. A Long Islander who agrees
with Mr. Hale in the opinion that peaches and other fruits can be a
successfully raised on Long Island is Joseph H. Randall of Port
Jefferson, who has just returned, from his winter home in Avon
Park, Florida Mr. Randall is a self-made man and his career is well
worth the study of boys who intend to make their own fortune.
Joseph H. Randall was born
in Middle Island 58
years ago, educated in the district schools and at Eastman’s
Business College, and until he was 27 was engaged in the wood
business with his father, buying large tracts, cutting off the wood
and selling it by the shipload in New York, Haverstraw and other
places. At 27 he shipped on a coasting schooner and led a seafaring
life for three years. Then he left it to take charge of the country
store at Middle Island which had been established by his father many
years before.
He was the village merchant
for eighteen years, selling everything, from a hay rake to a darning
needle, and at the same time conducting a large farm. In 1892, his
health failing, he went to Florida, bought a large tract of land at
Avon Park. Shortly after he sold his store and farm in Middle
Island, but in a year or two, finding time hanging heavy on his
hands, he bought another farm, about half a mile west of his former
one, of one hundred and thirty six acres. This was much run down
when he bought it, and it has been Mr. Randall’s care for the last
four or five years to bring it into fertility again. There was not a
building on it and he has erected a comfortable house, barn and
outbuildings.
His specialty is vegetable
and fruit growing and he is fond experimenting with new varieties.
He has on the new farm five hundred peach trees and eighty apple
trees, beside plum, pear and cherry trees. Six Japanese chestnut
trees and the same number of Japanese walnuts have been recently set
out, and Mr. Randall is watching their growth with much interest
He has also quite large
tracts of raspberries, blackberries, strawberries and dewberries.
The “iceberg blackberry,” a white blackberry, as Mr. Randall
described it, is one of the new varieties he is experimenting with.
He has a smaller orchard of about fifty peach trees four years old,
from which he picked last fall seventy buckets of fine fruit, beside
that consumed in his family, for which found a ready sale in
Bellport, most of it at $1.40 a bucket. The trees look thrifty and
Mr. Randall anticipates no difficulty in raising peaches on Long
Island.
In politics Mr. Randall has
been several times honored by his fellow citizens, having been
assessor of his native town for
four years and justice of the peace eight years. He has been
for many years an elder in the Middletown Presbyterian Church in
Middle Island.