Albert Etter: Another "Growing Fruit Trees From Seed" Success Story

Happy Groundhog Day!

I've written before on the value of experimentation and in particular on the worthwhile practice of growing fruit trees from seed. 

Recently, while doing my research on growing apples in Florida, I came across the inspiring story of Albert Etter in the following post at Green Mantle Nursery. Good for them for preserving the legacy of a true pioneer!

Check this out:


As a boy growing up on a farm near Ferndale CA, Etter displayed a precocious talent for horticultural experimentation. He combined aptitude with vision at an early age, making his life goal the creation of a new fruit varieties uniquely suited for California and the Pacific Northwest.

While still in his late teens, Albert had the enormous good fortune to stumble onto the piece of land that was to become his ranch and experiment station.

The young Etter discovered this bench of forest land above Bear Creek during a fishing trip up the Mattole River Valley. Rugged and remote, the parcel was available for free through the Homestead Act. In 1894 at the age of 22, Albert was able to take possession of the dream place he came to call Ettersburg. Clearing and improving the land was a formidable task, but he was helped in the work by several of his brothers who homesteaded adjacent parcels. And so a life-long quest for new and better fruit varieties took shape in the wilderness...

The Ettersburg "Experimental Place" - Laying out the grid circa 1900

Pomologists might divide Etter's career into two distinct halves: the strawberry legacy and the apple legacy. Actually, both projects began and proceded more or less simultaneously from the founding of his homestead experiment station. 

He followed the same approach for both strawberry and apple breeding: wide crosses between genetically diverse parents were favored, and his germplasm frequently derived from obscure, primitive, even wild material.

Etter's philosophy contradicted the conventional wisdom of the academic pomologists of his day. While many of these experts regarded him as an under-educatated fool, others, like Dr. George Darrow of the USDA, made the long pilgrimage to Ettersburg to learn from this inspired visionary.

Ettersburg in its Prime circa 1925

Etter was a remarkably systematic worker with an ambitious agenda. His apple program began with his growing out a grid of seedlings to serve as understocks. By 1900, he was ready to top-work these trees to several hundred varieties obtained through the new University of California Extension Service. The goal of this trial was to identify varieties that had desirable qualities needed as parents for subsequent breeding experiments. Etter eventually made thousands of crosses, grew out rows of the resulting seedlings, and then grafted wood from these onto his understock trees.

Edward J. Wickson (1848-1923) - "Father of California Agriculture" and mentor to Burbank and Etter. A plum from the former and a crab hybrid from the latter bear his name.

While Etter was waiting for his apple experiments to bear fruit, his strawberry work made it "big time". The new strawberry varieties came to the attention of Edward J. Wickson, California's leading pomological authority and publisher of Pacific Rural Press. Under Wickson's media mentorship, Etter and Ettersburg became world famous for important new strawberries. Etter was proclaimed as a hillbilly successor to Luther Burbank, and dubbed "the man who made himself in the woods". By the 1920's, several of Etter's strawberries were being grown commercially in Oregon, England, New Zealand, and Australia.

Etter Strawberry Beds circa 1915

Trebla Strawberry

Fame, however, did not lead to fortune, at least not for Etter. Others profited from his new strawberries, but Etter himself did not succeed as a businessman or nurseryman. Patent rights did not apply to plant hybridization until 1930. Isolated from railroad and trucking routes, Ettersburg was not well suited for berry commerce.

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At any rate, Etter soon shifted his hopes and horticultural attention almost exclusively to his growing list of new apple varieties...

CLICK HERE to keep reading over at Green Mantle Nursery's site.


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