SHARP (Sharpe), FRANCIS PEABODY, orchardist, pomologist, and businessman; b. 3 Sept. 1823 in Northampton, N.B., son of Adam Boyle Sharp and Maria Peabody; m. 31 Dec. 1853 Maria Shaw of Lower Wakefield, N.B., and they had eight children, four of whom predeceased him; d. 12 Dec. 1903 in Woodstock, N.B.

Francis Peabody Sharp was named after his paternal grandfather, Captain Francis Alexander Sharp, who had served with the British garrison at Quebec, and his maternal great-grandfather, Captain Francis Peabody, a veteran of the Massachusetts forces in the Seven Years’ War and founder of Maugerville on the Saint John River. He may also have been named after his great-uncle Francis Peabody*, the founder of Chatham, N.B. His father was a lumberman, merchant, and magistrate.

Educated at Carleton County grammar school, Sharp became interested in the cultivation and propagation of fruit-trees while employed as a clerk and bookkeeper in his father’s store at Woodstock and began a serious tree-nursery business in 1846. His industry, singleness of purpose, and practical experimental techniques are clearly indicated in his minute hand-bound diary of the period 1846 to 1850. He grafted trees with scions obtained from England and from local growers in New Brunswick and Maine; he budded apple suckers, raised trees from seed, and made root grafts; and he recorded the distribution of his stock in numbered rows and plots.

Sharp cultivated many known varieties of apples, plums, and other fruits and vegetables but is remembered particularly as a pioneer of new apple varieties and hybrids. His most famous variety, derived by grafting scions from a seedling originating in Maine, was the New Brunswick or New Brunswicker. Its success was assured when, in competition with apples from all the eastern United States, it took first prize for the best barrel of any variety. In an attempt to produce new strains Sharp carried out about 2,000 hybridizing experiments using the New Brunswick variety as one of the parents.

Before 1850 few apples were grown in New Brunswick. In 1890 18,000 barrels were exported from Carleton County by the Sharp family alone. Six to seven carloads a year were shipped to Boston, Portland, and New York, and wholesale buyers from other parts of Canada came to Woodstock to buy direct. The American trade was, however, hit by the McKinley tariff of 1890.

The productivity of Sharp’s orchards led to the establishment in the region of allied industries such as barrel-making, canning, and packing. In his own business nothing went to waste. His eldest daughter, Minnie Bell*, described the production of vinegar with a huge press, designed by Sharp, working day and night: “A crew of ten to twenty men with apple grinders and all necessary outfit were kept busily employed.”

Sharp was conversant with scientific writings of the day and communicated with specialists in Ottawa and at the Iowa Agricultural College but was critical of the fruit-growing methods they advocated. His cultural practices were a testament to his acumen for he discovered that he could obtain the optimum return per acre by careful cultivation, heavy manuring, and close planting of dwarf trees, and by keeping a careful balance between the roots and the top growth of trees. Keen to share his knowledge but mindful of the needs of his family, he wrote to Minnie Bell of a paper he gave to the Farmers’ and Dairymen’s Association of New Brunswick in 1896: “You will see that it is remarkable for what is left out. . . . Many of my discoveries would so greatly cheapen production of apples as to injure our own sales.”

A genial conversationalist, a lover of music and books, and generous to a fault, Sharp appears to have lacked a number of qualities essential to success in business. For many years he worked in partnership with his brother-in-law William Sperry Shea, who provided capital and, probably, management skills. After Shea’s death in 1876, Sharp’s eldest son, Franklin, became a key figure, and Francis made over the nursery at Woodstock to him in 1887. In 1892 they suffered a disastrous fire; Franklin died the same year and the property went to his younger sisters.

Sharp had a close emotional tie to his daughter Minnie Bell, an accomplished musician and organizer, and her equally remarkable husband, the artist, naturalist, and ethnologist Edwin Tappan Adney*. In his last years he worked with them in trying to restore his personal fortunes.

C. Mary Young

There is an oil portrait of Francis Peabody Sharp, painted by Edwin Tappan Adney, in the Old Arts Building at the Univ. of N.B., Fredericton.

Sharp’s papers, including his diary for 1846–50, a typescript copy of it, and his correspondence with Minnie Bell and others, are preserved among the E. T. Adney papers at the N.B. Museum. The collection also contains material on apple cultivation, Adney’s biographical notes on Sharp, and documents and clippings relating to the family. Some of this material is also available on microfilm at PANB, RS184, A, Adney file.

PANB, RS62, 1876, W. S. Shea; 1892, Franklin Sharp. Carleton Sentinel (Woodstock, N.B.), 18 Dec. 1903: 8. Dispatch (Woodstock), 16 Dec. 1903: 1, 4. David Folster, “Apple blossom time and the man who made Eden,” Daily Gleaner, 23 May 1984: 16. Press (Woodstock), 4 Jan. 1904: 4. M. B. [Sharp] Adney, “Minnie Bell Adney, an autobiography,” Carleton Sentinel, 10 Oct. 1919: 1, 8. Bill Turney, “Adney game management area set up near Woodstock,” Daily Gleaner, 20 March 1965 (clipping in N.B. Museum, E. T. Adney papers). E. B. DeMerchant, From humble beginnings: the story of agriculture in New Brunswick (Fredericton, 1983 [i.e., 1984]), 43–44.

