40fi MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



REMINISCENCES. 



BY W. R. LAUGIILIN, OREGON, MO. 



Grape- growing had been tried and nearly all men had come to be- 

 lieve it was a failure. William Penn's experiment made two hundred 

 and fifty years ago; another by the Rappites, at New Harmony, In- 

 diana ; the French, at Vincennes, and the Swiss at Vevay, all with 

 foreign varieties, seemed to leave but little reason for hope, and the 

 verdict was that " grapes cannot be raised in America." 



But here and there was a man, or sometimes a woman, who saw the 

 woods full of wild grapes, and, sensibly, went to work trying what could 

 be done with such varieties as nature had already shown to be suited to 

 this continent. 



In a cabin in the woods near the edge of a sandy rolling, Hennepin 

 Prairie, in the County of Putnam, and State of Illinois, lived Smiley 

 Shepherd. Like many men of whom the world is not worthy, he was 

 poor. 



Well do I remember, now fifty years ago, to see him and his family 

 regular attendants at the Old Log Meeting House at Union Grove. Their 

 team was a yoke of black oxen. Shepherd's health was not good, and, 

 of course, his more robust neighbors called him lazy. He was tall, self- 

 possessed, reserved and thoughtful. He was one of those who were then 

 here and there, working at the grape problem. As he passed among the 

 woods, he marked the wild vines that bore the best grapes, and a few of 

 these he cultivated where they stood, or moved them to his garden. 



Soon in the history of that variety he procured a vine of the Isabella. 

 That vine was one of the wonders of my early boyhood. Trained on a 

 horizontal arrangement of poles, perhaps seven feet from the ground, the 

 many clusters that seemed to me so huge, of grapes that looked to me so 

 large, hung below the frame work, and I was permitted to walk under 

 and to see the Glorious Revelation. At Shepherd's suggestion, I held a 

 bunch in my hand, and I and the other red-headed boy who had gone 

 with me, actually tasted some of those grapes. If they appeared to us 



