Archival materials tracing the ascendancy of one of the nation's premier horticultural enterprises, the Conard-Pyle Company of West Grove, Pa., have been donated to the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Delaware.

Conard-Pyle was founded in 1897 and today operates nurseries in Pennsylvania, Maryland and California, with annual sales approaching $20 million. The company is best known for its famed Star Roses, one of which, the Peace Rose, was provided to delegates from around the world as they met in San Francisco on April 25, 1945, to form the United Nations.

Richard J. Hutton, AG '48, chairman of Conard-Pyle, arranged the gift to the University.

"We are grateful to the Conard-Pyle Company for its willingness to share this valuable information with those interested in both horticulture and the history of the industry," John C. Nye, dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, says.

"The company has long been recognized
as a leader in the field, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to maintain this collection as a useful resource for our students, faculty and neighbors in the community."

Robert Pyle, who joined Conard-Pyle in 1900 and became its head in 1907, was responsible for focusing the company's marketing efforts on roses. In an effort to set his company's roses apart from the competition, he adopted and trademarked the word Star in 1908. The Conard-Pyle roses were among the first horticultural products to bear a trademark.

Later, when the Plant Patent Act was passed in 1930, Conard-Pyle was among the first to patent new roses and license other leading nurseries to grow and sell them.

Pyle was among the first nurserymen to forge partnerships with European hybridizers and to bring their creations to the American market. The company entered into an important such alliance in 1911 with The House of Meilland in southern France.

Francis Meilland dispatched one particularly striking rose--yellow, tinged with pink--to Conard-Pyle on one of the last airplanes to leave France before that nation crumbled under the Nazi blitzkrieg.

During the bitter years of World War II, the rose had successful trials in all areas of the United States. The name Peace Rose was adopted the day Berlin fell to the Allies, and the industry's All-America Rose Selections organization, which Pyle helped establish, selected the Peace Rose its only 1946 award-winner on the day Japan surrendered.

The archives will be maintained in the Special Collections Department at Morris Library. Materials include early 20th-Century publications of the American Rose Society, books, photographs, correspondence, catalogs, brochures and patent binders.

"The University is pleased to have received this gift and honored to house an important collection of materials that will prove an invaluable resource for our students and faculty," says Robert R. Davis, vice president of development and alumni relations.

Hutton, retired chairman of Conard-Pyle, has been inducted into the Nurserymen's Hall of Fame by the American Nursery and Landscape Association.

--Neil Thomas, AS '76