Down in Alabama

   During the winter of 1905-06, Dr. Oscar Winberg institued a series of lectures on modern farming methods and suggested the crops most likely to be successful in the region. A representative from a produce firm in Chicago arrived and offered the farmers contracts for all the cucumbers and potatoes they could grow. He also offered to supply seeds and fertilizers. The settlers consulted with Dr. Winberg, who definitely advised against the contracts. Nevertheless these were accepted and signed. The Autumn of 1906 was a bitter experience for the small communities, because most of the farmers found themselves in debt to the firm in Chicago. However, the experience did not prevent their signing new sets of contracts for the following season with its two crops, and the result was equally disastrous. The next year at the suggestion of Dr. Winberg, who had become the community adviser, the settlers formed a cooperative society. From then on the income from the truck farming rose to as high as one thousand dollars per acre, from the two crops the soil and the climate were able to give a year.

   If someone had a toothache or malaria, or if a family was undecided as to what future to choose for a son, or if the crops failed or it didn't rain, Dr. Winberg was called and consulted. While on a ride on such an errand, he once happened upon a very unusual sight, an orange grove.

   "It was beautiful," he told this writer, "not only from an aesthetic point of view but also from the standpoint of commercial possibilities. This struck me at once and I carefully examined the trees and found them to be of a rather strange kind for America. It was a Chinese orange known as the Satsuma. I immediately started gathering all the informaton I could on this type of fruit. I corresponded with several growers in China and Japan and got all the literature and information I could from sources in the United States. I found out how these trees grow under various conditions of altitude, rainfall, temperature, and type of soil. The Satsuma is a typical subtropical fruit, which will not thrive in the latitudes of Florida or Cuba, but is very suitable for the type of climate we have in Baldwin County."

   Dr. Winberg discovered the Satsuma in Alabama in 1906 and kept on experimenting with it the following years. In 1910 he was invited to attend a meeting of the American Chemical Society and stopped off in Chicago, where he informed the press about his new orange grown in America. He also persuaded the settlers of Swedish stock in Alabama to raise this orange. By 1914 the cultivation of the Satsuma had progressed so far that another cooperative society was formed in Silverhill, which now (in 1939) sells this orange for growers in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi to the tune of $1,500,000 a year.

   In 1914 Dr. Winberg also organized the Horticultural Society of Alabama. He was a member of the State Board of Horticulture of the State of Alabama, from 1915 to 1924. He has delivered addresses at universities, and has written a large number of articles on horticulture. Dr. Winberg, who is a native of Västergötland, Sweden, is now a recognized world authority on the cultivation of oranges and has at the present sixty varieties under cultivation on his land at Silverhill, which has grown considerably in acreage from the first 160 acres. His experimental orange groves are considered the largest in the world, and he receives many distinguished visitors from such far-off places as South Africa, Sweden, and Japan. A regular visitor every fourth or fifth year is Dr. Tanaka, head of the Imperial Horticultural Society of Japan, who stays a month at a time. Among the varieties grown and cultivated in the experimental groves at Silverhill are Shintani, Silverhill, Ishikawa, and Hosaki. The latter variety threatens to displace the Satsumas as the best orange tree in the regions of Alaska which were settled by people of Swedish stock.

   On the mailboxes outside the well-kept houses one sees such names as Swedelius, Rundquist, Lundgren, Andersson, and Johnson. Dr. Winberg assured me that there is not one individual of Scandinavian background in Baldwin County who is not well off today.

   Incidentally, the horticulture of Sweden stands high in the esteem of experts. Dr. Tanaka, of Tokyo, informed Dr. Winberg on one of his stays in Silverhill that a statue has been erected in Tokyo to the Swedish botanist Thunberg, and that the textbooks of another eminent Swede, Bengt Lidfors, are used in the Japanese Schools.

   Dr. Hail, an old and distinguished southern doctor, who had practised medicine for four years when, in 1898, malaria forced him from the Mississippi Delta to Baldwin County, was also interviewed by this writer, who incidentally was the first Swedish journalist to visit the settlements.

   "The Swedes," said Dr. Hail, with typical Southern chivalry, "are the best people ever to come to Alabama. I wish more of them would come and say 'Alabama' in the true meaning of the word: "Here we rest."