PART 4
THE INDUSTRY ACROSS THE NATION

14
The Eastern United States: from the Civil War To Prohibition

Winemaking in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains—or rather east of the Sierra—gradually consolidated and extended the work that had been begun before the Civil War. There were no striking new departures, and the scale of grape growing and of wine production never was large enough to be very visible to Americans, the great majority of whom lived in the eastern states. The ordinary American was still anything but a wine drinker, so such growth as the market made probably had as much to do with a growing national population, and, especially, a large immigration, as with a change of taste. The statistics of per capita consumption show an erratic, but on the whole discouraging, pattern. Another obstacle to rapid growth was an old one—the endemic diseases of mildew and, above all, black rot. Despite a growing understanding of these diseases, they put every grower's crop at risk season after season. The major new factor for eastern wine-making was the competition from California, a significant force by the 1870s; thereafter California grew at a rate unmatched by all the other winemaking territories of the country put together. Still, California was a very remote place throughout the nineteenth century, despite the railroad; the United States was still a largely rural country, and many of the services and supplies now provided by large-capital, nationally organized enterprises were then a matter for local activity. In

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Per Capita Consumption of Wine in the United States, 1870—1900 Sources. U.S. Department 
of Agriculture, Yearbook , 1898 (Washington, D.C., 1899);  Encyclopaedia Britannica . 13th ed, 26:581

these circumstances, winegrowing was a very good bet over a large part of the country, and it developed accordingly.

Eastern Wine and Eastern Grape Juice

New York, after its somewhat slow start, began to overhaul and soon passed all the other states outside California. In 1870, for example, New York stood sixth in wine production among the states, behind not only California and Ohio but Illinois and Pennsylvania too. By 1880 New York had closed to third, after California and Ohio; by 1890 New York stood second, and that was where it stayed until Prohibition put an end to the race.^[1]

The regions of the state that stood out as winegrowing centers before the war remained in that position afterwards: the Hudson shores, the Finger Lakes, and the Lake Erie grape belt. Of the Hudson region there is little to add once it had been established: it maintained a fairly steady acreage of grapes but did not expand. Its nearness to the produce market of New York City made the Hudson region particularly attractive for growing table grapes, and its river climate made it attractive to fruit growing generally. Thus, instead of specializing in wine, the Hudson growers made grape growing a part of a general fruit-growing economy. The most encouraging development in the state was the spread of winegrowing in the Finger Lakes. Keuka Lake had been the original focus; there, by the end of the Civil War,

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The vineyards of Pleasant Valley, above Hammondsport, New York, at the south end of Keuka Lake, 
1872. The view is of the region shown on the map reproduced as figure 58 ( Harper's Weekly , 11 May 1872)

there were some 3,000 acres of vines divided among two hundred proprietors and served by three wineries.^[2] By 1890, the year in which New York took over the second spot in the country, the Finger Lakes region had nearly 24,000 acres of vines, mostly still centered on Keuka Lake but with other large acreages around Seneca Lake to the east and Canandaigua Lake to the north and west. The vast bulk of the yield from New York's vineyards did not go the wineries but to the cities, in boxes and baskets, as grapes for the table.^[3] The Keuka region, however, specialized in winemaking, as did the developing Naples Valley at the south end of Canandaigua Lake. After its beginning in 1861 with the Maxfield Winery, the wine trade in the Naples Valley picked up speed in the 1870s and expanded very rapidly in the 1880s. The leaders were largely Germans, as the pioneer Hiram Maxfield was: he was followed by such names as Miller, Dinzler, Kaltenbach, and Widmer (though the latter was, to be exact, Swiss).^[4]

Finger Lakes wine was mostly white and came from the same varieties that had been established at the beginning, mainly Catawba and Delaware, with significant plantings of Elvira, Isabella, Moore's Early, and other varieties.^[5] Sparkling wine continued to be a staple product, so that Finger Lakes "champagne" was almost synonymous with American sparkling wine down to Prohibition. At the turn of the century, for example, New York produced more than twice as much sparkling wine as all other domestic sources—California, Ohio, and Missouri—combined.^[6] Some of that New York sparkling wine, however, was based on neutral California white wine imported in bulk to modify the flavors and the acidity of the wine from native varieties—a practice long established and still followed. The pioneer firms of the

Finger Lakes continued to be the major producers: Pleasant Valley ("Great Western," 1860) and the Urbana Wine Company ("Gold Seal," 1865). On Seneca Lake the first considerable commercial establishment was the Seneca Lake Wine Company, which put up its stone-built winery in 1870.^[7] The Germania Wine Cellars were founded in that year in Hammondsport, and the next quarter of a century saw such further additions to the Finger Lakes list as the Hammondsport Wine Company, the Columbia Wine Cellars, the Lake Keuka Wine Company, the Empire State Wine Company, and the White Top Winery.^[8] Something of an anomaly, but an important presence nonetheless, was the Paul Garrett Winery at Penn Yan, where, after 1912, the Garrett enterprises had their headquarters. Garrett's story properly belongs to that of North Carolina and will be told later in this chapter. Driven by a steadily encroaching zone of prohibitionist drought, Garrett left North Carolina for Virginia, then Virginia for New York, where he weathered Prohibition and reemerged as the genius behind the formation of Fruit Industries Incorporated, a combine of California and eastern interests that was the largest winemaking enterprise in the country. For a time, then, in virtue of Garrett's Penn Yan headquarters, the Finger Lakes region was the capital of the American wine trade. But that was an accident of the dislocations produced by Prohibition.

To the west, along the shores of Lake Erie in the New York and Pennsylvania grape belt, the production of wine from traditional varieties such as the Catawba continued, but only in a small way. As the century went on, the region was devoted more and more to the supply of grapes for the table; thus, by the end of the century, it was overwhelmingly dominated by the Concord grape. The first carload of grapes for the table market was shipped from the region in 1877, from Brocton to Philadelphia;^[9] within a generation hundreds of carloads left the grape belt each fall for eastern and middle western cities. The success of this trade created a "grape fever" in the 1880s: "Lawyers, teachers, doctors, and even ministers of the gospel turned vineyardists," a local historian recalled at the turn of the century.^[10] The concentration on table grapes rather than wine grapes was reinforced by the very strong local sentiment in favor of prohibition; Chautauqua County, the heart of the grape region, was also the home of the Chautauqua Institution, where the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was conceived,^[11] and where the uplifting programs of "culture" purveyed at the institution were sustained on cold water and high thought alone. The shores of Lake Erie, ideally suited to viticulture, continued to be devoted to the grape, but increasingly less to wine. Not that winemaking was extinguished. The Brocton Wine Cellars, going back to the earliest days of wine production in the grape belt, continued to operate, and by 1900 had grown to a capacity of 250,000 gallons. Other wineries in the grape belt—the Lake Erie Cellars at Westfield, the Chautauqua Wine Company at Ripley, and the Portland Wine Cellars at Portland, to name a few—raised the region's total production to one and a half million gallons annually by the turn of the century.^[12] A group of Italian winemakers concentrated in Fredonia also contributed to this total.^[13]

Generally speaking, the development of table varieties received more attention

in New York than did the work on wine varieties. The excited interest in breeding new native grapes generated by the grape boom of the 1860s had greatly subsided but not entirely disappeared, and a steady stream of new introductions appeared in the latter half of the century. One of the most effectively ballyhooed of these was the Niagara, a green grape, which for a time was the light-colored counterpart in eastern vineyards of the dark-colored Concord. Niagara may be, and is still, used for wine, but its chief market was for the table, as were such other new introductions, now largely fallen out of use, as Champion, Croton, Empire State, Jefferson, and many others in a long list of local and patriotic names.^[14]

One extremely promising experiment in New York never got a chance to develop: this was the work with vinifera vines carried out by the state's agricultural experiment station at Geneva, in the Finger Lakes. A grape-breeding program was started at the station in 1890, based on the station's own varietal collection: this was largely made up of native varieties but included experimental plantings of vinifera. By 1911 the station undertook a deliberate program of growing vinifera, with the idea of developing hybrids; some 101 varieties were planted, and four years later the results were encouraging enough to allow U.P. Hedrick, the director, to report that it was certainly possible to make the vines grow under New York conditions.^[15] Two years later, in 1917, one of Hedrick's fellow workers wrote in a station bulletin that they now had satisfactory means for protecting vinifera from all four of the major pests in New York: mildew, black rot, phylloxera, and winter injury.^[16] On that confident note the work so well begun flickered out in the darkness of Prohibition. The episode is well worth reporting, now that extensive experiment with vinifera is again being made in New York and elsewhere in the East. In the publicity surrounding the current trials, the earlier contribution of Hedrick and his associates ought not to be forgotten.

In Ohio, the shift from the south, where Ohio winegrowing was first established, to the north of the state along the Lake Erie shore was quite complete within just a few years after the Civil War. Ohio enjoyed an unspectacular, but fairly steady, growth in winemaking throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the Cincinnati vignoble was gone. Of the two regions where wine-growing was focused along the Erie shore, the one centered on Cleveland was first, by a little, to be developed. A Lake Shore Grape and Wine Growers' Association held a convention at Cleveland in 1866, and next year the members displayed their wines at the Paris Exhibition.^[17] Like their neighbors to the east in Chautauqua County, New York, the growers in the Cleveland area felt prohibitionist pressure from a very early date. In 1869, when there were already three hundred members of the association, its fourth meeting, held at Temperance (!) Hall in Cleveland voted to change the name of the group to the Ohio Grape Growers Association, dropping any reference to wine; the meeting also voted to exclude wine from future exhibitions. There were loud protests at these moves, but not enough to prevent them. The dissidents seceded and formed their own group under the old name in 1869, while the temperance branch soon disappeared into the Ohio State Hor-

ticultural Society.^[18] Thus winemaking continued around Cleveland. Most of the vineyards were planted to Catawba in the early days, but as happened throughout the eastern part of the Lake Erie grape belt, the Concord and other table varieties came more and more to dominate. Winemaking in northeastern Ohio never attained any very considerable proportions, but it managed to persist for a long time: among the wineries of greater Cleveland were the Dover Bay Grape and Wine Company, the Lake View Wine Farm, and the Louis Harris Winery.^[19]

