Ann, that's cool. History is still important, in more ways than one. :-)

I find multiflora coming up far away from where it was planted. I have this theory about birds eating seeds from the hips and "depositing" the seeds via droppings. Looks like it takes no effort at all to get multiflora seeds to germinate in the most unlikely places, like through cracks in the sidewalk. Since I live at the family home, I know there has never been any multiflora planted there, yet there was a multiflora seedling coming up through a crack in the sidewalk. Incredible.

When the USDA was considering encouraging farmers to plant multiflora as a substitute for barbed wire, they fed multiflora seeds to chickens and found that what came through....didn't germinate. From that the USDA decided that multiflora wouldn't be invasive.
They forgot that chickens have gizzards with small rocks for grinding up seeds; robins and bluejays and many, many other wild birds don't have gizzards.
Thus a pest was born.
In the 30s, farmers could buy starts of multiflora by the hundreds. And those hedges begat more multiflora. Birds did it, but only after farmers were encouraged to use multiflora for hedges, miners were encouraged to use multiflora to stabilize mined slopes, soil reclamation folks were encouraged to use multiflora to combat erosion and to stabilize creek banks.

Interesting Ann. I didn't realize that not every bird has a gizzard. And when I was a kid we raised lots of chickens, ducks, and geese.