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/sharp_francis_peabody_13E.html

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LATE F. P. SHARP, EARLY N. B. WIZARD OF FRUIT GROWING

Remarkable Orchardist and Nurseryman of Upper Woodstock Died in 1903
—Memory Is To Be Formally Honored
-New Brunswicker, Crimson Beauty, Duchess,
and Other Apples Developed By Him.

"The action of the New Brunswick Fruit Growers' Association adopted a resolution favoring the establishemnt of a suitable memorial for the late Francis Peabody Sharp directs attention to a career which has practically fallen from the public mind. It was a career, nevertheless, which places Sharp in the list of most brilliant men produced by New Brunswick. [April 14, 1939 34th Annual meeting adopted a resolution to this effect on motion of Vice-President Earl Hawkins of Douglas.]

"While his contributions to horticulture were evidently widely recognized and appreciated during his life, there is practically no record of a permanent sort, which appears to be the reverse of the circumstances not infrequently attached to persons who have made meritorious contributions to science and art. The information at hand comes from a paper prepared by Earl Hawkins, of Douglas, vice-president of the Fruit Growers' Association, whose source of information is an annual report of the Provincial Department of Agriculture of about the year 1906.

"Francis Peabody Sharp, born in Northampton Parish, Carleton County, N. B., in September, 1823, was the pioneer orchardist of this Province. He grew the first barrel of native New Brunswick apples ever sold in a commercial market. What is far more important, Sharp not only originated new varieties of apples better suited to New Brunswick conditions but evolved methods of culture altogether new to horticulture which have been or are being adopted by older orchard countries.

"Possessing a great mind and an analytical disposition, Sharp had the faculty of seeing relationships between facts apparently uncorrelated. Unwilling to accept any scientific statement or explanation as final, with microscope he set to work to study soil composition, structures of root, stem and leaf, and the character of the vital sap of plants and its circulatory system.
"He was many years ahead of his time, which may account in part for the modest attention paid him by the public life and scientific world of his day. While his extensive orchards provided him in his later years with a handsome income, much of the revenue went into further experimentation. He never received any assistance from either Provincial or Federal Governments. While Sharp did travel and attend conventions of horticulturists and pomologists as far west in the United States as Ohio, his work was strictly local and fully appreciated only by those who had visited his magnificent orchards in Carleton County.

"Soon after becoming of age in 1844, Sharp purchased his father's farm at Northampton with its existing orchards and again later opened a nursery at Upper Woodstock, to which place his father had removed following the sale of the farm. The farm at Northampton soon became the location of a nursery of plums and apples.

"He experimented with every variety of apple readily available but ever in his mind was the consciousness of the possibilities in developing a new strain of this fruit. Fameuse and Alexander were introduced into general use by Sharp and other well-known old varieties grown by him were: Red Astrachan, Porter, Minister, Golden Russet, Ribston Pippin, St. Lawrence, Gravenstein, Talman Sweet and Williams Favorite.

THE NEW BRUNSWICKER

"Growing apples from seed was, of course, an important part of the nursery work. In a lot of seeds obtained from Bangor, one shoot with a distinctive appearance was observed and allowed to grow on a second year. When the first fruit came, ten or a dozen large, handsome apples, Sharp said (as related in a written record by one Darius A. Shaw, who was an employee of Sharp at that time in general charge of the Upper Woodstock nursery), 'I saw at once their value and began propagating at once. It was the first apple of quality that gave evidence of being completly adapted to New Brunswick.'

"This was the original New Brunswicker which was different, Sharp pointed out, from the Duchess of Oldenburg, a variety of Russian origin.

2,000 CROSS-BREEDINGS

"Sharp later began the time-consuming practice of systematically hybridising varieties of apples to produce new varieties. With his New Brunswicker usually as one of the parent varieties, Sharp made some 2,000 cross-breedings, from which originated Munro Sweet No. 2, now called Walden, which approximates the quality of a McIntosh Red but is midway between it and the Fameuse, and Crimson Beauty. The Munro Sweet and Crimson Beauty materialized about the year 1866.

PEARS AND PLUMS

"Sharp in an address in Fredericton before the Farmers' and Dairymen's Association in 1896 made the statement that he and Peter M. Gideon, a famous contemporary horticulturist of the United States, were the first two men in America to systematically hybridize the apple and pear.

"Sharp's work in connection with pears and plums is a record of remarkable achievement. A seed of some plums obtained by T. A. Mooers, of Ashland, produced a new variety of great hardiness which Sharp named 'Mooers Arctic.' By evolving a system of bending plum trees over flat on the ground for the winter period, Sharp succeeded in inducing a far heavier yield under what is known as the 'Law of Antagonism of Stalk and Fruit.' The bending caused an interference with the flow of the cambium inducing excessive fruit-bud making.

GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

"It is recorded that Sharp put nursery plum trees three feet high into heavy bearing and accomplished the feat of producing an apple from seed 16 months after planting. He turned leaf buds into fruit buds and also reversed the process by cross-fertilizing. These discoveries affected orchard practice and production in many parts of the world, in England, for instance, where fruit trees tended to make excessive wood growth, full bearing at an early age of the tree was brought about.

"Sharp's life of activity came to an end at Upper Woodstock in December, 1903, after eighty years on this earth."



There was an Act to separate the Parish from the Town of Woodstock presented to Parliament on March 31, 1880. Both F. P. Sharp and my father worked very hard to get this petition up and signed. The majority of the people of Woodstock were against this Act.

From the "Minutes of the Assembly Journal," 1880, March 31, Page 61.
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