THE GRAPES OF NEW YORK. 21 



half century after, there were records in the southern agricultural literature 

 of the attempts of stragglers or descendants of this colony to grow European 

 grapes in the South. Yet these grapes are not now cultivated in this 

 region, which seemingly has the climate and the soil of France. 



The history of these French settlers on the Tombigbee is a most pathetic 

 one.' Many of the leaders had been officers of high rank in Napoleon's armies 

 unaccustomed to field work and the hardships of a new country. Here, 

 in a rough and hardly explored country, part of which was overflowed half 

 of the year, visited by all the sicknesses inherent to such a location, they 

 passed several years in their attempts to grow European grapes. Failure 

 was predestined because of natural obstacles which by this time were 

 apparent, and was foreshadowed by so many previous unsuccessful attempts 

 that it would seem that this culminating tragedy in growing European 

 grapes could have been prevented. The certain failure of the attempt 

 makes all the more pathetic the story of the Vine and Olive Colony on the 

 Tombigbee.^ 



In closing the record of the Old World grape in America a few of the 

 later individual attempts to grow this grape must be recounted. 



Three generations of Princes experimented with European grapes at the 

 famous Linnsean Botanic Garden, Flushing, Long Island. Wm. R. Prince' 



' For fuller accounts of this dramatic episode in French and American history, and in .American 

 agriculture, see: The Napoleonic Exiles in America, J. S. Reeves, Johns Hopkins University Studies, 

 23 Series, pp. 530-656; The Bonapartists in Alabama, .A. B. Lyon, Cidf State Historical Magazine, 

 March, 1903; The French Grant in Alabama, G. Whitfield Jr., Ala. Hist. Soc, Vol. IV- Tlte Vine 

 and Olive Colony, T. C. McCorvey, Alabama Historical Reports, April, 1885. 



- The last official account of this colony in the records of the United States Government is found 

 in American State Papers, Vol. III. " In a letter of Frederick Ravesies to the treasury department 

 dated January 18, 1828, is the following: ' We have suiTered severely from the unparalleled drought 

 of the last summer; many of our largest and finest looking vines, which had just commenced bearing 

 luxuriantly, were totally killed by the dry hot weather. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, the 

 grantees, with increased diligence, are using every exertion to procure others which are thought to 

 be more congenial to the soil and climate, and are now generally engaged in replanting.' ' Quoted 

 from Studies in SoiUliern and Alabama History, 1904:131. 



^ William Robert Prince, fourth proprietor of the Prince Nursery and Linnaean Botanic Garden 

 Flushing, Long Island, was born in 1795 and died in 1869. Prince was without question the most capa- 

 ble horticulturist of his time and an economic botanist of note. His love of horticulture and botany 

 was a heritage from at least three paternal ancestors, all noted in these branches of science, and all 

 of whom he apparently surpassed in mental capacity, intellectual training and energy. He was a 

 prolific writer, being the author of three horticultural works which will always take high rank among 



