22 THE GRAPES OF NEW YORK. 



author of A Treatise on the Vine, devoted his hfe to promoting the culture 

 of the grape in America. He tried all of the European sorts obtainable, 

 " reared " as he tells us, " from plants imported direct from the most cele- 

 brated collections in France, Germany, Italy, the Crimea, Madeira, etc.; 

 and above two hundred varieties are the identical kinds which were culti- 

 vated at the Royal Garden of the Luxembourg at Paris, an establishment 

 formed by royal patronage for the purpose of concentrating all the most 

 valuable fruits of France, and testing their respective merits."' After 

 nearly a half century of experimentation he gave up the culture of foreign 

 grapes and largely devoted the last years of his life to growing and dissemi- 

 nating native varieties, exercising, probably, a greater influence on the 

 culture of American grapes than any other of the many men who have 

 helped improve the grapes of this country. 



Nicholas Longworth,- of Cincinnati, Ohio, experimented with the 

 European grapes for thirty years. His experience is best told in his own 

 words written in 1846: " I have tried the foreign grapes extensively for 

 wine at great expense for many years, and have abandoned them as unfit 

 for our climate. In the acclimation of plants I do not believe. The white, 



those of Prince's time. These were : A Treatise on tlie Vine, Pomological Manual, in two volumes, 

 and the Manual of Roses, beside which he was a Ufelong contributor to the horticultural press. AU 

 of Prince's writings are characterized by a clear, vigorous style and by accuracy in statement. His 

 works are almost wholly lacking the ornate and pretentious furbelows of most of his contemporaries 

 though it must be confessed that he fell into the then common fault of following European writers 

 somewhat slavishly. During the lifetime of Wm. R. Prince, and that of his father Wm. Prince, who 

 died in 1842, the Prince Nursery at Flushing was the center of the horticultural nursery interests of 

 the country; it was the clearing-house for foreign and American horticultural plants, for new varieties 

 and for information regarding plants of all kinds. 



'Prince, Wm. R. A Treatise on tlte Vine: 337. 1830. 



^ Nicholas Longworth, known as the ' father of American grape culture ", was bom in 1783, 

 in Newark, New Jersey. At an early age he went West making his home in Cincinnati where he 

 became a lawyer, banker, and a man of large business affairs in what was then the far frontier. From 

 his boyhood Longworth was interested in horticulture and as a young man became greatly 

 interested in native grapes. He was one of the men to whom John Adlum sent the Catawba and he 

 became its disseminator and a promoter for the region in which he lived, making this grape the first 

 great American grape and Cincinnati the center of the foremost grape-growing region of the Continent. 

 He was the first vineyardist to make wine on a large scale and perfected methods of making wine 

 from the native grapes so that the product was comparable to that from the best wine cellars of 

 Europe. Longworth introduced the first cultivated variety of the wild black raspberry, Rubus 

 occidentalis, under the name of the Ohio Everbearing. His interest in the strawberry was i;econd 

 only to that in the graps and he not only did much to encourage its cultivation in America but also, 