The other focus of Ohio winegrowing was at Sandusky and the islands that lie scattered north of Sandusky Bay, in western Lake Erie. Vineyards here began to be planted in a substantial way about the end of the 1840s, and developed rapidly in the 1850s, largely through the work of German immigrants, and, as has been noted earlier, by growers who migrated from the doomed Cincinnati vineyards to the promising region of Lake Erie. One of them, the Alsatian Michael Werk and his sons, had 400 acres of vines near Vermillion by the 1870s.^[20] Another northern Ohio producer, H. T. Dewey, of Sandusky, was one of the first to open a New York agency for eastern wines. When Dewey sent a shipment of his wines to New York in 1865, he found that no merchant was interested in them, or in eastern American wines generally. He thereupon opened his own store and continued to sell his American wines there even after he shifted his winemaking from Ohio to New Jersey.^[21] Before the century was out, the Sandusky region was the undisputed center of Ohio wine production, from such wineries as those of the Diamond Wine Company, Duroy & Haines, the Sweet Valley Wine Company, and M. Hommell, among other names now vanished.^[22] Sandusky was also the scene of important cooperage works, specializing in supplying the wineries; and at Sandusky the firm of Klotz & Kremer made the machines—crushers, presses, pumps—that equipped wineries throughout the eastern states.^[23] The most attractive sites in the Sandusky region were the Lake Erie islands, which were almost entirely given over to vineyards and thus presented a concentration of vines and wines unmatched anywhere else in the country. Some of the island methods were Old World traditions, like the practice of growing willows and rye to provide shoots and straw with which to tie up the vines, a tradition that persisted on South Bass Island long after cheap string was readily available.^[24]

From about 1880 onwards, the vineyards of Ohio at the western end of Lake Erie furnished the main part of the state's statistics; here, too, the Catawba reigned as the premier grape for winemaking. In 1880 Ohio had twenty-one winemaking establishments; in 1890 when the state produced almost two million gallons of wine, there were fifty-eight; in that year the vineyards throughout the state reached their greatest-ever size, before or since, of 33,000 acres. From that high point a slow, but fairly steady, decline set in: there were fifty-two wineries in 1900, but just before Prohibition the number had dwindled to thirty-nine.^[25]

This diminution was owing to some other causes apart from the threat of prohibition. The growth of the city of Cleveland, for one thing, forced some vineyards in that part of the state out of production; increased competition from the vine-

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Michel Hommel's winery, founded in 1878 in Sandusky, Ohio, by then the center of the Ohio
 wine trade. Hommel, a Frenchman from the great champagne town of Epernay, had a distinguished
 background in American wine: he had worked for Longworth in Cincinnati and for Cook in St. Louis.
 Like them, he specialized in sparkling wine and made a solid success with his White Star brand. 
(Author's collection)

yards of states on either side of Ohio—Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan—accounted for other losses; so, too, did the diseases that Lake Erie growers for a long time had fondly hoped would not trouble them.^[26] For a number of years, it is true, they escaped the rot and mildew that destroyed the vineyards along the Ohio River, but that time of immunity was only a postponement, not a permanent state of affairs. A heavy infestation of black rot showed up on the Lake Erie islands as early as 1862,^[27] and though the disease was never as destructive as it was in the southern part of the state, it was a serious problem thereafter. The statistics of production show some violent swings from year to year, according to whether the rot or mildew did or did not appear in force in any given season. One estimate put the number of vines lost to disease throughout Ohio in the decade 1870-80 at 10,000 acres, a net decrease of 3,000.^[28]

The extent to which the German influence permeated winemaking along Lake Erie in Ohio is at once apparent from a mere recital of winery names: Steuk (1855), Engels & Krudwig (1863), Miller (1865), Carl Lenk (1867), Peter Lonz (1884),

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The Golden Eagle Winery on Middle Bass Island, Lake Erie, Ohio, at one time supposed to
 have been the biggest in the United States. One of its proprietors, Michael Werk, had begun 
winegrowing in Cincinnati in the era of Longworth and had migrated successfully to the Lake 
Erie region to continue the work there after the industry around Cincinnati fell victim to disease. 
The building, much altered, still stands. (Author's collection)

Gustav Heineman (1886). The giant among these firms was the Golden Eagle Winery, founded in 1861 on Middle Bass Island by Michael Werk and Andrew Wehrle; with a capacity of 500,000 gallons it was, for a time at least, regarded as the biggest winery in the United States.^[29]

Kelley's Island, the largest of the Lake Erie islands on the American side, and the first of them to be planted to vines, was the site of a considerable winemaking activity. The largest establishment was the Kelley's Island Wine Company, housed in a ponderous stone building looking like a feudal castle, and capable of storing 350,000 gallons of wine. Its operations were interestingly described by the French botanist J.-E. Planchon, on a visit of inspection in the vintage season of 1873. Grapes were brought in by wagons from all over the island, weighed, paid for on the spot, and sent by a steam-driven conveyor to the top floor of the winery, where they were crushed, destemmed, and the juice separated from the skins. The juice then went to the fermentation vats on the second floor, while the skins descended

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The first of the Lake Erie islands on the American side to be planted, Kelley's Island flourished 
as a place of winemaking in the 1860s and 1870s. The Kelley's Island Wine Company crushed 
9,000 tons of grapes in 1879, the produce of around 2,000 acres of vineyard. (From Bella 
C. Landauer, Some Alcoholic Americana  [1932])

to the ground floor, where six great steam-powered presses, each one capable of handling three tons of material in six hours, awaited them. Below ground were two levels of vaulted cellars for the storage of wine in both casks and bottles, including champagne storage. The wines were made and bottled as varietals, including Concord, Ives Seedling, Delaware, Isabella, and Iona. There were nine other substantial wineries on Kelley's Island at the time, ranging from 50,000 to 350,000 gallons of storage capacity. Planchon was particularly struck by the cellar of the German Thomas Rush, with its rows of well-made and scrupulously maintained casks and vats; they reminded him, Planchon wrote somewhat extravagantly, of "the work of that race of powerful drinkers, who, in times past, symbolized the cult of Bacchus along the banks of the Rhine in the great Heidelberg tun."^[30]

Planchon's observations, in Ohio and elsewhere, on the practices of American winemaking, are worth summarizing. In the first place, he tells us, the practice of chaptalizing—that is, of adding sugar to a must deficient in natural sugar—was standard in seasons when the grapes did not ripen sufficiently. This, he thought, was a perfectly innocent proceeding, especially if the sugar came from cane rather than potatoes: the latter sort gave the wine a strange flavor. More dubious was the

equally widespread practice of making wine twice out of the same grapes: first the free-run juice was converted into white wine, and then the marc , the residue of skins and seeds, was fermented into a red wine by the addition of water and sugar. In this manner, Planchon noted, the Concord would give first a "white wine with a not very pronounced flavor, then an inferior red wine, agreeable enough and stable enough to keep." The practice of turning the residue of skins from the press into a thin, sharp wine called piquette was traditional in France, but the American product, according to Planchon, was better than that; the grapes had "superabundant quantities of acids, tannin and aroma" in their skins, and needed only sugar added to make a genuine wine.^[31]

Planchon assured his French readers that despite the American winemakers' regular use of artificial methods, the average quality of American wine was higher than that of France—"superior not only to the frightful brews with which, under the name of wine, the public poisons itself in our cabarets, but superior to our petits vins de consommation courante. "^[32] He reassuringly pointed out at the same time that the production costs of wine in eastern America were too high to raise a serious threat to the French, even though he was writing in the very depths of the phylloxera devastation in France. Far more likely, he thought, was the possibility that wines made from American vines grown in France would be exported to the United States.^[33] It would be interesting to know whether such a thing ever did in fact happen, following the extensive planting of American vines as direct producers in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Very possibly it did, though I have no evidence on the subject.

Michigan, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, a state where fruit growing was traditional thanks to the climatic influences of the Great Lakes, was a natural region for the extension of the viticulture already established along the Lake Erie shore. A vineyard was planted along the lake at Point de Peau, near Monroe, in 1863 by Joseph Sterling, and a few years later this region was proclaiming itself a new Rhineland.^[34] As a matter of fact, the river in the region had been named the Raisin River by French voyageurs on account of the wild grapes growing there,^[35] and the literal name "raisin" was doubtless closer to actuality than the poetic "Rhine," even though here, as so frequently elsewhere, the growers were largely German. By 1890 there were a half dozen wineries in and around Monroe, producing wine from the standard eastern native varieties.^[36] The really considerable development in Michigan was in the "fruit belt" in the southwestern corner of the state, where the waters of Lake Michigan tempered the climate to suit the production of apples, cherries, and grapes. A sizeable beginning was made there shortly after the Civil War. By 1880 there were already more than 2,000 acres of vineyard.^[37] Some of the traditional eastern wine varieties—Catawba, Delaware, and Dutchess—were grown and some wine produced, but Michigan was dominated by the Concord. In 1900, there were only five small wineries in the state, with a production of only 33,000 gallons, scattered in the region of Monroe (on the Lake Erie side) and Muskegon (on the Lake Michigan side).^[38] The growth of Michigan as a wine-producing state did not really begin until after Prohibition.

