees were not as large, but also quite strikingly that
they had nearly lost all of their foliage, whereas the trees on the
fertilized section were still in full foliage, thus presenting a very
strong contrast. The effect of fertilizers on the foliage is shown also
in a series of slides of representative trees, from one of our
experiments in Louisiana, likewise taken in the fall. The first tree had
not been fertilized, the second had been fertilized with phosphate and
the third with potash. The one fertilized with phosphate appeared
slightly larger, but it can again be observed that all three trees were,
at the time the picture was taken, nearly three-fourths defoliated. The
next two trees from the same experiment, fertilized respectively with a
nitrogenous fertilizer and with a complete fertilizer, and photographed
at the same time, show the influence of these fertilizers strikingly in
that they are still in complete foliage, as well as showing a more
vigorous growth. Three slides of fertilized and unfertilized trees from
still different experiments all show the fuller foliage and better
branching of the fertilized trees, especially those fertilized with the
nitrogenous fertilizers or the complete fertilizers.
The yields of these trees cannot here be taken up but, in general, these
fertilized trees came into bearing earlier and have yielded double and
treble the number of nuts produced by the unfertilized trees.
(In conclusion, there was shown a slide of the yield of nuts from an
experimental tract of a commercial orchard of about 20 acres, in which
the yield from a fertilized acre was compared with the yield from an
unfertilized acre. It was noted that the unfertilized acre gave a yield
of approximately two barrels, whereas the fertilized acre gave an
increase of two bushel baskets more than the unfertilized.)
Dr. W. E. Safford, Botanist, Bureau of Plant Industry, then spoke on the
Use of Nuts by the Aboriginal Americans.
DR. SAFFORD: My interest in nuts has been confined almost entirely to
those of American origin. For a good many years, I have been studying
the plants, and plant products, utilized for food, and for other
purposes, by the aboriginal Americans, before the arrival in this
hemisphere of Columbus and his companions.
In this connection, there is a striking contrast between the American
Indians and the primitive Polynesians. The chief economic plants
encountered by early explorers on the islands of the Pacific Ocean were
identical with well known Asiatic species. Coconuts, breadfruit, taro,
sugar cane, yams and bananas, the most important food staples of the
Polynesians, had been known to the Old World for centuries before the
Pacific Islands were visited by Europeans; the shrub, from the bark of
which the Polynesians made their tapa cloth, was identical with the
paper mulberry of China and Japan; and the principal screwpine, or
Pandanus, from which the Polynesians made their mats, was a well-known
species of southern Asia. A number of these plants had even carried
their Asiatic names with them to Polynesia. The Polynesian language
itself, with its varied dialects, spoken in Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand,
Easter Island and on other island groups, can be traced without
difficulty to the Malay Archipelago, the cradle of the Polynesian race.
In America, on the other hand, every cultivated plant encountered by
Columbus and his companions was new. Not a single Old World food crop
had found its way to our hemisphere before the Discovery; not a grain of
wheat, rye, oats, or barley; no peas, cabbage, beets, turnips,
watermelon, musk-melon, egg-plant, or other Old World vegetable; no
apple, quince, pear, peach, plum, orange, lemon, mango, or other Old
World fruit, had reached America. Even the cotton which was encountered
in the West Indies by Columbus the very morning after the Discovery,
proved to be a distinct species and could not be made to hybridize with
Old World cottons. Conversely, no American cultivated plants; no maize,
no beans, tomatoes, potatoes, sweet potatoes; no cacao (from which
chocolate is made); no pine-apples, avocadoes, custard apples nor
guavas; no Brazil nuts, pecans, or hickory nuts; nor any other American
food staple had found their way to the Old World; even the beeches,
chestnuts, oaks, and maples were distinct; and the same is true of the
New World ground nuts and the grapes, which were the parent species of
our delicious American varieties. Quite unlike anything in the Old World
were such cultivated plants as the Cactaceae, the capsicum peppers, and
the manioc from which cassava is made.
In Polynesia the evidence thus offered by cultivated plants points to
the spread of Asiatic culture eastward across the Pacific, while the
peculiarities of the cultivated plants of America point to its isolation
from all the rest of the world; an isolation which is further
established by a radical dissimilarity of all American languages from
Old World linguistic stocks. In no language of the New World, for
example, is there a vestige of Hebrew, which would support the cherished
theory of the migration to this continent of the lost tribes of Israel;
nor is there a suggestion of any linguistic element to indicate
connection with the Chinese, nor any relationship between the builders
of the American pyramids and those of Egypt.
There are many distinct groups of American languages. Very often the
language of a tribe is quite unlike that of its nearest neighbors; while
at the same time it may resemble the languages of tribes quite remote.
This fact indicates former segregation of the various groups speaking
the unlike languages and a common ancestry or close association of the
tribes speaking the allied dialects. As examples, I might mention the
Quichua Indians of Peru, whose language is very unlike the languages
spoken by the Arawak and Carib Indians to their northward and, at the
same time, quite distinct from the languages of their Brazilian
neighbors to the eastward. The Aztecs of Mexico spoke a language
differing radically in structure as well as in vocabulary from the Maya
language of their Yucatan neighbors; yet there is unquestionably a
relationship between the Aztecs and a number of very distant tribes,
shown by resemblances of their languages, as in the case of the Shoshone
Indians of the northern United States and the Nuhuatl tribes of Salvador
and Costa Rica. In the same way, the Algonquian dialects, which differ
greatly from those of the Iroquoian, show a close relationship between
very widely scattered tribes in North America, from North Carolina to
Quebec. Such resemblances and radical differences point to a very remote
and long-continued segregation which permitted the independent formation
of distinct linguistic stocks; while the antiquity of man in America,
both north and south of the equator, is further attested by the
development of such a cultivated and highly specialized food staple as
maize, whose ancestral prototype we have sought in vain. Its endless
varieties, fitted for widely diverse conditions of soil and climate,
also point to a long period of cultivation in dissimilar culture-areas,
which enabled them to adapt themselves to conditions very different from
those of the original stock from which they sprang.
All this evidence points to the peopling of this continent at a very
remote time, perhaps as far back as the close of the Glacial Epoch; and
it also indicates that the early progenitors of our Indian tribes had
left their original homes in the Old World before any of the linguistic
Old-World stocks had taken shape; before Sanscrit was Sanscrit; before
the languages of China or any other Asiatic people had become
established; and just as in this hemisphere the natives developed their
own languages from the most primitive elements of speech, so most
certainly did they develop their agriculture from the wild plants of the
fields, the swamps, the hillsides, and the forests. In both respects, as
I have already pointed out, they differed from the Polynesians who
brought with them to their island homes not only their language but
their agriculture, from the cradle of their race in the Malay
Archipelago; cuttings of seedless breadfruit and of sugarcane, fleshy
roots of taro and yams; even trees, like the Indian almond and the
candlenut.