Treatment of the American Grape -Vine. 259 



But there was one locality in which vineyard-cultivation was commenced 

 nearly thirty years ago, and where the planters were far removed from out- 

 side counsel. They were compelled to study the nature and habits of the 

 vine, and thus deduce methods for its treatment. Extending south-west 

 from the head of Canandaigua Lake in the State of New York, a distance 

 of several miles, is Naples Valley, which, to-day, has over a thousand acres 

 of vineyard on one of its sides. Hills a thousand feet in height enclose 

 it ; and there, for many years, the American Neapolitans lived secluded from 

 the world. The Erie Railway, a branch of which is now but six miles 

 distant from it on the west, was then undreamed of No steamboat was 

 launched on Canandaigua Lake to facilitate communication with their 

 transmontane fellow-beings. The cumbrous stage-coach, clambering over 

 mountain-roads, brought them intelligence of the scandals and the gossip- 

 ings, and the disorders and the crimes, and the convulsions, social and 

 governmental, native and exotic, wliich, in those days, sorely tried the tem- 

 per of the sons of Adam on this mundane sphere. There they lived, had 

 their periodical spasms of politics, voted the regular ticket, got married, 

 multiplied, and did a good many things in a peculiarly American way ; for, 

 isolated as they were, the injunction of the Father of his Country to " be- 

 ware of foreign influence " was to them a work of supererogation, because 

 " foreign influence " had no special desire to encounter the perils of stage- 

 coach navigation on bad mountain-roads to make itself felt upon the man- 

 ners and customs of the citizens of Naples Valley, N.Y. 



Thus it was, that in the year of grace 1840, when Mr. McKay, an intelli- 

 gent lawyer, determined to plant a vineyard in that region, he had no one 

 who had ever seen a vineyard to give him counsel and advice. Arbor and 

 garden training on high trellises were the only methods in vogue in grape- 

 culture of which he had any knowledge ; and, in planting an acre of Isa- 

 bella vines, he put them in the ground a rod apart in each direction, — a 

 system of planting which required a hundred and sixty vines for the acre. 

 And, to make sure that his ground should be rich enough for grapes, he 

 took advantage of the fact of a drove of cattle dying in the valley from 

 some malady, and dug deep pits in the ground he intended for his vineyard, 

 in each of which he placed the carcass of an ox, refuse bones, and leather- 

 shavings, and over each carcass he planted a vine! He made his trellises 



