Note 223 — Chapter III · LEADING VARIETIES OF PLUMS. (continued 7)

J. W. Kerr, one of the best informed and most enthusiastic cultivators of native and Triflora plums, was born in York County, Pennsylvania, January 23, 1842. He is of Scotch-Irish lineage paternally and of English ancestors maternally. His education at the village school was supplemented by several years teaching and much reading and study in horticultural literature, fondness for which seems to have been inborn. In his early manhood Mr. Kerr engaged in growing trees for sale, a business with which he soon combined a fruit plantation in which he collected and tested all the plums that could be grown in his climate, comprising the great majority of the varieties of American species and of the Oriental plums. This work began in 1870, since which time no man has done more to popularize and improve native plums than Mr. Kerr. His most valuable work has been in testing varieties, where his knowledge of this fruit, his judgment and his sense of discrimination have made his opinion, as set forth in his nursery catalog and in the reports of horticultural societies, authoritative. He has, too, done considerable work in breeding plums, Choptank, Sophie and Maryland probably representing the best of his endeavors in originating new plums. It is a duty and a pleasure to acknowledge here the great services rendered by Mr. Kerr in the preparation of The Plums of New York.