The Day Two Wizards
Came to Visit a Third

On a cool, overcast afternoon in late October 1915, nearly the whole town of Santa Rosa crowded onto the depot platform to watch the 1:15 Northwestern Pacific train pull in from San Francisco. Trailing behind it was a private railroad car, and inside were two of the most famous men in America: Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. They had come to meet the third member of what the public already thought of as a natural trio -- Luther Burbank, the "plant wizard" whose experiment gardens on Tupper Street had made this small California town known around the world.

A Friendship Conducted at a Distance

By 1915, Burbank and Edison had admired each other for decades without ever meeting. Born just three years apart, the two men considered themselves long-distance friends, and it was easy to see why the comparison came so naturally. Both were self-taught, both worked by relentless trial and error, and both had turned patient experimentation into results the world could see and use. Edison's domain was electricity and sound. Burbank's was more than 800 new varieties of plums, potatoes, daisies, and berries.

Henry Ford, Edison's closest friend and greatest admirer, observed that Burbank shared many of Edison's qualities and worked by precisely the same methods -- only in a different field. In the popular imagination of the day, the three men stood together as symbols of American ingenuity: the wizard of electricity, the wizard of the automobile, and the wizard of horticulture.

The Panama-Pacific Exposition Brings Them Together

The occasion that finally united them was San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the great world's fair celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal. The Exposition had declared October 21, 1915 "Edison Day," and after some coaxing the inventor agreed to come west. Edison famously hated to leave his laboratory. Henry Ford promptly announced he would travel from Detroit to join him. Once the pair reached California, a side trip north to Santa Rosa to see Burbank became the personal highlight of the journey.

Burbank, ever wary of crowds trampling his experimental gardens, had hoped for a quiet visit. He wired ahead asking for no bands and no fanfare. Santa Rosa ignored him completely.

Schoolchildren were let out of class, automobiles jammed Santa Rosa Avenue, and newsreel cameramen swarmed the party so persistently that Edison -- whose own inventions had made the movie business possible -- was heard to grumble about them before Burbank hustled his guests inside the house for a quiet hour by the library fire.

Also along that day, largely unnoticed by the dazzled local reporters, was tire magnate Harvey Firestone. The fourth figure would soon join Ford and Edison on their famous "Vagabonds" camping trips across America.

"Particularly Interested In... Everything"

The visit produced the now-iconic photographs: the three men seated together on the steps and porch of Burbank's home, posed in the gardens by San Francisco photographer Fred Hartsook. It also produced one of the best anecdotes in the story. Visitors to Burbank's experiment garden signed a guest register that included a blank labeled "Particularly interested in --." Edison filled it in with a single word: Everything.

"Particularly interested in -- Everything."
-- Thomas Edison, in Burbank's garden guest register

When the party returned to the depot that evening, baskets heaped with Burbank's creations -- walnuts, plums, apples, grapes, and armfuls of Shasta daisies -- were waiting aboard the private car. As Edison shook Burbank's hand a final time on the platform, onlookers heard him declare it the happiest day of his life.

A Bond That Outlasted the Visit

Remarkably, that single afternoon was the only time Burbank and Edison ever met in person, yet the connection among the three men only deepened. Ford so admired Burbank that he presented him with the first Fordson tractor off his assembly line, which Burbank put to work at his Gold Ridge Experiment Farm in Sebastopol. After Burbank's death in 1926, Ford had the horticulturist's small editorial office moved from Santa Rosa to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, where it still stands today near a reconstruction of Burbank's Massachusetts birthplace.

Edison, for his part, carried Burbank's cause into the halls of Congress. When lawmakers debated the landmark Plant Patent Act of 1930 -- legislation inspired in large part by Burbank's life's work, which had gone legally unprotected for half a century -- Edison testified in its favor, predicting that the law would give America many more Burbanks. Several plant patents were issued to Burbank posthumously.

Why It Still Matters Here

For those of us living in the hills that bear his name, the story is a reminder that this landscape was once the center of the horticultural world -- a place so significant that the two most celebrated inventors in America boarded a private train just to spend an afternoon here.

The Luther Burbank Home and Gardens in Santa Rosa preserves the house, the greenhouse, and the gardens where that remarkable day unfolded. The guest register signatures of Ford and Edison remain part of its collection. And the cement block where Edison pressed his signature -- and Burbank's spade -- into the wet surface is one of the more quietly extraordinary objects to survive from that afternoon.

This is the first installment in an ongoing series exploring Burbank history through the collection of the Gordon R. Howard Museum in Burbank, California.