CHAPTER 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 even colonies, 

 form about the most instructive and dramatic episodes in the 

 history of American agriculture. All endeavors, it will be 

 remembered, were failures, so dismally and pathetically com- 

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

 the first settlements in America to the introduction of the 

 Isabella, a native grape, as time wasted in futile culture of a 

 foreign fruit. The early efforts were far from wasted, how- 

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

 ing came the domestication of our native grapes, one of the 

 most remarkable achievements of agriculture. 



The advent of Isabella and Catawba wholly turned the 

 thoughts of vineyard ists from Old World to New World grapes. 

 So completely, indeed, were viticulturists 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 species may be found North and South 

 from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 



Meanwhile, much new knowledge has come to agriculture, 

 old fallacies have received many hard knocks and chains of 

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

 broken. In no field of agriculture have workers received 

 greater aid from science than in viticulture. Particularly 



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