52 THE GRAPES OF NEW YORK. 



of their species. Yet it is not so much the wonder that grape-breeders 

 have so little improved upon these first varieties, as that our forefathers 

 could allow them to grow comparatively neglected at their doors for two 

 centuries while they wasted time in the attempt to grow a foreign grape 

 that had been a failure from the very start. 



Other species had also been tried at this time. Those indefatigable 

 botanists and horticulturists, the Princes, had grown plants of what we 

 now know as Vitis aestivalis lincecimiii Munson, Vitis longii Prince, and 

 Vitis cordifolia Michx., but without finding them of value. It is interesting 

 to note that the first named species, the Post-oak grape, now promises to 

 furnish valuable varieties for the South and that it has some characters 

 desirable for the North if they can be combined with those of our northern 

 species. 



We have followed the grape through the settlement, colonization and 

 first statehood days of the United States. We have seen that it had its 

 part, and no mean one, in these dramatic periods. We have found that 

 the wild grapes of the country, valued but uncultivated for two hundred 

 years, became through mere transplanting from the woods into the vine- 

 yards, without the slow modifications which nearly all other plants have 

 had to undergo, one of our most important fruits. The domestication of 

 four species of American grapes has been briefly traced. The beginning 

 of American viticulture has been set, somewhat arbitrarily, at 1830, the 

 date of the publication of William Prince's Treatise on the Vine. It 

 remains now to discuss the economic progress of the industry we have 

 seen launched. 



The twenty years following 1830 comprise a period of expansion in grape- 

 growing unmarked by tlie introduction of new types or of any new varieties 

 of particular note. During tliis time a grape and wine industry of con- 

 siderable magnitude was developed about Cincinnati, and the Ohio River 

 became known as the Rliine of America — a title long since lost and now 

 applied to the Keuka Lake region in New York. According to Buchanan.' 

 there were 1550 acres of gra]")es in the Ohio Valley within twenty miles of 

 Cincinnati; between fortv and fiftv acres near Hermann, Missouri; a few 



'Buchanan, Robert. Grape Culture: 6i. 1S50. 



