After graduating from high school in 1893, Vernon H. Krider abandoned plans to study medicine when his family could not afford medical schooling during a depression and instead began raising blackberry, dewberry, and Cumberland raspberry plants on two acres given by his father. In 1896 he made his first sale, earning $25.00 for 5,000 raspberry plants, then used his profits to buy more land and expand into grapevines, other small fruits, fruit trees, and general nursery stock while teaching school in winter and keeping one employee working the land. He bought thirty adjoining acres in 1898, traded his thirty-two acres for his father’s farmland, purchased forty more acres in 1905, added another sixty-seven-acre plot two years later, built the first nursery building in 1908, and enlarged it in 1916. Krider Nurseries was incorporated in 1923, the same year a New York Central Railroad switch was laid beside the nursery building to unload railroad cars of evergreens and shrubs. In 1925 Krider printed his first colored catalog, “Glories of the Garden,” and that same year a fire destroyed the packing house, equipment, and propagating stock, after which new buildings were constructed in 1926 and propagating stock was doubled. By 1928 the corporation had purchased 290 acres, bringing the total to 405 acres. Participation in Chicago’s 1934 Century of Progress World’s Fair, reflected in features later included in Krider Park in Middlebury, opened a profitable mail-order business, and by 1938 the volume of that business led the U.S. government to upgrade the Middlebury Post Office to first class even though the town had fewer than 1,000 residents. Krider Nurseries employed more than 100 people and was the town’s largest employer by the time World War II broke out in 1944, the year Krider obtained the patent for “Festival,” the thornless rose. In 1953 the corporation spent more than $22,000 in postage shipping shrubs, trees, roses, and perennials to every state in the United States and to foreign countries including Siam, South Africa, and China. The Krider family continued its mail-order, retail, and wholesale nursery business in Middlebury until it was sold in 1988; the business closed in 1990, the buildings were demolished in 1992, and in 1993 the stockholders donated the 2.4 acre World’s Fair Gardens to the town of Middlebury for use as a community park. Vernon H. Krider, remembered as an entrepreneur with a vision who also enjoyed reading and writing poetry, died on February 3, 1955, at age 79.