Note 27 — Chapter IV · LEADING VARIETIES OF PEARS

General Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, who followed the vocation of a soldier, statesman, and author, chose as his avocation horticulture and in several of its fields became eminent. A native of New England (1783-1851), son of General Henry Dearborn of Revolutionary fame, he was early educated to the profession of law and pursued that vocation until the war with Great Britain in 1812. Services in this war brought him the rank and title of general. After the war he served as Collector of the Port of Boston, in Congress, and as Mayor of Roxbury, Massachusetts, which office he held at the time of his death. But it is as a patron, friend, and lover of horticulture that the life and work of General Dearborn interest pomologists. He was one of the charter members in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and a prime mover in its organization. He was elected its first president March 17, 1829. In the history of the Society published in 1880, of all the famous members of this truly remarkable organization, General Dearborn’s portrait was chosen for the frontispiece. He was early interested in experimental gardens and rural cemeteries. The plans for experimental gardens advocated by him were never fully carried out, but no doubt his enthusiasm for such gardens, with his own garden as a model, did much to stimulate the planting in America in the early half of the nineteenth century of the many famous gardens which adorned and enriched every center of culture along the Atlantic seaboard. He helped to establish the Mount Auburn and Forest Hills cemeteries, famous among Boston cemeteries, and the first of rural cemeteries in this country. His life-long devotion to rural art as exemplified in gardens and cemeteries knew no bounds. On these subjects and on pomology he contributed many articles to the agricultural and horticultural papers of his time. Few men, it can be said, could better concentrate their thoughts and feelings on paper than he seems to have done. Besides the many papers from his own pen he published several translated treatises from the French, chief of which was a monograph on the Camellia in 1838 and another on Morus multicaulis in 1830, the "Mulberry Craze" being in full swing at this time. General Dearborn was an ardent pear-grower and helped to test the hundreds of seedlings then being brought from Belgium and France and grew as well considerable numbers from his own seed-beds. Of all his seedlings, however, only Dearborn survives.