Wild hickory nuts have been commercialized only to a slight extent.  Its crops are almost entirely consumed in the locality in which they are grown by those people who find great pleasure in spending fine autumn days gathering them.  The obvious reason why hickory nuts have not been made a product of commerce lies in the nut itself, which is usually very small and which has a shell so strong and thick that the kernel can be taken out only in small pieces.  The toughness of the shell makes cracking difficult, too, and since only rarely is one found that can be broken by a hand cracker, it is necessary to use the flatiron-and-hammer method.  It is quite possible, though, that some day the hickory will rival or exceed its near relative, the wild pecan, in commercial favor.  The wild pecans which formerly came on the market at Christmastime in mixtures of nuts were just as difficult to extract from their shells as the wild shagbark hickory nuts are now.  By means of selection and cultivation, the pecan was changed from a small, hard-to-crack nut to that of a large thin-shelled nut whose kernel was extractable in whole halves.  Among many thousands of wild pecan trees were a few which bore exceptionally fine nuts, nuts similar to those now found at every grocery store and called “papershell” pecans.  These unusual nuts were propagated by grafting twigs from their parent trees on ordinary wild pecan trees whose own nuts were of less value.  These grafted trees were set out in orchards where they produce the millions of pounds of high-grade pecans now on the market.

The question which naturally occurs is, “Why hasn’t this been done with hickory nuts?” Hundreds of attempts have been made to do so, by the greatest nut propagators in the United States.  They have been successful in grafting outstanding varieties of hickory to wild root stocks but the time involved has prevented any practical or commercial success, since most grafted hickories require a period of growth from ten to twenty years before bearing any nuts.  This length of time contrasts very unfavorably with that required by grafted pecans which produce nuts on quite young trees, frequently within three to five years after grafting.  This factor of slow growth has set the pecan far ahead of the tasty shagbark hickory.  Experimenters have long thought to reduce the time required by the hickory to reach maturity by grafting it to fast-growing hickory roots such as the bitternut or the closely related pecan.  Both of these grow rapidly and the bitternut has the additional advantage of growing farther north and of being transplanted more easily.  It has always been thought that when a good variety of shagbark hickory had been successfully grafted to bitternut root stocks, orchards of hickory trees would soon appear.  This takes me to my discovery of the variety now known as the Weschcke hickory, which I have found fulfills the necessary conditions.

[Illustration:  Shows exceptionally thin shell of Weschcke hickory variety.  Drawing by Wm. Kuehn]