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Vaults of the Egg Harbor Vineyards, Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, in the sandy flatlands 
of the southeastern part of the state, a center of red wine production in the eastern United 
States that was largely in the hands of German producers. (From  Industries of New  Jersey  [1883])

Pennsylvania, to finish this brief review of winegrowing in the Great Lakes states, has its short stretch of Lake Erie shore in the far northwest of the state, in Erie County, linking the grape belts of New York and Ohio. Indeed, from Cleveland on the west to Buffalo on the east and north, the region is essentially one from the point of view of the grape, and the Pennsylvania section has shared the same development as the rest. Commercial winemaking began in Erie County as early as 1863, but after flourishing briefly was displaced by the spread of the Concord and the dominance of the table grape and juice markets. From a high of 97,000 gallons of wine in 1870, Pennsylvania—which largely meant Erie County—slipped to only 51,000 gallons in 1900.^[39] Commercial winemaking on a modest scale also persisted in the German-settled parts of the state, where some success had been gained with the Alexander grape in the 1820s in York County. In the latter part of the century there were small wineries in and around Reading, all operated by Pennsylvania Dutchmen.^[40]

In New Jersey the beginning made in the eighteenth century by Edward Antill and William Alexander had not been followed up in any effective way, though there are many sites in the state well suited to viticulture that might have encouraged continued experiment. The abundance and quality of New Jersey apples had suggested another sort of possibility to the farmers and orchardists. Jersey cider had been famous since early colonial times, and it was an easy step to make it sparkle and to offer the result to the public as "champagne." Newark was the center of this trade, well established by the 1840s. The Scottish traveller Alexander Mackay was told then that most "imported champagne" in America came in fact

from Newark. Even under its assumed name, Mackay found it "excellent as a summer drink. Many is the American connoisseur of champagne who has his taste cultivated on Newark cider."^[41] The fountain of cider that flowed through New Jersey also supplied the stills that made applejack, or Jersey Lightning. Essex County, where Newark is, alone produced 300,000 gallons of applejack in 1810, and though a growing temperance movement much reduced production thereafter, there were still 388 distilleries in New Jersey in 1834, some of them no doubt kept in operation by the state's bountiful apple crop.^[42]

Proper winegrowing began at the time of the grape boom of the 1850s and 1860s, in the region of Egg Harbor City in the sands of south Jersey. Here an agricultural society was organized in 1859 and carried out tests of some forty different grape varieties to determine which were best suited to the local conditions.^[43] The dozen varieties selected included the staple Concord and Catawba, but also the briefly popular but now forgotten Martha, and, most interestingly, several native varieties for the production of red wine: Norton, Ives, Eumelan, and Clevener.^[44] At Egg Harbor City, as in so many other places, the first impetus was from the Germans; the Gardener's Monthly reported in 1865 that the town, which had hardly existed eight years earlier, was now full of Germans making wine, "as good as any in the world" according to the boast of one of them.^[45] Julius Hincke, Jacob Schuster & Son, August Heil, Charles Saalman, and J. Furrer were among these early producers:^[46] they were soon joined by H. T. Dewey & Sons, whose vineyards were originally on the Lake Erie shore of Ohio, and by L. N. Renault, who bought land in Egg Harbor City in 1864.^[47] In the early days Hincke was the enterprising grower of the region. He exhibited his wines to good effect at the great Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and at the Paris Exposition of 1878, winning medals at both for wines that he called "Iohlink" and "Franklin"—the latter is the name of a native variety, but what was "Iohlink"?^[48] The firm of Dewey was long known for its red wine from the Norton grape, and Renault for its New Jersey champagne—this one from grapes rather than apples. Production was considerable, but never large enough to make much of a difference to the market: by 1879 there were nearly 800 acres of vineyard around Egg Harbor City; in 1900, a year of peak production, New Jersey made about 220,000 gallons of wine from eleven wineries. Native red wines, never very common in the east, gave New Jersey its special place in American winegrowing.

Only a few miles away from Egg Harbor City, at Vineland, New Jersey, something was going on that would make a profound difference to the character of grape growing in the east. This was the invention of grape juice. Vineland was a real estate speculation promoted, successfully, by a Philadelphia lawyer named Charles Landis, beginning in 1861, on 32,000 acres of cutover and swampy land in southern New Jersey. "Intending to make it a vine country," Landis said of one of the towns he laid out on his acres, "I called it Vineland."^[49] He did not, however, explain why it should also have a charter forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages, but so it did. The combination of viticulture and prohibition, which strikes

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Workers (and a proprietor?) at the Renault Winery in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, enjoying 
the sparkling wine for which the firm was noted. The picture was taken in 1906. (Huntington Library)

us as so strange, is pretty clear evidence of the strength of prohibitionist sentiment and of the establishment of a table grape market as an alternative to winemaking so early as 1861: we have already noticed a comparable development in Chautauqua County, New York, just after the Civil War. Landis's temperance principles did not, however, prevent a large Italian community settled at Vineland in the 1870s from making wine in commercial quantities; a German named Peter Lenk also operated a winery in Vineland until black rot destroyed the supply of grapes at the end of the eighties.^[50]

To Vineland there came in 1868 a dentist named Thomas Welch, a restless type of which the American nineteenth century seems to have had so many. English-born, but reared in upstate New York, he had been a Wesleyan preacher, then a

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Four generations of the Welch family. Dr. Thomas Welch, the inventor of grape juice, is 
seated; his son, Dr. Charles E. Welch, the successful promoter of the invention, stands 
on the left. The picture dates from some time before 1903, when the elder Welch died.
 (From William Chazanof,  Welch's Grape Juice  [1977])

doctor, and then a dentist, practicing in New York State and in Minnesota before fetching up in Vineland. He liked to experiment and to diversify: he had invented a stomach-soothing syrup, had made a trade in compounding and selling dental alloys, and had devised a "Sistem of Simplified Spelling."^[51]

In Vineland, where he was communion steward to the Vineland Methodist Church, he began to take thought about the problem of wine in the sacrament. To Dr. Welch, and to many other ardent prohibitionists, the centrality of wine in the service of the Christian church was a rock of offense and a stone of stumbling. To the riddle of how Our Lord could possibly have recommended the Demon Rum—anything alcoholic was so identified in the circles to which Dr. Welch be-longed—as the symbol of His own sacrificial presence there seemed to be only one

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Eliphalet Nott (1773—1866), Presbyterian minister, prohibitionist, and for sixty-two
 years president of Union College, Schenectady, New York. He revived the notion 
that there were two kinds of wine mentioned in the Bible, one fermented, the other 
not, and so helped to contribute to the invention of grape juice. (From Andrew Van 
Vranken Raymond, Union University  [1907])

answer: the wine of these latter days was a sad corruption of the wine Our Savior knew, which must have been an innocuous temperance beverage suitable to divine purity. By what distortions and evasions of historical and philological evidence such people were able to sustain their conviction we need not trouble to discuss here.^[52] The case is a clear instance, if one is needed, of the power of the wish over the fact.

But Dr. Welch, in Vineland, in 1869, had an unprecedented opportunity to realize that wish—in fact, to make a non-alcoholic "wine." For two things had come together for him: first, he had the vineyards of Vineland all around him, and second and most important, he had learned of the experiments of Pasteur in the control of fermentation. The process we call pasteurization had been made known only a few years before, but its obvious importance had spread it abroad quickly—it was discussed in the Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society in 1867, for example. Now, thinking about how he, an incorruptible prohibitionist, could supply wine for the communion services of his church, Dr. Welch was inspired to try the effect of heating an unfermented grape juice. I know of no positive evidence on the question, but the juice he used was presumably that of the Concord grape. By the simple expedient of bringing a liquid to a temperature of 140° Fahrenheit, as Pasteur had shown, one could kill whatever yeasts it contained and so preserve it against fermentation. Thus was the first preserved grape juice of which we have record created. It was certainly a new thing under the sun. The three great staples of classical Western civilization—bread, cheese, and wine—are all the products of a natural process of fermentation that both transforms and preserves the substances upon which it works. Now, in the name of the "natural," but in fact through the application of modern technological understanding, an American dentist had shown how to hold the blood of the grape in artificial arrest. It was the final insult to injured nature to call it, as its inventor did, "Dr. Welch's Unfermented Wine," and to sell it in burgundy-style bottles—a parody in name, appearance, and substance.^[53]

Welch made some efforts to sell his product, but gave up after a few years, having met with little encouragement. In 1875, however, his son, Charles E. Welch, also in practice as a dentist, determined to resume the manufacture and sale of his father's invention. He evidently saw its commercial possibilities, but for many years after the younger Welch took it over, the business remained shaky. At last, in 1893, Charles Welch quit his dental practice and devoted himself wholly to the business of "grape juice," as he had now decided to call it (in England, though, it was sold as "Unfermented Port wine").^[54] Shortly thereafter, the vineyards in New Jersey were smitten by black rot and the supply of grapes became a critical problem. Charles Welch at once moved his operations to upstate New York, first to Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake, and then, after only a year, to Westfield, in the grape belt of Chautauqua County. That was in 1897. In that year, Welch's Grape Juice Company pressed about 300 tons of Chautauqua County Concords and sold 50,000 gallons of the pasteurized juice; a decade later, sales had reached a million gallons annually.^[55]

The success of grape juice in the American market clearly owed much to preexisting prohibitionist sentiment, as its invention had; but Charles Welch understood the importance of advertising, and he effectively combined moral uplift with commercial astuteness. He founded two magazines to promote his product, one called The Acorn in 1875, and five years later another called The Progress :^[56] in these Welch could put his advertisements of grape juice together with editorial matter promoting the temperance cause and the virtues of Welch's grape juice, the whole flavored with fundamentalist Christianity and the offer of premiums. "If your druggist hasn't the kind that was used in Galilee containing not one particle of alcohol, write us for prices," as one ad put it.^[57] And, since temperance and religion might not be attraction enough, grape juice was described as good for everything that might ail one: "Dr. Welch's Grape Juice is especially recommended in Typhoid Fever, Pneumonia, Pluritis [sic ], Peritonitis, Rheumatis, for Lying-in Patients and for all forms of chronic diseases except Diabetes Melitus."^[58] Since Charles Welch certainly did especially recommend his grape juice to all and sundry, there was that much truth in this claim, and, perhaps, not too much harm. One may note that for many years grape juice was a drugstore, rather than food store, item, which no doubt affected the character of its advertising.^[59]

Welch did not confine his promotional efforts to print. He took advantage of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 to set up a stand and distribute samples of grape juice to the crowds gathered in Chicago, as he did later at the St. Louis World's Fair and at other expositions. He also set up a permanent stand on the boardwalk at Atlantic City to catch the holidaymakers in their thousands. In his program of national advertising, he made grape juice all things to all people: for the medical trade it was presented as a tonic; for the religious, as a scriptural necessity; for the secular, as a pleasant drink. Later, in the vacuum created by Prohibition, the company was even bold enough to proclaim Welch's grape juice "the national drink."^[60]

The demands of the Welch Company for Concord grapes ensured that the Lake Erie grape belt would remain entirely dominated by that variety, and not only the Lake Erie grape belt. It was not long before new regions were devoted to the growing of Concords and the supply of Welch's grape juice. Welch had bought out a large competitor at North East, Pennsylvania, only a few miles away from West-field, in 1911. As expansion continued, the company built a new plant at St. Catharine's, Ontario, in 1914, amidst the vineyards of the Niagara Peninsula; in 1918 the company acquired a plant at Lawton, Michigan, in the grape-growing southwest corner of the state.^[61] Prohibition being a boon to the grape juice industry rather than the bane it was for the winegrower, Welch's added another factory in 1922, this one at Springdale, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, where 15,000 acres of company vineyards were planted, or so a company statement proclaimed in 1925.^[62] Official figures are much more modest, though substantial.^[63] By the end of this process of expansion grape growing outside of California was virtually synonymous with growing Concords for the provision of juice, jams, and jellies. That situation is now, at last, beginning to change, but only beginning. For most of its modern

history, and apart from merely natural conditions, eastern viticulture has been shaped by three historic events in combination: the introduction of the Concord grape in 1854; Dr. Welch's invention of grape juice in 1869; and the institution of national Prohibition in 1920. Together they have powerfully retarded the growth of a healthy wine industry.

