America's Crop Heritage


cause of their wide adaptability and variety of uses. Chinese sugar
cane, identical with the black amber cane commonly sowed today
as a hay crop in Texas, was first referred to by the Patent Office
in its Report of 1854 as the "Sorgho Sucre." This was the French
name for a variety sent from northern China in 1851 by the
French consul at Shanghai. At the request of his government, the
Count de Montigny had forwarded a collection of plants, seeds,
and cuttings to the Geographical Society of Paris. The seeds
were sent to the director of the Marine Gardens at Toulon.
 According to the accounts, only one cane seed of the entire lot
sprouted, and the survival of this plant was accidental. Such lore
is rather common in the early history of the migration of crops
into different lands. It springs, no doubt, from the fascination of
such stories of the chance survival and reproductive capacities of
plant life.
 The Patent Office took an immediate interest in the French
sorgo when it heard that the juice of the plant could be processed
to make sugar, that three crops might be taken from the same
ground in one year, and that it could be used as a forage crop. The
French also had hoped that the new plant would supersede the
sugar beet in the production of sugar and alcohol.
 First Introductions-Credit for the introduction of the new
sorgo belongs to D. J. Browne of the Patent Office, who brought
over from France about 200 pounds of the seed in 1854. D. Red-
mond, editor of the Southern Cultivator, also obtained some of the
seed about the same time from the firm of Parker, White and Gan-
nett of Boston. He planted a few ounces in the spring of 1855 and
distributed seed from this crop throughout the South. Redmond
therefore claimed credit for introducing this cane into general
cultivation in the South.
 Another claimant for the honor of having been the first to intro-
duce the cane to America was William R. Prince, head of one of
the leading seed and plant businesses of the time. Prince's claim
that he brought the cane in a year before either Browne or Red-
mond is accepted by Peter Collier, in charge of sorghum experi-
ments for the Department of Agriculture during the 1880's.
 The Patent Office had about 175 bushels of the cane grown near
Washington in 1855, and imported another 100 bushels from
Vilmorin in France. The American Agriculturist, a leading agri-
cultural journal in the North, assisted in disseminating the cane.
Its editor, Orange Judd, distributed 1,600 pounds of seed in 1857