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Early Life Among the rolling hills of what today is the Czech Republic is a small village called Hynčice. In the nineteenth century, this region was part of the Austrian Empire, and the village was called by the German name of Heinzendorf bei Odrau. The people who lived in the village were farmers and lime burners . One of the farmers was named Anton Mendel. His ancestors had been living in the village since 1684. As a young man, Anton had been in the Austrian Army. When he came back to Hynčice, he took over a plot numbered 58 in the village and built a house with a tiled roof. He farmed about forty acres of sloping meadow: plowing the fields, cultivating crops, and trying to improve his stock of farm animals. Anton was interested in growing fruit. He planted fruit trees in a field that sloped down from his house to the road. Anton experimented with grafting new varieties of fruit, exchanging grafts and stock as well as advice with the priest in nearby Vražné (then called Gross-Petersdorf). In 1818, Anton married Rosine, the daughter of a gardener in the village. In July 1822, their son Johann was born. He was their second child and only son. As a boy Johann attended the village school in Hynčice. The schoolmaster, recognizing that Johann was much cleverer than the other boys, persuaded Anton and Rosine to send him to a bigger school. So when Johann was eleven, he went to the Piarist College in Lipnik, an upper elementary school, about

Fruit Growing At the village school in Hynčice, the principles of fruit growing were taught. It was unusual for a small village to have a school in those days. It was even more unusual to have one where the scientific principles of agriculture were taught.

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