A pear tree formed the centrepiece of the original Buxton Homecoming celebration back in the 1920s. That tree was old then, and it still exists on the Robbins farm across from the museum at North Buxton.

We wonder whether or not this pear tree is a Jesuit pear. There is no proof it is, but there are a few scattered around Southwestern Ontario and southern Michigan.

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Jesuit missionaries who came to this area in the seventeenth century brought with them seeds of pears. They planted these seeds at various places.

They could also have given seeds, or cuttings to the original immigrants from New France who settled first in the vicinity of Detroit, which had been founded by Cadillac in 1701. By the mid-eighteenth century, habitants’ ribbon farms had spread down the Detroit

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