prince, parsons, bloodgood, king family nursery Flushing NY

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/01/interactive-project-maps-trees-new-york-city-urban-forest

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/01/interactive-project-maps-trees-new-york-city-urban-forest

"The 600,000 trees that line the streets of New York City have been mapped, revealing a diverse array of greenery in the midst of one of the world’s largest cities.

Jill Hubley, a web developer who lives in the New York borough of Brooklyn, used official city data to create a visualization of where each of the 600,000 trees, which cover 168 different species, are situated.

The map shows some striking differences in the types of trees across New York, with silver maples popular in Queens but very sparse in Manhattan.

Pin oaks are widely distributed, although the London plane tree, a hybrid of the native sycamore and the oriental plane tree, is the greatest in abundance across the five boroughs."
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"Bloodgood Nurseries

The earliest records of the Bloodgood name associated with nurseries relate to 1798 in Flushing (now Queens) New York. Flushing was religiously tolerant and became predominately Quaker with a large African population.

French Huguenots immigrated to the area in the18th century, bringing knowledge of horticulture with them. Flushing became known for its various nurseries. Large farms began to grow plants commercially.

Among the names recorded were Prince, Bloodgood (1798), Higgins, Kimbers and Parsons families.

Members of the King and Murray families purchased the Bloodgood Nursery in the 1830’s and moved it to land next to their Kingsland estate.

Although rumored that Benjamin Franklin visited and swapped seeds with the Bloodgood Nurseries, no proof of this visit was found.

President George Washington recorded in his diary a visit to the Prince Nurseries on October 10, 1789. He was not impressed, but did purchase fruit from the trees.

In the same article in Newsday.com about the history of Flushing, there is a mention of Bloodgood Nursery being there in 1838.

In the History of Long Island, the following quote was found.

“The old Bloodgood nursery now owned and conducted by Wilcomb and King, has long been in high reputation, and is only inferior in quantity and variety to the Linnaean Garden.”

 John Warner Willcomb, who was born in Massachusetts in 1793 and moved to Flushing “lost the business by defalcation of his New York agent.”

We are unable to maintain the lineage of Bloodgood Nursery until mention of a more current name of Keene and Foulk.

They were owners of Bloodgood Nursery of Flushing, as shown in a report of Entomologists in 1894 regarding the San Jose Scale. Apparently Bloodgood nursery stock had this scale infestation and was forced to destroy much of their stock as a result.

The company became became Foulk and Flemmer and moved to Flemington, New Jersey.

Ted Foulk, a graduate of Princeton in 1946, moved the business to Doylestown, Pa. after graduation and Flemmer stayed in New Jersey.

Al Edling, who had received a degree in horticulture from Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, took over the Doylestown business and moved it to Horsham as Bloodgood Nursery. Mr Edling was a long-time HPHA member who donated fruit trees and other plants to HPHA, and with his wife, Eleanor, hosted our Covered Dish Supper several years ago. He ran Bloodgood Nursery for 37 years.

https://horshamhistory.org/Bloodgood-Nurseries
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" In 1735, father and son Robert and William Prince established the first commercial plant nursery in the USA and built it into a thriving business; the then-unpolluted Flushing River enabled the Prince family to ship plants all over the East Coast.

The nursery later became the Linnaean Gardens, named for Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, who established the Latin nomenclature used to classify plants and animals.

The Bloodgood, Parsons, King and Murray families also operated plant nurseries in Flushing in the 1800s."

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" On December 27, 1657, the inhabitants of Flushing approved a protest known as The Flushing Remonstrance.

 This petition contained religious arguments even mentioning freedom for "Jews, Turks, and Egyptians," but ended with a forceful declaration that any infringement of the town charter would not be tolerated. Subsequently, a farmer named John Bowne held Quaker meetings in his home and was arrested for this and deported to Holland.

Eventually he persuaded the Dutch West India Company to allow Quakers and others to worship freely.[7] As such, Flushing is claimed to be a birthplace of religious freedom in the New World.

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"Flushing was the site of the first commercial tree nurseries in North America, the most prominent being the Prince, Bloodgood, and Parsons nurseries. 

 Much of the northern section of Kissena Park, former site of the Parsons nursery, still contains a wide variety of exotic trees.

The naming of streets intersecting Kissena Boulevard on its way toward Kissena Park celebrates this fact (Ash Avenue, Beech, Cherry ...Poplar, Quince, Rose).

 Flushing also supplied trees to the Greensward project, now known as Central Park in Manhattan.

During the American Revolution, Flushing, along with most settlements in present-day Queens County, favored the British and quartered British troops, though  

one battalion of Scottish Highlanders 

 

 is known to have been stationed  

at Flushing during the war."


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flushing,_Queens