Missouri, Kansas, and the Midwest

In Missouri, the center of winemaking in the Midwest, there was an expansive mood immediately following the Civil War. We have already noted the excited enthusiasm of George Husmann about the future of winemaking in Missouri, and he evidently managed to communicate that enthusiasm to others in the state. The Cliff Cave Wine Company was organized in 1866 to develop 240 acres of vineyard site on the Mississippi River, thirteen miles south of St. Louis. It had cellars in a natural cave—like the one where Tom Sawyer spied on Injun Joe not far away in Mark Twain's Hannibal—and a storage capacity of 100,000 gallons by 1870. The director was Dr. C. W. Spalding, M.D., of St. Louis, the co-editor, with Husmann, of the short-lived Grape Culturist .^[64] Another postwar enterprise near St. Louis was the vineyard operated by an Irishman named J.J. Kelley at Webster Groves; there he produced wine from such native varieties as the Delaware and Norton that the French scientist Planchon, visiting in 1873, found excellent.^[65]

In the same year that the Cliff Cave Company was set up, another, larger enterprise was founded on the Missouri River, not many miles to the east of Hermann, at Bluffton. This was the Bluffton Wine Company, which secured over 1,500 acres in Montgomery and Callaway counties, laid out the town of Bluffton, and then leased the land to tenants who were to grow the grapes for the winery.^[66] This sort of scheme was called a "colony," and in one form or another it occurred frequently in the history of American settlement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Two of the leading names in Missouri viticulture were among the incorporators of the Bluffton Company, Husmann of Hermann, and Isidor Bush of St. Louis. Samuel Miller, of Pennsylvania, a well-known horticulturist who had introduced the Martha and other varieties of native hybrid grapes, was in charge of the viticultural work. Husmann himself took the presidency of the firm and migrated from Hermann to Bluffton in 1869 when the cellars of the firm were complete and ready to begin production. The party inaugurating the cellars in February 1869 attracted a large group of St. Louis notables, mostly drawn from the German community, and the hopeful officers of the firm announced that they had received an order for forty cases of their Missouri Cynthiana and other wines from President U.S. Grant himself.^[67]

In 1867, shortly after the founding of the Cliff Cave and Bluffton wineries, Dr. Spalding and Husmann founded the Mississippi Valley Grape Growers' Association to organize growers on both sides of the river, north and south of St.

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The ruins of high hopes in Missouri: the Boonville Wine Company's building, shown in a 
nineteenth-century view, a victim of the bad times for midwestern winemakers after the 
Civil War. (From Charles Van Ravenswaay,  The Arts and Architecture of Germans in Missouri  [1977])

Louis.^[68] All this must have seemed good evidence of the secure beginnings and bright future of winegrowing in Missouri. But the young hopes of the growers were soon knocked on the head; the crash of prices in 1871 forced the Bluffton Wine Company into bankruptcy;^[69] at the same time diseases, especially the black rot, began to ravage the vineyards beyond all precedent, and the horizon for wine-growers seemed dark indeed. When, in 1880, the irrepressible Husmann published his American Grape Growing and Wine Making , he was forced to admit that the preceding decade had almost entirely falsified the hopes with which it had begun, not just in Missouri but in other states: "Prices in consequence of over production of inferior grapes and wines, came down to their lowest ebb, diseases and other disasters have occurred, and for a time it seemed almost as if grape growing had become a failure."^[70] All was not lost, however. There was reason to be hopeful as growers learned their business better, and as the control of winemaking methods became more secure.

One new development of crucial assistance was not far away. This was the discovery, by one of those happy accidents that help to make revolutions, of the fungicide called bordeaux mixture, a compound of copper sulphate and lime. The mixture was applied by a harassed French grower to his vines bordering a roadside to make them look unappetizing and so to discourage casual thefts. Its fungicidal properties were somehow noticed, and it was then tested and brought to the attention of the public by the French scientist Alexis Millardet of Bordeaux in 1885.^[71] It

was soon thereafter introduced into the United States through the Department of Agriculture. Trials were made in afflicted vineyards in South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Missouri, with spectacularly good results.^[72] This work was, incidentally, one of the first significant contributions of the newly established state agricultural experiment stations. Called "the first broad spectrum fungicide,"^[73] bordeaux mixture for the first time gave the embattled eastern grape grower an effective weapon against black rot and downy mildew.

Throughout the ups and downs in the rest of the state, the industry at Hermann had been continuous and expanding. The biggest of the town's wineries, the firm of Poeschel & Scherer, put up its main building in 1869, added a cellar in 1874, and was producing on the order of 200,000 gallons in the 1880s. In the next decade it was taken over by new owners as the Stone Hill Wine Company and the production capacity expanded to over a million gallons. When the battleship Missouri was launched in 1901, it was wine from Stone Hill that christened her.^[74] Other successful growers at Hermann, though not on the same scale as Stone Hill, were Henry Henze, August Langendoerfer, Frederick Loehnig, H. Schus, and Julius Hundhausen.^[75] Winegrowing also continued in and around Augusta, near where Friedrich Muench had pioneered years before. Some vineyards and winemaking also developed in the southwestern corner of the state, in the Ozarks, and around Kansas City on the Missouri River: a hundred acres of wine grapes were reported in that region as early as 1870.^[76]

By far the most significant and interesting work in Missouri in the nineteenth century—a work of vital importance to winegrowing around the world—came about through the phylloxera crisis that began its career of devastation in France in 1867, about the time that winegrowing in Missouri was being energetically expanded. It happened that Charles V. Riley (1843-95), the first state entomologist for Missouri, was a leading expert on the phylloxera; he was able, in 1870-71, to establish the identity of the American insect with the unknown creature at large in the vineyards of France, a first step of essential importance in combating the pest.^[77] As a resident of Missouri (though English-born), Riley knew something about native American vines; he was one of the first to suggest the idea of grafting vinifera to native American rootstocks, and his authority gave special weight to the suggestion. His work on phylloxera had made him well known in France; he had also visited that country, and he had assisted the experts sent over to this country by the French government to learn about phylloxera.^[78] Riley was thus in a position of special importance for the French in their search for a means of fighting against phylloxera. After hundreds of futile and often pathetic "cures" for the phylloxera infestation had been vainly tried in France, and when it gradually became clear that grafting vinifera vines onto resistant American roots was the only reliable and practical way to save the French wine industry, Riley was again appealed to, this time for his advice on the selection of appropriate American varieties for the purpose. He in turn referred the French experts who were carrying out the necessary trials to the veteran growers and nurserymen of Missouri.^[79]

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The Stone Hill Vineyards and Winery, Hermann, Missouri, in 1888. Descended from the earliest 
winery at Hermann, it grew to be the largest. (From  History of Franklin, Jefferson, Washington,
 Crawford and Gasconade Countise  [1888])

In this way it came about that Missouri took the lead in furnishing the root-stocks that saved the vineyards of France. Three nurserymen in particular, all of them winemakers themselves, were in the forefront of this work. They were George Husmann, who, after the failure of the Bluffton Wine Company, had established himself as a nurseryman in Sedalia, Missouri; Isidor Bush, the learned Austrian whose Bushberg nursery and Bush Wine Company were in St. Louis; and Hermann Jaeger, a trained viticulturist from Switzerland who had come to Missouri in 1867 and planted a vineyard at New Switzerland, in the southwest Ozark region of Newton County. The combination of Riley, Husmann, Bush, and Jaeger probably could not have been matched outside of Missouri in the 1870s, both for relevant scientific knowledge and for practical experience in viticulture. It was highly fitting, then, that Missouri supplied the vines that, after extended trial in France, yielded the sorts that enabled the French to reconstitute their afflicted vineyards. Writing in 1880, Husmann reported that "millions upon millions of American cuttings and vines have already been shipped to France."^[80] George Ordish has calculated that the potential market for American rootstocks sufficient to replant the vast vineyards of France was on the order of eleven billion plants^[81] —a figure that might well make the Missouri nurserymen imagine wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. But of course the French soon began propagating from their own nurseries of imported American vines. The significant contribution of Missouri was to provide the original vines from which a stock could be propagated and dissemi-

nated in France by the French themselves. The years from 1873 to 1876 were the period of greatest activity in this movement of cuttings from Missouri to France.^[82]

Missouri was also ideally situated to provide a variety of native vines, a point of great importance since it was quickly discovered that American vines were by no means uniform in their power to resist phylloxera. Labrusca varieties, for example, were almost as tender and vulnerable to the louse as was vinifera itself. It was also found that the American species differed widely in their ability to serve as rootstock for vinifera: some took well to grafting, some less well. Another variable was the Americans' tolerance of French soils. Many French vineyards are on chalky soils—those of Champagne, to take a famous example—and some American varieties have an intense, even fatal, dislike of chalk. It was thus necessary to proceed slowly and to try as wide a range of experiment as the material available allowed. Here Missouri could be most useful, for it is a state where southwestern, midwestern, and southeastern climates meet. Labrusca, aestivalis, riparia, rupestris, cordifolia, and other species all grow in Missouri, so that if one sort failed another could be provided. As it happened, the first varieties sent for experiment to France were labrusca and labrusca-riparia hybrids; they did not do well. Then varieties of aestivalis were shipped. In the end, it was found that riparia and rupestris varieties did best, and they provided the basis on which rebuilding could proceed. Jaeger, Husmann, and Bush shipped great quantities of them.^[83]

One may mention here that the French did not confine their use of American vines to the roots alone. They also planted the vines for their fruit, and though officially disapproved, there are still many vineyards of old-fashioned American hybrids, known as producteurs directs , to be found in France: Noah, Clinton, Othello, and Lenoir among others. At the same time, experiments were made in hybridizing the American and French vines, just as American hybridizers had been doing on this side of the Atlantic since the middle of the century. The French have produced many valuable varieties through hybridizing, a work still actively carried on, and though the use of such hybrids is now officially discouraged in Europe, they are widely and increasingly planted in the eastern United States. The so-called French hybrids are an unlooked for, but welcome, consequence of the phylloxera disaster.

