Note 265 — Chapter V · LEADING VARIETIES OF PEACHES (continued 3)

Theodatus Timothy Lyon, fruit-grower, experimenter and writer, was for many years the leading pomological authority of his adopted State, Michigan. T. T. Lyon, as he always signed his name, was born in Lima, New York, January 13, 1813, and died in South Haven, Michigan, February 6, 1900. At the age of fifteen he moved with his parents to Michigan where until his thirty-first year, in 1844, he worked at most of the arts and crafts practiced by pioneers in a new country. In the year named, he began the career of horticulturist, by planting a nursery at Plymouth, Michigan. In the nearby regions French missionaries had early planted orchards and old settlers had long been importing varieties of fruit. The nomenclature of these fruits was in uttermost confusion. T. T. Lyon set himself the task of ascertaining the correct names of these varieties in the old settlements of the State. The result was he became the pomological authority of the State. In 1874 Mr. Lyon moved to the famous "peach-belt" of western Michigan, where he lived until his death. Here, at first, he was president of a prominent nursery company. In 1876 he was elected president of the State Horticultural Society and continued as its active president until 1891 and from then on until his death was honorary president. In 1888 T. T. Lyon wrote a History of Michigan Horticulture which was published in the Seventeenth Report of the State Horticultural Society. From the beginning of his interests in horticulture in southwestern Michigan Mr. Lyon was particularly interested in peaches—growing seedlings, testing new varieties, planting orchards and in every way helping to forward the great peach-industry of the region. He was probably, in his time, the best informed, the most accurate and the most critical judge of peaches in this country. In 1889 he was given charge of the South Haven Sub-station of the Michigan Experiment Station which gave him added facilities for studying and describing fruits and a means of publishing, through his connection with the Experiment Station, bulletins on fruits. These, for accuracy of description of varieties, are still unsurpassed among American pomological publications. Besides these bulletins, the fruit-lists in the reports of the Michigan Horticultural Society and in the American Pomological Society, during the last half of the Nineteenth Century, show the results of his accurate judgment of fruits. A modest man, shrinking from publicity, his printed works but poorly represent his vast knowledge of fruits and his great influence in the betterment of American pomology.