Leslie, I don't agree with what the nursery told you. I have similar leaves this spring on my pears and they all formed well after frost danger had passed during a period when my apples had a lot of fireblight. In seeing many such leaves over the years I have rarely seen the firelight progress on them, there was not enough of an infection for the disease to propagate. One thing they could be correct about is there is some chance it is frost damage. Scott

Bill, I'll put money that you do not have a pear there. I would say it is a plum. Both your plum and your peach have bacterial spot. Why isn't it a pear? #1 it has the same disease as your peach and pear and peaches do not get the same diseases; plums and peaches do. #2 the leaves are shaped like plum. #3 and the kicker is the stem is bright green; new pear stems are never bright green. Scott

True 'Bartlett' is exquisitely susceptible to fireblight, and I would not expect it to have much of a shot at surviving for any length of time once it reached blooming/fruiting age in hot humid South Carolina. Perhaps your other tree really is Bartlett, but I'd hazard a guess that if it's 40 years old, it's probably not - even though it may have come to you labeled as such, or someone told you that's what it was. While the big box stores are infamous for selling zone-inappropriate plants(like Bartlett for The South), they're also infamous for selling incorrectly labeled plants. I have a friend who worked for some of the big propagators in McMinnville TN some years ago; filling an order for one of the big box stores, they requested 'no labels' - they would provide their own. So...although the pears they were purchasing for re-sale may have been Keiffer, Orient, Ayers, etc., the big box re-seller was going to label them with a variety name 'known' to the mostly-unknowing/unsuspecting public, while counting on those folks not to know the difference if the trees they planted ever lived to fruiting - or if the purchasers were even still living at the same place.

That could be fire blight. But that small amount on that big tree probably isn't worth worrying about. If it gets worse look up that disease.