Hermann Jaeger deserves a word more. He was an indefatigable worker in developing and testing better varieties of grapes for American conditions. With this object he explored the Ozark region and originated hybrids and seedlings from his finds, many of them from the Post Oak grape (V. lincecumii ).^[84] Jaeger was also partial to rupestris varieties. When the French scientist Pierre Viala, searching for American vines adapted to chalky French soils, called on Jaeger in Missouri he was offered rupestris wine made by his host; it had, Viala said, "a very good color and a taste good enough."^[85] It is interesting to know that one of Jaeger's hybrids found its way from Missouri to the Ardèche region of France, where it became the ancestor of the famous series of hybrids developed by Georges Couderc and Louis Seibel, now widely planted in this country as well as in Europe.^[86]

George Husmann also deserves another and final word. In many ways his ca-

reer was symbolic of the fortunes of winegrowing in the United States itself, for it touched many points of development and mirrored many representative changes. A brief outline will make the truth of this proposition clear. We have already looked at his origins in the winegrowing community of Hermann, at his embodiment of the scientific German style of experiment, and at his eager proselytizing for winegrowing through his publications. Then came his failure, in common with that of many others, in the incautious days after the war. Undaunted, he turned to the propagation of vines in a nursery business, and had a large part in supplying the French with native vines to combat the phylloxera. The rest of his story begins in 1878, when he was appointed the first professor of horticulture at the University of Missouri in Columbia. There he at once laid out a vineyard on university ground and had over 130 varieties growing by 1880.^[87] In 1881, as though to symbolize the transference of power from the East to the West, Husmann accepted a position as manager of the Talcoa Vineyards in the Napa Valley, California, belonging to the James W. Simonton estate. The vineyards were being destroyed by phylloxera, and Husmann was a recognized expert who might save them. He had sent native root-stocks to California as well as to France in the years when he was a nurseryman.^[88]

Husmann's migration to California in 1881 came at just the moment when phylloxera was at last recognized as a menace to the state, and at the same moment that saw the formation of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners and the founding of the university's viticultural program. Husmann set to work with his invariable energy and enthusiasm, and soon had three hundred acres planted in native American vines for experiment to determine their resistance and their suitability for grafting to vinifera.^[89] He also continued his interest in the whole subject of winegrowing, making inquiries into the various developments in California and taking part in the professional meetings of the state's winegrowers. The result was that within the decade of his arrival in California he had written a book, called Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California: A Practical Manual for the Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker (1888).

This was the third phase of Husmann's oracular performances before the American public: in the first, going back to his early days as a grower and wine-maker at Hermann, Missouri, he proclaimed the future of Missouri and the "great west" as the home of a marvelous winegrowing economy; in the second, as a somewhat sobered but still convinced prophet, he sold American vines to the French and wrote a book to encourage eastern American growers generally after a decade of sore disappointment and distress. In his final phase, he joined the growing company of visionaries who had found the future revealed to them in California. In all of this, there was nothing meretricious, nothing affected. Husmann was, clearly, a true believer, wherever he found himself, and a shrewd judge too of what was going on and what might be made of it. That California claimed him at last is no discredit to the rest of the country. I note it here only as completing his role as symbolic instance of the progress of American winegrowing in the century, a progress in which California was surely the culminating stage. Long before his death in

1902, Husmann had left the Talcoa Vineyard for his own property of Oak Glen, in the Chiles Valley of Napa County. The winery that he built there has now disappeared, but the professor's work and his example are still vivid.

As we saw in an earlier chapter, winegrowing in other midwestern states responded very quickly to the early successes in Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. There were vineyards and wineries in Illinois and Wisconsin before the Civil War, and in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas not long after it. In Iowa, for instance, the State Horticultural Society reported in 1868 on the results of grape growing and winemaking in sixteen different counties with all the established varieties of native hybrids. The testimony was all optimistic, and one witness declared that "one man can tend three acres of grapes as easily as twenty acres of corn."^[90] The fact that corn has long since triumphed over its rivals in Iowa does not necessarily mean that the grape could not still have a significant place there. In the same year as the Iowa report, 1868, Illinois produced 225,000 gallons of wine, more than Missouri and only barely less than New York.^[91] The very heart of the Midwest was evidently a place where people thought well of the chances of grape growing and winemaking.

In a large and general view, the two most favored regions for winegrowing in the Midwest were along the two great river valleys of the Mississippi and the Missouri: along the first of these from southern Wisconsin to a point well below St. Louis; and along the second from Omaha to St. Louis. On the Mississippi there was significant viticulture at Dubuque, Nauvoo, Keokuk, and St. Louis; on the Missouri, at Council Bluffs, St. Joseph, Leavenworth, Kansas City, and, of course, at the old German settlements from Boonville to St. Louis. Grapes were not confined to the riverine slopes, however; they were raised on the prairies of the Illinois interior, on the Ozark hills of southwestern Missouri, on the rich black lands of central Iowa, on the arid bluffs of western Kansas, and any other sort of middle western site that might challenge the ambitions of a horticultural pioneer.

It should certainly be known that these middle western states were winemaking states, since the fact is largely forgotten today. Winemaking at Nauvoo, Illinois, is a notable exception in having persisted down to the present day. More typical is the history illustrated on the other side of the river from Nauvoo by the White Elk Vineyards of Keokuk, Iowa. Established in 1869 by Hiram Barney of New York, the one hundred acres of White Elk vines produced, by 1880, up to 30,000 gallons of Concord, Ives, Norton, and Clinton wines a year.^[92] But they could not survive the unequal struggle against the growing power of prohibition on one side and the unremitting attack of endemic diseases on the other. There were a number of beginnings comparable to the White Elk Vineyards scattered over the wide distances of the flat Midwest, but to try to give a connected account of them would present a distorted idea of their importance in the general agricultural scene in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Winegrowing was always an exotic activity in most of this territory, at the mercy of unfriendly nature and re-

garded with suspicious hostility by large parts of the population. Still, though winegrowing was scattered and small-scale in these states, its history recapitulates the most familiar themes of pioneer American experience in this effort. In the first place, it was largely the work of continental immigrants, who were almost certain to be German, Swiss, or French. In the second place, it was sometimes an aspect of communitarian life, either religious or utopian. And it had to face the inevitable obstacles: powerful endemic diseases, and intolerant prohibitionist hostility. These themes may be briefly illustrated.

The Germans of Belleville, Illinois, have already been mentioned, and the Germans, it seems, almost always gave the lead elsewhere in the state, as they had at Belleville. John Bauer, the son of a German winegrower in Rhenish Bavaria, and John Tanner, a Swiss, introduced winegrowing to Nauvoo, Illinois, in the early 1850s, and one of the earliest wineries there belonged to a man from Liechtenstein

named Rheinberger.^[93] Louis Koch, a Saxon, operated a winery for many years before and after the Civil War, at Golconda, on the Ohio River.^[94] As viticulture spread up and down Illinois along the length of its Mississippi River border, and into the prairies to the east, one continues to encounter German names: Theodore Engelmann operated his Looking-Glass Vineyard at Mascoutah; Dr. H. Schroeder his Marble Front Wine House in Peoria; Friedrich Hecker at Belleville, Fred Schneiter at St. Elmo, and Theophile Huber at Illinois City are other instances.^[95] Hecker was a man of considerable eminence, a lawyer and politician from Baden who had been forced into exile for his revolutionary activities. He settled among the learned German farmers in the region of Belleville, fought with distinction in the Civil War, and afterwards cultivated his farm with success. He made viticulture a special interest and corresponded on American grape varieties with experts in Germany at the time of the phylloxera crisis.^[96] Theophile Huber, whose vineyard went back to 1867, was an active experimenter in breeding new varieties of native grapes; so were Ludwig Hencke of Collinsville, and J. Balziger of Highland, G. A. Ensenburger of Bloomington, and Otto Wasserzieher of Nauvoo.^[97] The German propensity to experiment was not restricted to such eminent names as Engelmann, Husmann, and Rommel, but was diffused widely and shared by many obscure, but useful, workers.

Perhaps no state has been thought of as more thoroughly and permanently "Dry" than Kansas: it was the first state to adopt constitutional prohibition; its politicians were usually notable among the public spokesmen for the Dry cause; it was the home of the absurd Carrie A. Nation, the ax-wielding destroyer of saloons. As the president of the State Temperance Union vaunted in 1890, "Kansas is the mausoleum of the saloon, the sepulchre of its vices, the tomb of its iniquities."^[98] Besides, its rolling prairies seem utterly unfitted to grape growing: Bacchus loves the hillsides, and there are none in Kansas. In the popular imagery of the United States, Kansas is a place to grow wheat, and that, in fact, is what most of the state's acreage is devoted to. Yet there was a time when the future of winegrowing looked quite promising in Kansas, and perhaps such a time will come again.

Wild vines flourish in Kansas just as they do in every other part of the Midwest. Captain Etienne Venyard de Bourgmont, on an expedition to what is now the northeastern corner of the state in 1724, was supplied with grapes there by the local Indians; what is more, he and his men made wine from the wild summer grapes that they found growing in abundance along the Missouri River bluffs.^[99] Eighty years later, when Lewis and Clark passed the site where Bourgmont had found his grapes, they saw the same abundance: "On the shores were great quantities of summer and fall grapes."^[100] It would be another half century before much settlement had been made in Kansas, but when it came, the grapes were still there to meet the pioneer. One settler heading west from Kansas City just after the Civil War recalls the air of June on the Kansas prairie as "fragrant with wild grape blossoms."^[101] Another early settler, describing how they used to go "graping" along the Kaw River bottoms, remembered that "one could drive the wagon under the vines as they hung from low tree tops and pick the fruit directly into the buckets and tubs provided."^[102] I myself remember in the 1930s swinging across a Kansas creek on a great festoon of wild grape vine hanging from the trees along the bank.

