"draining and reclaiming Wappatoo Lake and converting a disease- breeding swamp into a beautiful farm." For several years this Blen- nerhasset project satisfied his inveterate craving for accomplishment. Then, in 1896, he sold the place and returned to Portland. He devoted his time to managing an orchard near Hood River and in a scheme down in Lake County that found his old promotion enthusiasm still very much alive when he was long past 70— "a great manufacturing enterprise," he called it , "the development of the soda-borax mines of Alkali Lake." He must have applied his organizing ability as well as his literary ability to the seven big and thick volumes of his histories. These are Portland, Its History and Builders, 3 volumes, 191 1; and The Centennial History o f Oregon, 4 volumes, 1912. He died on July 20, 1913, lacking four months of being 80.
"A Nursery on Wheels"
Several years ago this pioneer nursery experience of Luelling was the basis of a short story with this title in the Youth's Companion.
As "Johnny Appleseed" . . . was the fore-runner and fore-planter of apple trees in the Ohio valley in 1805, so also was Henderson Luelling in like manner the good mis sionary of all fruits to the region of Old Oregon in 1847. . . . And forty-two years after "Appleseed" commenced planting nurseries on Licking river, Ohio, Luelling took up his line of march, carrying his precious load of grafted apple sprouts twenty-five hundred miles from Salem, Iowa, to Oregon. Thus i t i s seen by the unselfish labors of these two men, and b y two long strides, apple trees were transplanted from Eastern Pennsylvania to the wilds of Western Oregon. "Appleseed" transported his cargo on a packhorse, while Luelling planted his 700 little trees in boxes twelve inches deep and wide enough to fit snugly in the bed of the wagon
and thus day after day watering the precious young scions he safely landed them after six months of watchful care on the banks of the Willamette river at the place where the town of Milwaukie now stands, and there about half a mile north of the townsite started the first tree nursery, in 1 847, west of the Rocky Mountains.
Luelling's trees were not the first fruit trees in Oregon; but they were the first grafted trees, trees that bear im
