The Creation of Institutional Supports for Winegrowing

In the central decades of the nineteenth century, viticulture and winemaking became permanent institutions in the United States. Before that could happen, however, certain conditions had to be met; and when they were, still others had to be met so that the achievement could be sustained. Information, research, organization, publicity, legislation—all these complicated matters had to be provided for, and to do that a number of different agencies, some with overlapping functions, grew up. Not all can be dealt with here, but the more elementary forms of support may be briefly described.

The agricultural societies, local and state, were among them. Before the days of a vast scientific establishment such as we know, in which the results of research carried on at hundreds and thousands of laboratories, experiment stations, and universities are quickly collected, organized, and published, it was impossible for one man to profit readily from another's experience in this country. Viticulture was especially subject to the penalties of ignorance, as growers kept repeating over and over what were, in the circumstances, their futile trials of vinifera. Even into the nineteenth century the situation persisted: we have seen, for example, how the emigré French of 1817 went off to grow grapes in Alabama in entire ignorance of Dufour's work in Kentucky and Indiana—they learned too late, to their cost, what he might have quickly told them.

The earliest efforts to fill this large vacuum of experimental and practical knowledge in agriculture were made by societies whose interests were much wider than agriculture. We have already seen the work of the London Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in the colonial period; its domestic equivalent, the American Philosophical Society, earned a place in the records for its publication of Antill's pioneer treatise in 1771. But these were societies only incidentally interested in agriculture, and only intermittently in viticulture. The pattern of development since the middle of the eighteenth century has naturally been the formation of groups having more and more narrowly focused special interests—from learned groups like the American Philosophical Society the movement was to general agricultural societies and from them to horticultural societies; that interest was then narrowed to pomological societies and next to associations of grape growers, until at last we reach the departments and special branches of agricultural experiment stations and universities devoted exclusively to research in viticulture or winemaking. The whole process follows a fairly regular chronological sequence, as viticulture and winemaking become more secure and extensive and their requirements more distinct.

Organizations specifically concerned with agriculture appeared soon after the Revolution—the Agricultural Society of South Carolina and the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, both formed in 1785, were the earliest. Both took an interest in viticulture, too. The example they set was widely imitated in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as state and local agricultural societies pro-

liferated, they made it possible for the next phase to develop. This was the organization of horticultural societies—horticulture being understood as the art of cultivating those plants that grow in gardens, among which grapes are by tradition numbered. Such societies began with the New York Horticultural Society in 1818, but far and away the most prestigious and opulent through the nineteenth century was the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, founded in 1829, expensively housed in Horticultural Hall in Boston, and the proprietor for many years of a thirty-acre experimental garden. The society's library is a major collection, and its publications extend through many notable volumes. The exhibitions of the society around midcentury were important popular and scientific occasions; it was at one of them that the Concord grape was brought before the world. Its long-time president, Marshal Wilder, was enthusiastically interested in viticulture; it was he who presided over the dinner at which Great Western champagne received its name, and it was for him that Rogers named one of his pioneering hybrid grapes.

The next phase of specialization was to restrict horticulture to pomology—the science of fruit growing. The Ohio Pomological Society was founded in 1847, with grape growing as a major, though not exclusive, interest. The increasing importance of fruit culture in the rest of the United States led to the formation of the American Pomological Society, which quickly became the largest and most active organization of pomologists in the world.^[45] This was the agency that, during the years of the grape mania, had a major share in publicizing, testing, and passing judgment on the hundreds of varieties that tried to crowd into the market. Its list of approved varieties was always kept to an austerely limited number, no doubt for the real security and comfort of the amateur.

The last refinement of specialization in the middle of the century came about with the formation of societies confined exclusively to grape and wine growers. The first, so far as I can find, was the Gasconade Grape Growing Society of Hermann, Missouri, chartered in 1849 to promote winegrowing in the county of which Hermann is the seat.^[46] The next was the American Wine Growers' Association, founded at Cincinnati in 1851.^[47] In the next few years the number of comparable organizations formed is rather remarkable, considering the still very small scale of viticulture in this country: the record is perhaps better evidence of the gregarious tendencies of nineteenth-century Americans in their lonely, underpopulated country than it is of the economic importance of the industry. In any case, there were associations organized in Pleasant Valley, New York; Aiken, South Carolina; Evansville, Indiana (this one German-speaking); on the Lake Erie shore; in Nauvoo, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; Richland, Missouri; and generally for the states of New York and Illinois.^[48] None of these societies has left a trace today, except for a few mouldering files of their publications to be found in scattered libraries. But in their day they provided a structure where none had existed before; they made the efficient exchange of information possible and provided a basis for mutual support and enterprise.

