W. N. Kight San Juan County, New Mexico

W. N. Kight, proprietor of the Sunnyside Orchards, has resided at Farmington since 1896, at which time he purchased the horticultural interests of William Locke, owner of the largest and best orchards of the County, covering eighty acres. The property altogether comprised three hundred and fifty acres of land, for which he paid ten thousand five hundred dollars, and since that time he has figured as one of the most prominent fruit growers of the Territory. He was born in Ohio in 1848, and left that state for Iowa in 1866. He removed to Colorado in 1887 and was a resident of Durango and that vicinity until 1896, when he came to New Mexico and purchased the fruit-raising interests which he has since owned and conducted. He has won prizes on his fruit wherever he has made exhibitions. The apples which he largely raises for market are of the Jonathan, Grimes Golden, Winesap, Beauty and White Winter Permian varieties. He believes that apples and peaches are the fruits that may be produced most profitably in this part of the country, and the apples raised are of particularly fine quality and size, owing to the iron in the soil. In the fall of 1904 he gathered thirty-six apples, the combined weight of which was fifty pounds. Mr. Kight has himself set out about thirty acres to fruit. During his second year on the ranch 1898 he handled one million pounds of fruit and sold all he could ship out of the County, and in all of his shipments there was not a single box that contained wormy fruit. In 1905 he gathered six hundred pounds of fruit from one peach tree twenty-five years old, which was set out by William Locke, and he has taken one thousand pounds of fruit from the same tree. His orchards are among the finest in the entire Territory and he is accorded a foremost place among the fruit raisers of New Mexico.

Mr. Kight is a Republican in politics and he was made a Mason and also an Odd Fellow at Burlington Junction, Missouri. He is now connected with the Durango lodge of Masons and with the Odd Fellows lodge at Farmington.

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Source: History of New Mexico, Its Resources and People, Volume II, Pacific States Publishing Co., 1907.