Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Langdon's Earliana Tomatoes

From Historical Sketches of Franklin County, New York (1918) by Frederick J. Seaver, p.263:
The soil [in the town of Constable], though generally light, is rich and heavy in a few localities. Market gardening is practiced successfully and upon a large scale, especially by Herbert P. Langdon & Son, successors to Fayette Langdon & Son, who entered upon the business some fifteen years ago. Their first venture was melon raising, which was successful for a time, but latterly has been a failure, and therefore abandoned. At present the concern's specialties are early cabbages, early corn, early tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers, etc. Of corn they market forty to fifty thousand cars in a season, and of tomatoes eight hundred to a thousand bushels. Most of their products are shipped to summer hotels in the Adirondacks at fancy prices, though considerable quantities are sold in Malone also. They have developed a particularly early and fine tomato, called the Langdon Strain of Earlianas, from the most carefully selected specimens of which they put up large quantities of seeds for sale to seedsmen. For the choicest of these seeds they have no difficulty in disposing of all they raise at five dollars per ounce, with other grades selling at varying figures down to sixty cents per ounce. They had a contract in 1916, outside of the Earliana seed, to furnish a large house with all of the seed from two acres that were cultivated solely for this purpose. Their tomato seeds alone brought them two thousand four hundred dollars in 1915!
From the Weekly Market Grower's Journal, January 20, 1912:



From The Southern Planter, January 1911:

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