Rochester, for its first 50 years or so, was a boisterous place.
Water roared through millraces on either side of High Falls. Boats on the Erie Canal tied up at all hours, disgorging produce and raw materials and the hardworking, sometimes quarrelsome crews who tended to them. The construction was clangorous and never-ending; during the construction season of 1827, the number of newly built houses exceeded the total number of carpenters in the city by 50 percent.
“Like a hive, and the apertures everywhere around it are full of bees pressing into it,” an 1826 visitor described it in a letter. Even 15 years later, when the initial boom had faded and the leading edge of settlement advanced west, another traveler found Rochester to be “the best specimen of the go-a-head principle that can be found upon the face of the earth.”
Just two generations later, however, the narrative had turned almost 180 degrees. Once defined by its disorder, Rochester had become synonymous with elegance and natural beauty in the nation’s eye.
“Even our back streets have their pleasant and attractive homes,” a longtime resident said in 1886. “Strangers speak of our city as ahead of all others in shaded trees and ornamented grounds.”
What caused the change? In short, plant nurseries. In the middle of the 19th century, Rochester largely abandoned its association with wheat farming and instead became the Flower City, renowned everywhere for its skillful production of fruit trees and ornamental plantings.
That story of Rochester is told in “The Roots of Flower City,” a new book by historian Camden Burd. It provides a thorough and easily readable account of an often-overlooked period in the city’s history, after the heyday of the canal but before Eastman Kodak and other advanced manufacturers wrought their own revolution.
A financial panic in 1837, Burd writes, was the death knell of a local economy based on flour milling and water power. In its place arose an economic and aesthetic vision aligned perfectly with a contemporary spiritual revival in the city. Horticulture, according to early practitioners and advocates like Michael Boyd Bateham, George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, improved the soil as well as the soul, the pocketbook as well as the public good.
“Now our city is celebrated, not for the flour that feeds the body, but the flowers that feed and enlarge and refine the soul,” wrote James Vick, himself a leading character in the transformation.
Rochester had many advantages in establishing itself as the Flower City: easy access to eastern and western markets thanks to the canal and then the railroad; a temperate climate that supported an appealing variety of fruit trees in particular; and an early knot of like-minded practitioners, Ellwanger and Barry foremost among them.
By the 1850s, half of all the nurseries in the state were located in Rochester. The local industry backed a series of influential horticultural journals—they are among Burd’s key sources in the book, along with the Ellwanger and Barry ledger books—and employed scores of field agents in the still-settling western states.
“We western men have long looked upon the world renowned Genesee Valley as a sort of headquarters for all horticultural products, science and information,” a Chicago horticulturalist wrote in 1858.
The relentless planting, covering thousands of acres of what is now southeast Rochester, bore civic fruit as well. Nurserymen slipped easily into municipal roles, in particular the parks commission, where they propagated their vision for a more manicured city—and, in many cases, bought the plant material from their own firms.
Highland Park was formed in 1888 from land donated by Mount Hope Nursery, Ellwanger and Barry’s firm. Here, too, they combined an earnest philanthropic impulse with clear self-interest. The park’s ambitious botanical garden, for example, was conceived from the beginning as a sort of open-air advertisement for the nearby nurseries.
“It cannot be questioned that a good collection of well-grown plants, clearly labeled … would be of very great value to the entire nursery interests of Rochester,” park architect Frederick Law Olmsted wrote in 1891.
Olmsted and the nurserymen did not know then that the industry’s demise was already underway in the form of a tiny insect with hardy gray armor and a thread-like mouth known as the San Jose scale. Millions of them descended on apple trees across the country in the 1890s, devastating entire orchards and forever abolishing the widely unregulated shipment of plant materials across state lines that the industry had relied upon.
The spread of the San Jose scale was blamed particularly on nurserymen, tarnishing their previously spotless public reputations. Rochester nurseries found a temporary foothold in the City Beautiful movement, exporting infestation-immune ornamental trees and shrubs to cities and new suburbs throughout the country.
Eventually, though, they turned to their last asset: their sprawling acres of property, largely adjoining the sections of the city on which they’d lavished so many fruit and shade trees. Part of Horace Hooker’s nursery became East Avenue; James Vick’s seed operation yielded Park Avenue. Almost all of the South Wedge and Highland Park neighborhoods came from Mount Hope Nursery. These transformations explain, in part, why some areas of the city have such an advantage in terms of tree canopy cover.
Burd, a professor at Clemson University, developed the book from his doctoral dissertation at the University of Rochester. He does a skillful job illustrating what horticulture had to do with moral welfare, economic development and civic development in the late 19th century—as well as gender and class bias.
The Flower City was the less unruly successor to the Flour City and, in turn, laid the literal groundwork for Kodak City. Kodak City begat Smugtown, which brings the story to the present. The flowers and fruit trees that men like Ellwanger and Barry sold are for the most part dead and gone.
Burd’s book provides proof, though, that their seeds took root.
Justin Murphy is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. He is the research and communications coordinator for Our Local History and a former reporter for the Democrat and Chronicle.
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