doing on the Coast.

We were in the nursery business near Portland, and during the war we
went out of it, but we are working back in trees again[7], and all this
time we have been preaching the gospel of nut trees, and we find that we
can't preach a gospel unless there is some reward. There is no market
for chestnuts in our section of the country, and yet we had quite a few
of them around Portland. We could not talk about chestnut trees when
there was no market. Buyers there had been offering as low as three
cents a pound or not buying them at all, and we, ourselves, had quite a
few nuts to sell. So I took a trip up to Seattle and found a commission
man there that would take our nuts and arranged with him, and we have
sent nuts to Seattle ever since that year and got a very good price.
Then a neighbor had me send some of his, and we are still sending nuts.

+Introduced on Mid-West Markets+

The next year through Carl Weschcke of St. Paul I got in touch with a
reliable Minneapolis firm. They evidently had been burned and they were
somewhat skeptical. They said if we would send a sample there they would
look them over. So I went out and picked up a mixed sample and shipped
to Minneapolis, and they said if we could send nuts as good as the
sample they could use some.

We began to send them. When we shipped them we made sure we sent nuts
that were considerably better than the sample, and the rewards for
shipping there were also very good. Then we went on to Chicago, and we
have been shipping to Chicago over since. At this time I am out here to
find a little more market for some of the nuts that we have in Oregon.

At first we put the nuts in cold storage at about 32 degrees, expecting
to get a better price on the Thanksgiving market. We found out that we
were making a mistake and that the earliest nuts on the market brought
us our best price. So now we are shipping just as early as we can ship.

We first adopted the western cranberry box as being open enough to allow
a little drying off and tight enough so that it wouldn't allow too much
and yet we didn't get any mold. We were very much afraid of that,
because a good many of the California chestnuts had molded on the way to
market. Later we turned to the splint bushel basket, and lately we have
been in favor of the half-bushel basket. There seem to be buyers who
don't like to stock up more than a half bushel at a time, chestnuts
being of a rather high price. They dr