TWENTY-SIXTH SESSION. 
13 
introduced. It was .just as good as the Delaware is today, and I have never 
felt certain that the Delaware was not that variety. It was found eventually 
that neither would quite do. But when the Catawba and Isabella came out 
it was thought that success had surely come. It was in Germantown, the 
northern part of Philadelphia, that the first vineyards of these varieties were 
planted. Germantown as a borough w T as settled two years after the date of 
the Philadelphia charter. Daniel Pastorius brought a colony of Germans 
there. Grape culture was so eminently an object of the settlers that “Vinum. 
linum, textrum,” (meaning “Wine, flax and weaving”) was chosen as* the 
Borough Seal. A descendant of one of these settlers, Edward H. Bonsall, 
planted, in 1823, nearly four acres of Isabella and Catawba on the hillside a 
little below the Wissahickon Inn, where you are now sojourning. The locality 
is now known as “Garrett’s Hill.” He had found that the Alexander did not 
ripen. But this venture did so. well that in 1826 he enlarged the vineyard, 
and large quantities of wine, as well as the fruit, found ready sale in Phila- 
delphia City. Sad to relate, the grapes failed to ripen in the course of years 
.and the vineyards had to be abandoned. In those days they had not learned, 
as we have since, about rot fungus and root aphides weakening the vitality 
of the vines — which was the cause, and not any change in climate, of the non- 
ripening of the grapes. 
Just here I would say that, in my opinion, most of the injurious insects and 
fungi were brought here from the old world. They did not thrive as well 
there as here because the conditions for increase were not as favorable. We 
know the history of the potato beetle. It was not indigenous here; it came 
originally from the Rocky Mountains, where it was comparatively harmless, 
Rut increased wonderfully with its migration to the East. 
They have the same experience in England today that we have had here. 
England at one time was covered with vineyards. In London there are locali- 
ties that are known as “The Vineyards.” Vineyards were numerous all over 
England, and we have inventories of the stock found in the old monasteries, 
when they were abolished, showing that quantities of wine on hand were 
made from grapes which ripened well at that time in England. But they do 
not ripen there now. There is little doubt in my mind that this is because they 
liave not progressed as far as we have today in hunting for causes of failure 
and applying remedies and that they have not reached a knowledge of the 
-cause of modern failures to succeed with the European grape there. 
So far, then, as grape growing is concerned, Philadelphia is the first locality 
in America to successfully plant the native grape for vineyard purposes. 
Later along in our history we have many noble men like Dr. Brinckle, Caleb 
Cope, Dr. Thos. P. James and Robert Buist, who followed successfully in 
the footsteps of Landreth and of William Bartram, of a generation before, 
in improving the grape. To be sure, the foreign grape was cultivated here 
under glass to an immense extent; and with the taste of the foreign grape 
in their mouths even our own people could scarcely appreciate the modern 
advance. When the Concord grape was announced, in Massachusetts, as 
being the great discovery of the century, a committee from Philadelphia was 
sent, like the Wise Men of old, to examine the new wonder. They returned, 
protesting they had sore throats for their reward. Attempts were then made 
to try to further improve the native grape— that w r as Dr. Brinckle’s idea— but 
the efforts amounted to nothing; the Concord eventually crowded out all 
the other grapes. 