Another service to winegrowing in this country was provided by the fairs and

exhibitions. By midcentury state and county fairs were ritual events in rural America, and in urban America too, at a time when the city was still in touch with the country. Most such fairs accepted wine among their regular exhibits, and many of them made wine judging and the award of premiums part of their activity. The nineteenth century was not only the golden age of the agricultural fair but the era of the international exhibition. The model not just for the first but for all subsequent instances of this sort of exposition sprang full-blown from the brow of Prince Albert in 1851 and was triumphantly revealed to the world as the Great Exhibition. Wine from Cincinnati was among the exhibits sent over to represent American industry at this archetypal exhibition. Thereafter there was no important congress, exhibition, exposition, or world's fair without its contingent of American wines among the competitors. A few labels adorning commercial bottlings today still display the proud golden medals collected in those palmy days—Turin, Vienna, Paris, Rome, London, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro—all acknowledged the humble efforts of the United States to produce wines worthy to be judged with those of the established wine countries.

It was not only at the local and state level that supporting organizations for winegrowing were at work. The national government, too, gave a strong helping hand to the early commercial wine industry, a fact likely to surprise many readers. Any American who has grown up in the twentieth century, after the great chasm made in our winegrowing history by Prohibition, is conditioned to think that the federal government has nothing to do with winegrowing. The subject is not referred to in federal publications; it is not provided for in the sums granted to the appropriate research agencies; it is not an issue in anyone's campaign. This state of affairs is, we may hope, an accident following from the bad old days of the Noble Experiment. The long history of the country's interest in winegrowing was suppressed then, and after Repeal the sensitiveness and timidity of politicians towards the question made it easy for a few aggressive, well-placed legislators to obstruct any effort to restore the industry to a place among the legitimate objects of the government's interest. It is enough to say here that the present situation is an anomaly, and that the federal government was not always derelict in its duty in this respect, as it has been now for more than a generation. Quite the contrary. All of the founding fathers were, without exception, not only steady friends of wine, but active propagandists for it. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were all interested in practical viticulture, and would have been winegrowers themselves if they could have found the way to success.

The best evidence of the official disposition in favor of wine is the fact that, in the early years of the republic, no tax was laid on it. Instead, the government did what it could to help those who undertook to provide the country with native wines. We have already seen how Dufour, in 1802, and the French emigrés, in 1817, were granted large tracts of land on favorable terms in the hope that they could turn the trick of making wine in considerable quantities. Both of these episodes, one may note, were essentially repetitions in the federal era of the experiments

made in colonial Virginia and South Carolina to achieve a winegrowing industry through the assistance of the state.

When both Dufour and the French failed to make good on their promises, Congress quite naturally drew back from further trials of that kind.^[49] But when, in the 1840s and the 1850s, it began to appear that viticulture was, after all, going to be successfully established in this country, the federal government again began to contribute to the work. This first took the form of articles on viticulture and winemaking published in the annual reports of the agricultural branch of the Patent Office, the forerunner of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.^[50] The articles were of every kind, both historical and technical, and were gathered from both domestic and foreign sources. Translations of French treatises on winemaking, notes from middle western growers on the adaptation of native varieties to new conditions, and remarks on diseases, pruning methods, and the best modes of planting and propagation were all gathered and published for general distribution. One of Longworth's best and most informative articles on the wine industry of Ohio, for example, appears in the Patent Office Report for 1847. The office was also a clearing house for information about new varieties, and it collected and sent out cuttings to be tried by interested growers all over the country.

In 1857 the Patent Office determined to make a systematic effort to collect and study native vines to learn which were best for table and wine. One agent, H. C. Williams, was sent from Washington to explore Arkansas, the Indian Territory (Oklahoma we call it now), and northern Texas. In the next year, 1858, Williams travelled to New Mexico over the Santa Fe Trail, and thence into the valley of the Rio Grande down to El Paso, where he found that a small wine industry, going back to the seventeenth century and based on vinifera, was still in existence. Methods were exceedingly primitive: cowhides, for example, did duty for barrels in that woodless country. But to Williams' eye, the possibilities were spacious: the Rio Grande Valley in west Texas, he informed his superiors in Washington, is "the Eden of the Grape."^[51]

At the same time that Williams was making his western explorations, another agent, John F. Weber, was sent on a similar mission to the middle Atlantic and New England states. He collected thirty-eight different varieties that seemed worth examination, and reported that people in the East were keenly interested in grape growing:

I found, in general, a lively interest among all classes for this noble and lucrative branch of horticulture. The intention of the Patent Office to encourage the culture of the vine through the whole country, by collecting and disseminating knowledge relating to it, and the best methods of wine-making, was well appreciated, and especially so on account of the direct way which had been chosen.^[52]

One of Weber's specimens had been provided from Concord, Massachusetts, not by Ephraim Bull but by another celebrated Concordian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had growing on his house a large labrusca of the variety called Sage, or Mam-

[Full Size]

64
The United States Propagating Garden, Washington, D.C., established under the Patent Office in 1858
 (the Department of Agriculture did not yet exist); the collection, propagation, and dissemination of grapes 
was an important part of the garden's work. The trellis that runs behind the ornamental gazebo in this 
engraving and connects the two greenhouses was exclusively for the training of native grapes; elsewhere 
in the garden there were 25,000 vines of some fifty varieties by 1859. ( Report of the Commissioner
 of Patents: Agriculture. 1858  [1859])

moth. All of the specimens were then sent to Boston for chemical analysis by the distinguished American scientist Charles T. Jackson (the co-discoverer of ether, and, incidentally, Emerson's brother-in-law); the results of Weber's collecting and of Jackson's analyses, published in the official Report of the Patent Office, gave a clearer and more accurate picture of the winemaking promise of the native vines than anything else yet available.

