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Summary
Emmett Stull Goff was a pioneering horticulturist, inventor, writer and educator best known for his founding of the cherry growing industry in Door County, WI.

Early life and career
Emmett Stull Goff was born on September 3, 1852 on a farm just south of Elmira, New York joining a family which eventually numbered five brothers and three sisters. Goff’s scholastic education was obtained in the common schools of New York and at the Elmira Free Academy from which he graduated in 1870. For the next five years he lived and participated in the work and life of a business-orientated farm gaining knowledge of practical agriculture including managing the family orchard and marketing the produce and plants. By 1875, despite not having any formal experience as a teacher, he began a short career as a school master in Elmira.

New York Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station
The New York Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station was founded in 1882 to focus on agricultural scientific research and the establishment of experimental plantings. Goff was hired as the Station’s first horticulturist by Edward Lewis Sturtevant who was considered one of the giants of American agriculture in his own time. An early project was to develop a botanical State of New York Report of Board of Control of the New York Agricultural Experiential Station, Jan 1888 p 116 of the known vegetables propagated and marketed by nurserymen in New York State, a cataglog that extends over 190 pages.

His work on apple varieties, begun in 1883, produced a collection of research on apples and crabapples that was, at the time, the "most noteworthy collection of its kind in the United States", containing over 700 named varieties of apples and crabapples. While developing his classification of plants of New York, Goff published his observations on cross fertilizing different varieties relating to the dominance and recessiveness in certain characters of the common garden pea, seventeen years before the rediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s Law of Genetic Inheritance.

In the 1880’s The Geneva Station was under pressure to achieve visible results which could be exhibited to farmers. Goff was involved with establishing small plots demonstrating the effectiveness of new fertilizers, insecticides or varieties alongside control plots which were devoted to the old way of doing things.

University of Wisconsin - Madison
The Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station was established in 1883 at a time when the decline in agricultural productivity due to infertile soils was a growing concern. Goff was recruited to Wisconsin in 1889 by his Geneva Station colleague Stephen M. Babcock who had joined the staff of the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture a year earlier. Subsequently Dean William Arnon Henry appointed Goff as UW’s first Professor of Horticulture and as the Horticulturist to the University Agricultural Experiment Station.

During his tenure at UW Goff was involved with experiments regarding effective therapy of apple scab, potato blight and scab, corn smut, onion mold, spot disease of strawberries, and grape mildew and rot in addition to the development of reagents and spray machinery.

Recognizing the dearth of scientific based agriculture text books, Goff authored Principles of Plant Culture (1897) which by 1916 had reached its eighth edition. This volume was followed by Lessons in Pomology (1899) and Lessons in Commercial Fruit Growing (1902) the year of his death.

Perhaps his best single work was the study carried on at Madison and the University of Chicago on The Time and the Manner of the Formation of Flower Buds in Fruit Trees published in 1899 where he ascertained the approximate period of development of flower and leaf buds in the leading orchard fruits.

Goff planted an orchard on the Madison Agriculture Station grounds seeking fruit trees which were hardy enough to withstand Wisconsin’s winters. In travels around the state and in conjunction with orchardist Arthur L. Hatch, Goff discovered that Door County, Wisconsin – the peninsula on the east shore of Wisconsin that extends into Lake Michigan - is an area remarkably suited for fruit growing. The subsequent growth of the cherry industry brought Door County national prominence.

Goff was also successful in the classroom, building a student enrollment from less than a dozen to more than 300 by 1902. This was at a time when there were few departments in the college and presumably every student took at least one course in horticulture as part of their program.

Death
Goff died suddenly on June 6, 1902 at age 49 as a result of unsuccessful intestinal surgery. He was buried in the Forest Hill Cemetery on the near west side of Madison, Wisconsin.