The Man Who Left on a Freight Train with Nothing

The story of how Luther Burbank left Massachusetts is useful for what it says about California in the eighteen seventies and about what a young man with few prospects and one remarkable idea might do with a continent of room to run.

Burbank was twenty-six years old in eighteen seventy-five, his father long dead, recently transplanted from his family's small-scale farming in Lancaster to a larger land experiment near Lunenburg that had not gone as planned. He had developed a potato there, one that would eventually make the french fry a reliable and scalable product for the entire food industry, and he had sold the rights to it for one hundred fifty dollars because he needed the money to leave.

He had family already in Santa Rosa. They had arrived earlier, part of the internal migration that was filling northern California with people who had heard, correctly, that the land was extraordinary. Burbank came west by train. When he arrived in Santa Rosa, he had very little money in his pocket.

He found work at a nursery. He saved money. He bought a plot of land and began experimenting, not with potatoes this time but with everything that grew. He understood, perhaps instinctively, that California's climate was unlike anything the eastern nursery trade had encountered: a long mild season, reliable winter rain, summer dry heat that suited plants from the Mediterranean, from Japan, from South America. The state was, for someone willing to spend years crossing and selecting, a laboratory without walls.

That is what he built here: a laboratory without walls. His experimental farm in Sebastopol, a few miles to the west, ran alongside his Santa Rosa home for decades. The greenhouse he designed in eighteen eighty-nine still stands. He arrived with very little. He left a changed agricultural world.