Besides gathering information in the field and from the published literature, the Patent Office did work of its own in Washington. An experimental garden was set up there in 1858, and work with grapes was a large part of the activity carried on.^[53] Thus was realized, at last, and in a modest way, that "national vineyard" for which so many early growers, including Antill and Adlum, had prayed. The superintendent of the garden, William Saunders, made grapes a speciality, and published several papers on the subject. Within a year of its establishment, the garden had 25,000 seedlings of fifty different varieties of grapes growing; these included not only natives but vinifera as well, to be used in hybridizing experiments. By 1863 there were one hundred varieties in the garden; from this stock cuttings were sent out for trial in various parts of the country, and to it additions were regularly made from all available sources.

The scale and importance of American agriculture made it inevitable that a separate department of the government would need to be devoted to its interests. This came about in 1862, when the agricultural division of the Patent Office was separated from its parent and reestablished as the Department of Agriculture. The

change made no difference to the policy of encouraging viticulture and winemaking; both subjects remained part of the regular concern of the department, and continued to do so until Prohibition. Since that time, as has been said, the department has, even after Repeal, yielded to prohibitionist pressure and studiously avoided any association with winemaking. It is agreeable to report the first signs of a turn back towards the department's original tradition; the 1977 Yearbook of the department, devoted to the subject of home gardening, contains not merely a brief article on viticulture by a department specialist, but another on home winemaking. It is significant of the lost ground yet to be made up that the winemaking article was written, not by a member of the department, but by the distinguished professional Philip Wagner. Nevertheless, the appearance of the book marks a turn, a welcome turn, in the right direction.

The literature of winegrowing kept pace with the growth of the industry. Articles and books devoted to the subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be counted on one's fingers. By the middle of the nineteenth century the flow of print on vines and wine, if not precisely a flood, had at least become a substantial and steady stream.

The pioneer agricultural magazine was the American Farmer , published in Baltimore from 1819; it was followed by magazines with specialized regional appeal such as the New England Farmer (1822), the Rural New Yorker (1849), and the Southern Cultivator (1843); all of these took practical winegrowing as part of their province. Next came the more highly specialized publications: magazines devoted to horticulture, to pomology, and then to grapes and wine. The Horticulturist , founded in 1846 by the eminent writer and botanist Andrew Jackson Downing, was a type of the best of these.

The first periodical entirely devoted to winegrowing was the Grape Culturist , published in St. Louis from 1869 to 1871 and edited by George Husmann. The magazine was premature: there was not yet a sufficiently widespread commercial interest to sustain it. Yet there are many excellent things in it. In 1854, in New York, a different sort of journal began to appear, this one given over, not to the practical sciences of viticulture and enology, but to what may be called the lore of wine—anecdote, popular history, remarks on current trends, and the like. Wine, as a hobby and as a subject of connoisseurship, has always fostered this sort of interest. It was met in this country by the magazine called Cozzens' Wine Press , issued from 1854 to 1861 by Frederick S. Cozzens, by trade a grocer and wine merchant in New York and by avocation a humorous writer. Cozzens was a loyal champion of American wines, and there is much to be learned about early American wines from his pages, including such exotica in New York City as Kentucky and Virginia catawba, sweet wines from Orange County, New York, and the North Carolina scuppernong wines of J. H. Weller.

Down to the year 1850 there were published in the United States, by a liberal count, only ten books on the subject of vines and wines—the landmarks are Adlum's in 1823, Dufour's in 1826, and Prince's in 1830. But in the decades of the

1850s and 1860s some thirty-seven books, at least, on winegrowing were published in this country. The figure more than triples the output of the preceding fifty years, and the information in many of these books—not all, but many—was fuller and more accurate than it could have been earlier. They include Robert Buchanan's A Treatise on Grape Culture in Vineyards, in the Vicinity of Cincinnati (1850), a modest, but intelligent, brief work; the works of Husmann and Muench based on their experience in Missouri; Agoston Haraszthy's contribution from California, Grape Culture, Wines, and Wine-Making (1862); and, in the South, Achille de Caradeuc's Grape Culture and Winemaking in the South (1858). By the end of the Civil War, a man who wanted to collect a technical library on winegrowing in America could do so.

How good was the technology? That, too, is a question better deferred till later, when the revolutions brought about by Pasteur's studies and by the crises of disease in Europe can be discussed. By way of brief summary, however, it may be said here that at the end of the Civil War there was an impressive accumulation of knowledge about the habits and requirements of the native vine, and there was beginning to be, at least, some experience in knowing how to handle it for wine. The study of individual varieties had been carried pretty far, both in the vineyard and in the chemist's laboratory, and new methods of training had been devised to suit the vigorous habits of the native vines.^[54] The techniques of hybridizing were well understood. Control of disease was still at a primitive stage, but that was about to change. The crucial importance of climate to winegrowing had been clearly grasped, and the Patent Office was publishing a detailed series of studies of climatological regions. If none of these things had passed beyond the beginnings, they were at least well begun.