AMERICAN GRAPES 339 



heads of wine in a single season." Amadas and Barlowe, sent out by 

 Baleigh in 1584, described the coasts of the Carolinas as, "so full of 

 grapes that in all the world like abundance can not be found." Captain 

 John Smith, writing in 1606, describes the grapes of Virginia and rec- 

 ommends the culture of the vine as an industry for the newly founded 

 colony. Few, indeed, are the explorers of the Atlantic seaboard who 

 do not mention grapes among the plants of the country. Yet none saw 

 intrinsic value in these wild vines. To the Europeans the grapes of 

 the Old World alone were worth cultivating and the vines growing 

 everywhere in America only suggested that the grape they had known 

 across the sea might be grown in the new home. 



During colonial times and the first half century of the union, efforts 

 to grow European varieties of grapes in America were continuous. 

 Some of the experiments were on a large scale and in the hands of ex- 

 pert vine growers, yet all resulted in failure. Several large companies 

 undertook grape-growing and wine-making in the years following the 

 Eevolution ; the efforts of a few of these are worth noting. 



Peter Legaux, a Frenchman, founded a company to grow grapes 

 at Spring Mill, near Philadelphia, in 1793. John James Dufour, a 

 Swiss, came to America in 1793 to engage in grape-growing and became 

 the head of the Kentucky Vineyard Society in the valley of the Ohio 

 in Kentucky and Indiana. The Harmonists, a religious-socialistic com- 

 munity, planted ten acres of grapes about 1805 near Pittsburgh, and 

 later made another plantation at New Harmony, Indiana. When the 

 Napoleonic wars were over, a number of Bonaparte's exiled officers 

 came to America and founded the Vine and Olive Colony on land 

 granted them by Congress on the Tombigbee Eiver in Alabama. Here 

 one hundred and fifty French settlers spent several years in vain 

 attempts to grow European grapes in America. In a rough and hardly 

 explored country, part of which was overflowed half the year, with all 

 the sickness inherent to such a location, unaccustomed to field work 

 and the hardships of a new country, the attempt to grow grapes, where 

 failure was predestined because of natural obstacles, became for these 

 French officers and their families a tragedy which ended in great suffer- 

 ing and the impoverishment of all and the death of many. 



It is only on the Pacific coast and in favored valleys of the Eocky 

 Mountains that Vitis vinifera, the grape of the Old World, can be 

 grown. The great viticultural industry of California is founded upon 

 the successful culture of this species. The native grapes can be grown, 

 but they can not compete on the Pacific coast with the Old World grape 

 for any purpose. The success attained in the cultivation of this species 

 west of the continental divide makes all the more remarkable its com- 

 plete failure east of the divide. 



For three centuries from the first recorded attempt to grow the 

 Old World grapes in America, the causes of the failures were a mystery. 