Such an obvious invitation to try grape growing was responded to quickly. We have already noted the work of John Burr and Dr. Stayman around Leavenworth in the 1860s. Another pioneer in grape growing, a bold one, was a nurseryman named A. M. Burns, who set up a nursery on the arid plains of Riley County in 1857 and specialized in vines. In his catalogue for 1866 he wrote as one who had proved beyond doubt the harmony between Kansas and the grape: "I now think I can with safety predict a glorious future for the grape in Kansas. It is only a matter of time, and some who, when I commenced to test the vine, sneered at the idea, may yet live to see the day when our bluffs will be teeming with millions of dollars of wealth, while they ought to hang their heads with shame at their own ignorance."^[103] To anyone who has had the patience to read to this point in my narrative, Burns's words will have a distinct pathos: they echo so closely what other intrepid pioneers had to say about their work and their vision in the two centuries before Burns wrote that one can hardly avoid the ironic connection between his boast and their failure. Yet we cannot say that Burns was wrong: only that the trial has not yet been sufficiently made. Burns offered a list of more than 150 varieties for sale, all of them native American vines, including such aboriginal hybrids as the Alexander and the Bland as well as the latest popular hybrids such as the Concord, the Iona, and Rogers' hybrids. He was also producing his own new varieties for trial in central Kansas.^[104]

Burns was not just a voice crying alone in the wilderness, for there were many to share his faith. Who was the first to make wine in Kansas does not appear, but the Brenner family must have been among the earliest to do so, and they return us to the theme of the European element in the Midwest. The two brothers Brenner, Adam and Jacob, were born in the celebrated wine town of Deidesheim, Rheinpfalz, and migrated to Kansas in the 1860s. There they settled in Doniphan County, in

the far northeastern corner of the state where the Missouri River forms the boundary and where the early explorers had noted the abundance of native grapes. Jacob Brenner planted his Central Vineyards in 1864 and developed sacramental wines as a specialty; Adam Brenner planted his Doniphan Vineyards in 1865; George Brenner, Jacob's son, planted his Bellevue Vineyards in 1869. The family's vineyards lay adjacent, and included such varieties as Elvira from Missouri, Goethe from Massachusetts, and Norton from Virginia. By 1883 they had, together, over a hundred acres of vines and a winery capacity of over 60,000 gallons.^[105] There was at least a touch of French influence in Kansas as well. In Douglas County, just west of Kansas City, Isador Labarriere was growing grapes and making wine in the 1870s, and in the same county August Jacot built a wine cellar and planted a vineyard in the 1880s; there is still a hamlet called Vinland in the area, no doubt evoking thoughts of Vikings rather than of wine in the minds of its Kansas neighbors, who have long been out of the habit of familiarity with wine.^[106] In Miami County, not far from Vinland, R. W. Massey had been growing grapes since just after the Civil War around Paola, on the Marais des Cygnes River, where, only a few years earlier, the fanatical John Brown had been preaching against the wickedness of slavery and slaying such proslavery men as he could find. Massey hoped to form a "grape colony" in the area, but there is no evidence that he did so.^[107]

When the Kansas State Horticultural Society was formed, it at once made grape culture a part of its work—the grape forms a prominent part of the society's official seal. At the 1871 meeting it approved such varieties as Ives, Norton, and Clinton for "general culture for wine," and Creveling, Catawba, and Delaware for "amateur culture for wine." At the same meeting in 1871 "the manufacture of grapes into wine was ably discussed, pro and con. "^[108] In 1871 and 1872 the society heard lectures on the grape from Dr. Stayman of Leavenworth, and from the distinguished Dr. Warder, one of the pioneers of winemaking in Cincinnati.^[109] The State Board of Agriculture, an official branch of the state, was also concerned with wine-making; M. Labarriere exhibited his wines to the board in 1873, and the Transactions of the board regularly report the statistics of viticulture in the state. These make rather startling reading for anyone who finds it hard to connect the ideas of Kansas and the grape. In 1872, for example, vineyards were reported in fifty counties, and the production of wine in that year was put at about 35,000 gallons.^[110] A year later, though the production of wine had fallen off, there were more than five and a half thousand acres of vines reported in the state, from all but seventeen of its seventy-three counties.^[111] The effect of these extensive plantings was evident by 1880, the year the state went Dry: the census of that year reported a production of 226,000 gallons of wine from Kansas. Even after Prohibition, the state took notice of viticulture by establishing an experimental vineyard at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Manhattan (where Burns's nursery was) in 1888. This began with 64 varieties of native grape and had grown to include 157 varieties by 1894; the vineyard was used for experiments in spraying and winter protection, as well as for determining what were the best varieties to recommend to Kansas growers.^[112]

Working against all this interest, whether official, commercial, or amateur, was the powerful prohibitionist sentiment that seems somehow to be just as native to Kansas as its wild grapes are. At the meeting of the State Horticultural Society in 1871, in the very midst of the discussion on winemaking, one member suddenly offered a resolution condemning "the use and manufacture of wines,"^[113] and, though the resolution was rejected, the threat that it expressed grew rather than diminished. The passage of constitutional prohibition in 1880 put an end to official encouragement of winegrowing, of course, though it does not seem to have shut down such wineries as already existed. The state of things in Kansas by the end of the century is exhibited by a curious volume published by the State Horticultural Society in 1901 called The Grape in Kansas . On the title page stands this remarkable declaration about "the grape":

The oldest cultivated fruit. The finest of all table fruits. A fruit too good to be made a chief source of the degradation of the race as an alluring (yet intoxicating) principle. To the glory of Kansas, 99½ per cent. of this luscious fruit which grows freely all over the state is used without fermentation.^[114]

In its treatment of the grape, the book gives recipes for canned grapes, grape jam, grape jelly, grape marmalade, grape pie, pickled grapes, spiced grapes, and grape syrup, but not a hint about wine. The entire discussion of fermentation is confined to this succinct assertion: "Ferment is decay, decomposition, rot. Alcohol is only produced by decay, decomposition, rot."^[115] And that remained the official view of things in Kansas for the next fifty years. It is no wonder that grape growing gradually withered away in a state that its hopeful pioneers had declared—not altogether fancifully—to be "the home of the vine." There are now beginning to be heard in Kansas prophecies of new beginnings in winemaking. If they should be fulfilled, one may hope that the new winemakers of the state will hold the pioneers of the grape in Kansas in pious memory. They have long been lost in the oblivion thrust upon them by the state's history of prohibition.

About a hundred miles north of the early Kansas vineyards, in the same Missouri River country, at least one winegrower was active in Nebraska. Peter Pitz, who had been a winemaker on the Rhine before settling near Plattsmouth, Nebraska, had about twelve acres of vines and a cellar sunk thirty feet deep in the ground against summer heat and winter blasts. Pitz made three kinds of wine from his grapes—white, red, and yellow (!)—and he claimed to do so entirely without the assistance of added sugar or water. A report on his operations in 1896 noted that Pitz's success had stimulated "a number of German capitalists" to investigate the chances of winegrowing in Nebraska.^[116] No extensive development followed, but a small industry has persisted in the region, especially on the opposite bank of the Missouri, in Iowa, around Council Bluffs. One may note, too, that back in the days of the grape boom of the sixties, when hybridizing was all the rage, Nebraska made its contribution: two varieties, at least, were introduced by R. O. Thompson, of Nursery Hill, Nebraska, and though neither had any success, they are good evi-

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The extraordinary boast of this title page—that it is the "glory" of Kansas to consume
 its grapes fresh rather than fermented—speaks volumes about the attitudes of a constitutionally
 dry state and about the cultural atmosphere in which midwestern grape growers had to work. 
(California State University, Fresno, Library)

dence of the hopefulness of those days. In the same spirit Thompson tested hundreds of varieties of native vines, looking for the elusive one that would yield good wine in the state's unfriendly climate.'^[117] Nebraska was later a source of resistant riparia rootstocks for California, shipped out by the carload when that state began to reconstitute its vineyards against the phylloxera in the 1880s.^[118]

The communal pattern, which we have seen on both the East and the West Coasts, appeared in the Midwest too, though only in a flickering way. The Icarians of Cloverdale, California, were the remnant of a community of idealistic Frenchmen, inspired by utopian notions, who had settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1849, not long after the Mormons who had founded and built the town had abandoned it for their migration to Utah. The Icarians did not pioneer grape growing at Nauvoo, but when others began it they joined in; not, however, without taking a backward step. They planted European vines, and so had to watch them fail first before finding their way with native vines.^[119] Emil Baxter, an Englishman who had joined the Icarians, founded a winery at Nauvoo in 1857 that is still in operation.^[120] Meanwhile, a series of bitter schisms among the Icarians, culminating in the exile and death of their leader, Etienne Cabet, had left the Nauvoo community weak and disorganized. In the hope of making a new start, some Icarians migrated to the southwestern corner of Iowa in 1860, not far from that stretch of the Missouri River where the borders of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri approach one another between Omaha and Kansas City. Here they established a small vineyard of Concord vines expressly for winemaking and succeeded in maintaining it for many years.^[121] Even after another schism had sent the last expedition of Icarians out to California, the Icarians who remained in Iowa kept their vineyard going. The example had some effect, for as early as 1870 nearby Des Moines County had 250 acres in vines and was producing 30,000 gallons of wine from standard American varieties.^[122] It was reported in 1898 that the example of the Icarians had made grape growing a success in southwestern Iowa.^[123]

Another communal experiment, also utopian rather than religious, is worth noting just because it repeats so many of the motifs that we have heard from the beginning of American colonization. Ernest Valeton de Boissiere, a wealthy and philanthropic Frenchman inspired by the communitarian theories of his countryman Charles Fourier, in 1868 bought 3,500 prairie acres in Franklin County, Kansas, a region then in rapid development immediately following the Civil War. There de Boissiere intended to make cheese, silk, and wine through the cooperative labors of a community living in a Fourierist phalanstery. Cheese making is a new note, but the combination of wine and silk takes us back to the dreams of Hakluyt and the first days of the Virginia colony. There were 1,000 vines planted by 1871, and ten years later a visitor noted the "acres of grapes then worked into wine." The community also succeeded in producing silk, a display of which was an object of interest at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. But then Silkville, as the community was called, was abandoned in 1892, after twenty years of struggle.^[124] The long double avenue of mulberry trees planted to supply the silkworms and the large, austere

communal building of native sandstone long remained to remind the farmers on that windswept prairie of an exotic episode in the history of their county.

