"Niles Celebrity" - actor William Thorne - I am Batman!

From the 1946 Spanish language catalog

Who is the mystery man in the sombrero?

He is William L. Thorne, AKA "Uncle Bill" to the Roeding family, and part-time Niles resident.

William Thorne (1878-1948) was Elizabeth Thorne's brother.  That's George C. Roeding's wife, Elizabeth, and George C. Roeding Jr.'s "Uncle Bill."

Here are some scraps and bits from his life in an attempt to get the whole picture of his life. Always updated and fact-checked.

Victorian Gardens in the Washington Township

So what was a Victorian garden in the Washington Township? Where would they have gotten their plants? 

The mission gardens and orchards would have been a source of plant materials before the nurseries. E.J. Wickson wrote about the nurserymen in the 1850s to 1910. Until the first nurseries in the Washington Township, there were nurseries in San Jose. 

Luckily we had a local prolific writer, Charles Howard Shinn, who wrote about the old gardens of the area. He was editor for the California Horticulturalist and floral magazine for a couple of years (Check his wikipedia article for many more articles). 

The Shinn family had a nursery in the 1870s and 1880s and you can check out their "Shinn's Nurseries" catalog. They list the roses, ornamentals, and flowers that you could buy along with the fruit trees. They imported many plants from Japan.

Rock's Nurseries in San Jose was in business from 1865 to the late 1880s or 1890s. Pioneer nurseryman B.S. Fox was Rock's neighbor. (catalogs not online but available) Rock and his partners opened the California Nursery in 1884 and the California Nursery catalogs can be found online.

Rock's Nurseries after 1884

1887 San Jose Directory

There seems to be the general assumption that Rock's Nurseries was consolidated into the California Nursery right away in 1884. 

But it makes no sense that you would uproot all of your nursery stock in San Jose and move it to Niles. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep both properties and sell the Rock's Nurseries stock from both catalogs until there was no more? I have followed this transition for a while. There was a messy divorce in the midst of all of this and probably some issues with this break-up.
Lots of information can be gleaned from the San Jose Directories.

Lucy Shinn Smile

Lucy Ellen Shinn was just a black and white photo on the wall at Shinn House. We never never knew much about her and what kind of person she was.

She and her husband, James, raised five talented children, three who survived beyond into adulthood. Their childhoods spanned from the 1850s to 1880s during the time when Shinn's Nurseries was underway.

In 2020 we were fortunate to learn about Lucy from letters that she wrote to her daughter Millie. Kathryn Kasch, descendant of Lucy's oldest son, Charles Howard Shinn, spent many hours of her pandemic days transcribing 120 of Lucy's letters. The letters cover the span from 1873 to 1882. During this time, Millie was in grade school and then later in college, one of the first women admitted to the new University of California.  Millie later was the first woman to receive a PhD from UC Berkeley.

The 'Wickson Challenge' ... lost out

'Wickson Challenge' Plum

 This painting has a very faint writing on it - 'Wickson Challenge.' 

If you look that name up you find that 'Wickson Challenge' was renamed 'Formosa' and is a Burbank variety. So is this variety still around? And can you buy it?

The plum was front page news in the January 17, 1907 Pacific Rural Press and California Fruit Bulletin. 

Where did John Rock get his trees for his experimental orchards?

From the
Museum of Local History
scanned by California Revealed 

No Guessing Required! You can look it up!

This is one of many orchard records in the various archives around town. This is the only one scanned in so far - from the Museum of Local History. Thank you! It is possibly the first orchard record.

A quick look at the sources of the various fruits/nuts planted around 1887:

Many came from the nurseries of John Rock and R.D. Fox in the Santa Clara Valley.

Ellwanger & Barry was an old nursery in New York. According to George C. Roeding, John Rock worked there. Others came from his future Biggs fruit orchard partner A.T. Hatch.  Some came from the University. Some came from local orchards - Beard, Shinn, and maybe Curtner. Felix Gillet was a competitive nurseryman in the Sierra. The Quito orchard was in the Santa Clara Valley and is now a neighborhood. From Burbank, two old varieties of apples. The other names need some research to determine what the abbreviations mean. 

Imported from the East: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, 

Imported from Europe: Tosette? Joselyn? Rivers? Many are marked Imp. which I'm beginning to suspect that Imp. means imported and will confirm at a later date.

Visiting the Pernet-Ducher roses in 1912

The Pernet-Ducher family and the Pernetiana roses

What are Pernetiana roses? 

The Pernetiana roses was a category of roses introduced by the Pernet (Pernet-Ducher) family around 1900. It’s not officially a category any longer, like hybrid tea, polyantha, grandiflora, etc. But you will still see it mentioned.