CHAI^ER X 

 EUROPEAN GRAPES IN EASTERN AMERICA 



As we have seen, there were many efforts to grow European 

 grapes in America during the first two centuries in the settle- 

 ment of the country. The various attempts, some involving 

 individuals, others corporations and in early days e\ en colonies, 

 form about the most instructi\c and dramatic episodes in the 

 history of American agricnlturc. All endeavors, it will he 

 remembered, were failnres. so dismallx and pathetically com- 

 plete that we are wont to think of the two hundred years from 

 the first settlements in America to the inti'odnction cf the 

 Isabella, a nati\e <;rape, as time wasted in futile culture of a 

 foreign fruit. Tlie early ell'orts were far from wasted, how- 

 ever, for out of the tribulations of two centuries of grape-grow- 

 ing came the domesticati(tn of (»ur nati\t' grai)es, one of the 

 most remarkable achie\ements of agriculture. 



The advent of Isabella and ('ata\vl)a wholly turned the 

 thoughts of \iiie\ardists from Old World to New World grapes. 

 So com])letely, indeed, were \itit-ulturists won by the thousand 

 and more native grapes, that for the century which followed 

 no one has planted Old World grapes east of the Rockies, while 

 vineyards of native s{)ecies ma>' be found North and South 

 from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 



Meanwhile, nuich new knowledge has come to agriculture, 

 old fallacies have received man\' hard knocks and chains of 

 tradition in which the culture of plants was bound, have been 

 broken. In no field of agriculture lia\-e workers received 

 greater aid from science than in \iticulture. Particularly 



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