As for winemaking in religious communities, that, too, was represented in the Midwest, at least in a token way, in the Amana Colonies in southeastern Iowa, still flourishing 130 years after their founding by the German Community of True Inspiration in 1854. On 25,000 acres of splendid Iowa soil, the Inspirationists quietly developed a prosperous economy based on farming, cabinetmaking, meat smoking, and winemaking, carried out in seven small villages scattered over an area of some twenty square miles. Like the houses of the Rappites in Economy, Pennsylvania, those in the Amanas, often brick-built, had their walls covered in trellises for the growing of grapes. Winemaking was largely for local consumption; in the communal scheme of distribution, the average ration was about a gallon a month for adult men, half as much for women. As though to underline the connection between wine and the spirit, the colonists used the basement of their meeting house (they did not use the term "church") as their wine cellar.^[125]

The obstacles that middle western winegrowing had to face were both natural—acts of God, as the insurance companies say—and cultural—acts of man. The obstacles that nature laid in the way were those already long familiar in the shape of weather, pests, and diseases. The special agent of the census bureau assigned to report on viticulture in the United States in 1890 declared gloomily that in Missouri and Kansas in the past ten years there had been "but little progress." The vineyards in Missouri, he affirmed, "have been devastated or ruined," and in Kansas the industry was stagnant (he does not refer to the circumstance that the state was constitutionally Dry).^[126] This was too alarming a view, but it at least testified to widespread uneasiness and discouragement. The introduction of the fungicide called bordeaux mixture at about this time gave reason for new confidence, yet production did continue to decline, in the next decade, in Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. Even more daunting than the struggle with diseases was the intensifying struggle with prohibitionists, enemies to winegrowing who were in fact to prove far more devastating than even the lethal black rot. The rising trend to oppose, obstruct, and forbid the sale of alcoholic drink in any and all forms had to be a severe inhibitor of the wish to plant vineyards and to make wine, not just in Kansas but in any state where organized "temperance" opposition was growing—and that was just about everywhere. The movement was not, perhaps, stronger in the Midwest than in other parts of the country, but the relative feebleness of the winegrowing industry there meant that it had little means of standing up to it.

15
The Southwest; the South; Other States

Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma

South of Missouri, in Arkansas, the first winegrowing began as almost a repetition of the Missouri development: as Missouri had begun with Germans along the Missouri River, so Arkansas began with Germans (and Swiss) along the Arkansas River. The place chosen, around 1880, was at the high point of the territory along the river's course between Fort Smith, on the western border, and Little Rock, in the center of the state. This high point, logically named Altus, was planted in native varieties such as Catawba, Ives, and Cynthiana (a variety often claimed as native to Arkansas, and just as often asserted to be identical with Norton).^[1] The beginning thus made has continued to the present day, and the firms of Wiederkehr and Post may now claim more than a hundred years of operation. The Cynthiana, by the way, is a variety of which we perhaps ought to hear more. According to Hedrick, it is not only a variety distinct from the Norton (so he settles that argument), it is "the best American grape for red wine."^[2] This judgment was confirmed in the nineteenth century by the French in their experiments with native American grapes suited to the direct production of wine in Europe. Only a handful of producers now offer a varietal Cynthiana, three in Arkansas and three in Missouri.^[3]

A distinctive note in Arkansas winegrowing is provided by the Italians of Tontitown, who varied the otherwise overwhelmingly German character of the industry throughout the Midwest and Southwest. Tontitown, in the far northwestern corner of Arkansas on the Ozark plateau, began as a refuge from a disastrous experiment. About 1895 the New York financier Austin Corbin conceived the idea that his vast

cotton-growing properties in the swampy flatlands along the Mississippi in southeastern Arkansas could be better worked by Italian immigrants than by the freed slaves who had been the only labor employed before. Accordingly he arranged to have Italians shipped out directly from Italy to the cottonfields of Arkansas.^[4] Corbin's plantation was an island in the river, and, ominously, had been a penal colony, though now it was renamed Sunnyside.^[5] There the Italians, despite their ignorance of cotton-chopping, met and surpassed all expectations as field laborers. They also met malaria, with fatal consequences: in one year at Sunnyside 130 died out of about a thousand.^[6] By 1898 there was almost a panic feeling of desperation; they knew that they had to get out, but did not know how or where. At this juncture the priest of the Sunnyside church, Pietro Bandini, took charge. He entered into negotiations with the Frisco Railroad, whose lines ran through Arkansas and whose officers were eager to encourage agricultural development along their route. One of the properties proposed by the railroad was almost symmetrically opposite from the Sunnyside plantation: it lay in the northwest corner of Arkansas, at the other end of the state from Sunnyside, and it stood high in the Ozarks instead of at water level. The land was poor, but at least it would be free from malaria.

In 1898, under Bandini's leadership, some forty families of Sunnyside Italians made the exodus to the new lands; the men went to work at once in the zinc and coal mines of the region in order to pay the mortgage on the land, and in the intervals of their breadwinning began to plant vineyards. They were, most of them, from the Romagna and the Marches, and so at least by association of birth they were familiar with an immemorial winegrowing tradition. They named their settlement for Enrico de Tonti, the Italian who served as La Salle's lieutenant in the exploration of the Mississippi region, including Arkansas.^[7] By degrees, through very hard work, and against much sullen and ugly local opposition,^[8] the Italians made their way as farmers and winemakers. The town was not a communal experiment: each householder had his property to himself. But the experience of common origins, common suffering, and common achievement gave the Italians a powerful sense of community. Father Bandini, who had remained with his flock, was rewarded by seeing the growth of a small, but flourishing, town, which to a remarkable degree retained its original Italian character. By 1909 there were seventy families, all Italian, living in Tontitown. They were making wine from their vineyards of Cynthiana and Concord (a trial of vinifera varieties had quickly failed and was not persisted in); and they were soon to form a cooperative association for the marketing of their grapes.^[9] In common with almost all the other grape-growing regions of the Midwest and East, the Tontitown vineyards were more and more given over to the production of table grapes, and then of grape juice. Prohibition, which put an end to winegrowing, nevertheless swelled the vineyards—now exclusively Concord—to record size, enabling the growers to survive and prosper but putting an end to the interest of the region from the point of view of this history.^[10]

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Father Pietro Bandini (1853-1917). the priest under whose leadership 
Italian immigrants established Tontitown, Arkansas, and made it a 
center of winegrowing. (From Giovanni Schiavo,  Four Centuries of 
Italian-American History  [1952])

The ill-fated Sunnyside plantation was the source of two other small winegrowing colonies of Italians, both of these in Missouri. In Father Bandini's original negotiations with the Frisco Railroad, an offer had been made of land at Knobview, Missouri, along the route of the railroad as it ran southwest out of St. Louis. Bandini and that part of his flock who went with him to Tontitown rejected the offer, but a group of some thirty families closed with it and made the migration to Missouri in 1898.^[11] Who the effective leader of the Knobview Italians was is not known—it would be interesting to identify who it was that took the initiative and made the crucial arrangements.^[12] In any case, after hard days of struggle, the Knobview group, like that at Tontitown, began to prosper. At first many of them did track work for the Frisco in order to support their families while the slow work of agricultural development went on. Their town, which they later renamed Rosati, after the first bishop of St. Louis, did not flourish, most of its functions being absorbed by the neighboring town of St. James, so that Rosati lost its post office, its schools, and its stores. But the grape growing did well, so well that it managed to survive Prohibition and to serve as the basis for a newly revived winemaking industry around St. James in our day.

The third Sunnyside colony was the tiny town of Verdella, Missouri, consisting originally of only twelve families. They, too, devoted themselves to winegrowing, but beyond that their story remains obscure.^[13]

In Texas, largest and among the most varied of the contiguous forty-eight states, the history of grape growing and winemaking was very much like what it

had been in the earliest days of colonization: full of unmistakable promise but hard to bring to success. Over much of the state, especially in the eastern half, wild grapes of many varieties abounded—indeed, one expert affirms that Texas has "the most diverse population of wild grapes in the world."^[14] The explorer sent out by the U.S. government in 1857 to report on the grapes of the Southwest found that in parts of Texas the Mustang grape "is multiplied to an extent almost incredible."^[15] The grapes and wines of El Paso, at the far southwestern tip of the state, went back to the first days of Spanish colonization, but, as we have seen, that start was not carried further after the annexation of Texas. Even before that annexation, German immigrants in eastern Texas made repeated trials of vinifera varieties, with the predictable result. Texas, like Missouri, was the scene of very early and considerable German settlement, otherwise rather unusual in the Southwest. Much of this settlement was organized by a group of wealthy men in Germany for speculative purposes, beginning in the early 1840s.^[16] The colonists they sent out scattered over an area of southeastern Texas that now centers on San Antonio, and there they founded their towns, giving them such names as Fredericksburg, Weimar, and New Braunfels. At the same time, but under different sponsorship, a settlement combining Alsatians, Germans, and Frenchmen was made at Castroville, a little west of San Antonio.^[17] The speculative hopes of the promoters of these places were not realized, but the Germans continued to come anyway. By 1860, it is said, there were some 20,000 of them in Texas.^[18] Germans and Frenchmen alike hoped to make winegrowing one of their important businesses and almost at once set out vines brought from Europe. When these failed, they turned to the unimproved native grapes and made wine from them, sometimes in commercial quantities.^[19]

The Mustang grape (V. candicans ) was the main variety used, and from all reports, it made a tolerable red wine, requiring added sugar but without the foxiness of labrusca.^[20] Since it was so abundant a grape, it was natural to hope that it might also be a good wine grape. One Dr. Stewart, writing from Texas in 1847, reported that a "French wine maker and vineyardist" from Kentucky had come into Texas and pronounced the Mustang to be "the port wine grape, and of superior quality and yield." On this testimony, Dr. Stewart was moved to exclaim, "What resources our country possesses in this respect, if this be the fact, for the mustang grows every where in our fair land."^[21] It is hard not to smile now, since the hope was so wide of the mark, but where little is known much may be hoped, and experts are not immune to the desire to please. It is probably also the fact that there are great opportunities for winegrowing in Texas that are only now beginning to be grasped.

