Mt. Hope: A Civil War Nursery for the World

Abstract

Mt. Hope Nursery in Rochester, NY was the largest in the world in the late 1800s. Founded by George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry in 1840, the nursery rose to prominence due to the entrepreneurial spirit of the founders, their love of plants, and the emerging transportation infrastructure in western New York State that enabled them to ship plants around the world. They were among the first to recognize the potential of dwarf fruit trees. They established a research farm well before the advent of university farms or state experiment stations. Their nursery catalogs were a source of best management practices for growing fruit. At the behest of the American Pomological Society, Ellwanger and Barry produced an extensive catalog that included 90 fruit-bearing species with hundreds of cultivar descriptions and their regions of adaptation. Although the nursery was sold in the early 1900s, their legacy lives on through the philanthropy of the founders. Many trees propagated by the nursery are still thriving in Rochester and the smaller villages in the region, and land donated by Ellwanger and Barry is now a popular park that hosts more than a million visitors every year.