The Mustang was the dominant native grape of Texas winemaking but not the only one used. Judge J. Doan, in the Texas panhandle, made well-regarded wine from a species of wild grape in Texas and Oklahoma Territory named after him Vitis Doaniana .^[22] But such local and limited successes with the indigenous vines were disappointing when the early hopes had been to discover the Eden of the grape in Texas. Individuals continued to experiment through the rest of the century, trying all the native hybrids developed in the older eastern and southern states and gradually determining that the traditional southern varieties of aestivalis,

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Thomas Volney Munson (1843-1913), of Denison, Texas, nurseryman, 
grape hybridizer, ampelographer. For nearly four decades Munson produced
 a steady stream of native hybrid grapes and showed by his work the possibilities 
latent in the grapes of the American Southwest. (From T. V. Uunson,  Foundations 
of American Grape Culture  [1909])

like the Lenoir and the Herbemont, seemed best suited to large parts of the state.^[23] Nor did people entirely resist the seductive attraction of trying to grow vinifera: after all, such grapes were already long proven around E1 Paso. By the end of the century we hear of large plantings—200 acres—of vinifera around Laredo, on irrigated lands bordering the Rio Grande, of a group of Italians attempting to grow vinifera around Gunnison, Texas, and of a group of forty-seven French winemakers brought over by the Texas and Pacific Railroad to grow grapes in the alkali desert around Pecos.^[24]

The more discreet growers contented themselves with the safer native varieties from the South, however: the oldest commercial winery now operating in the state, at Val Verde on the Rio Grande, goes back to 1883, and is still making its wines

from vineyards of Lenoir and Herbemont grapes.^[25] The success of these and other related varieties led one of the persistent German growers of the state to declare that they "make of nearly the entire state of Texas a natural wine-producing region of enormous capacity."^[26] By now we know that no claim to "natural" status is worth very much, but the proposition is an interesting one once again now that very powerful interests in Texas, including the university in its character as a great landholder, are investigating anew the chances of winegrowing in Texas.^[27] That those chances were never realized in the nineteenth century is clearly affirmed by the French viticulturist Pierre Viala, who found abundant native grapes on his visit of exploration to Texas in 1887, but who noted that "Texas is one of the least viticultural regions of the United States."^[28]

Apart from its wide open spaces, its abundant native grapes, and its large promise, Texas's greatest claim to attention in this history is the work of a single man, Thomas Volney Munson, of Denison, on the far northern edge of the state. Munson (1843-1913), a native of Illinois, was educated at the University of Kentucky and worked in Kentucky as a nurseryman for some years.^[29] He was thus familiar with the many native vines of the Midwest and upper South, and began to take a keen professional interest in their possibilities. In 1873 he migrated to Lincoln, Nebraska, to continue his business as a nurseryman. He experimented with grapes in the frigid blasts and searing droughts of that country of extremes for a few years, but was then glad to accept the invitation of a brother to transfer his business to the north Texas town of Denison, on the Red River. This he did in 1876, and for the next thirty-seven years, until his death, he operated the firm of T. V. Munson & Son and indulged his passion for collecting, describing, and hybridizing native American grapes.

Like his good friend Hermann Jaeger, not far away in southwestern Missouri, Munson was an indefatigable field worker; for many years during grape season he rode on horseback through the woods and fields of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in quest of new varieties. Travelling by train, he carried his search into all but six of the United States and into Mexico, hunting, as he tells us, from train car windows, jumping off to collect specimens at every stop, scheduled or unscheduled.^[30] Munson was active in assisting the French in their great struggle to understand and to exploit the characters of native American vines for their own ravaged vineyards. For his contribution he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1888. Munson also did notable work in the description and classification of native varieties and in publicizing the results of his work. He made an ambitious, comprehensive display of the native and foreign grape for the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, and he wrote several treatises on grape classification and grape varieties.^[31] All this would have been work enough for a man who had his living to make as a practical nurseryman. But Munson's great passion was not for selling stock or for making classifications. It was for breeding native grapes. This is the work for which he is remembered today, work that he began soon after he removed to Texas and continued until his death. In that time he introduced about

three hundred new varieties, derived from crosses making use of a large number of native vines.

Munson's objects were several: for one thing, he tried to create a series of grapes ranging from early to late so that the whole of a growing season would be filled with successively ripe grapes. Like every American breeder, he dreamed of creating grapes that would defy the endemic national diseases—the rots and mildews that had oppressed American viticulture from the beginning. And he also aimed at creating a series of wine grapes suited to all the varying conditions of the country.^[32] He accomplished none of these things, but the example of his energy and resourcefulness in the work was widely impressive. No hybridizer before him had provided so large and steady a stream of new varieties. There were so many, in fact, that Munson had difficulty in providing names for them; many are named for his family or friends, and others have singularly graceless names, suggesting exhaustion of the poetic power. Who would be tempted to drink the wine of "Headlight," "Lukfata," "XLNTA," "Armalaga," or "Delicatessen"? These and others are all recorded in Munson's Foundations of American Grape Culture , a retrospect of his work that he published in 1909.

One of Munson's distinctive additions to the repertoire of American grape hybridizing was his extensive use of native southwestern varieties, especially those of the species V. lincecumii (Post Oak grape), V. champini , and V. candicans (Mustang). It is fitting therefore that he should be especially honored in the South, as he has been in recent years. The eclipse of experimental grape growing during Prohibition meant that many Munson varieties almost disappeared from knowledge and were in some danger of disappearing for good. In the past decade, however, a small and enthusiastic group has devoted itself to rescuing Munson's work from oblivion. Led by W. E. Dancy, an Arkansas businessman and amateur grower, they have succeeded in discovering living instances of most of the Munson hybrids. They have also established a Munson Memorial Vineyard, where the Munson hybrids are grown and propagated, in his home town of Denison. Another tribute to him has been paid in South Carolina, where a "Munson Park" vineyard of thirty-three Munson varieties has been planted at the Truluck Vineyard of Lake City. It is even possible, still, to buy wine from Munson grapes: the Mount Pleasant Winery of Augusta, Missouri, offers red, white, and rosé wines made from the Munson variety Muench (named for the venerable Missouri German winemaker Friedrich Muench); and the St. James Winery of St. James, Missouri, makes (or did make) a dry wine from the variety called Neva Munson, after one of Munson's daughters. So Munson's name is still alive in the land, as are his grapes.

Oklahoma, or the Indian Territory, where Judge Doan found his supply of Vitis Doaniana for winemaking, was not without some production of its own. In 1890, only a year after the territory was opened to white settlement, Edward Fairchild, a transplanted winegrower from the Finger Lakes of New York, acquired land near Oklahoma City for a vineyard and orchard. In 1893 he constructed a substantial cellar of native sandstone, and there, for the next fourteen years, he

made wine for the local trade from Concord and Delaware grapes.^[33] When Oklahoma Territory became the state of Oklahoma in 1907, it entered the Union as a Dry state. That put an immediate end to Fairchild's winemaking, and to any other such enterprises that had grown up in the brief history of Oklahoma settlement. It is a startling fact that, according to the census of 1910, Oklahoma had over 4,000 acres of vineyard, putting it eighth among all the states. Yet perhaps we ought not to be surprised. No less an authority than T. V. Munson pronounced Oklahoma to be a splendid grape-growing region.^[34] In recent years the Fairchild Winery has been carefully restored and entered in the National Registry of Historic Places.^[35] The restoration makes it possible to get an unusually distinct and accurate idea of the details of the actual operation.

The South

In the Southeast, as in the Southwest, the general picture in the period after the Civil War was one of widely scattered local enterprises in grapes and wine. The South had much to contend with: the economic and political disruptions of the war and Reconstruction, obviously; but besides that, the destructive effects of cotton culture, the bad old system of tenant farming, the backwardness of methods, and the poverty of things generally made any new venture precarious. And quite apart from economics and politics, the South was a place where nature itself had many kinds of bad news for grapes: humidity, heat, black rot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, anthracnose, Pierce's Disease, phylloxera, nematodes—after running the gauntlet of that list of afflictions, few vines that people wanted to grow for wine were likely to be left alive. Nevertheless, people did persist, and the conclusion one finally draws from the record is that the hope of making a success of winegrowing is indestructible, no matter what the obstacles and the defeats. What follow are examples of this general proposition.

In Florida, for instance, a state largely developed after the Civil War by an influx both of dispossessed southerners and of northerners looking for sun and land, there was a small sort of grape boom in the last thirty years of the century. The northerners, clustered around Orlando in the middle of the state, tended to plant the labrusca varieties; the southerners, in the north and panhandle of the state, were loyal to their native muscadines. By the 1890s, the high point of grape planting, there were about five hundred acres in the region of Orlando. Florida made 20,000 gallons of wine in 1890; by 1900 the figure was 31,000 gallons.^[36] Much of what was made doubtless went unreported, however, for the muscadine growers in the north of the state were rarely more than household winemakers, a circumstance that probably has been true in the South almost from the beginning. By the end of the century, despite modestly rising production figures, it was clear that the northerners' idea that labrusca varieties would prosper in the humid warmth of Florida was a mistake. Inevitably, Catawba and Concord succumbed to

fungus diseases, while the invulnerable muscadines continued to spread vigorously over the rambling trellises that supported them. Florida winemaking went on as it had begun; that is, as a domestic affair usually based on the possession of only a very few muscadine vines. Commercial production was carried on at the Ponce de Leon Wine Company of St. Augustine, which had a winery at Moultrie.^[37]

One grower of distinction did emerge from Florida's brief affair with the grape. This was Emile Dubois, of Tallahassee, who was respected enough to be among the wine judges at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and whose produce from his San Luis Vineyard of Cynthiana and Norton varieties was good enough to win a medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900. But Dubois was, ultimately, compelled by endemic diseases to give up his Florida vineyards, in common with less notable growers.^[38]

Alabama, to take another sample of the South, might very well have developed a small, steady trade in wine but for the obstruction of prohibition. Two small colonies on Mobile Bay, named Daphne and Lambert, were founded in the 1890s for Italian immigrants by an Italian-American newspaper editor from Chicago named Alessandro Mastro-Valerio. Both colonies grew grapes and made wine as part of their general plan to make a living from truck gardening and fruit growing. The wine made in these small communities had some success in the markets of Mobile, but local prohibition put an end to viticulture in the pine lands along Mobile Bay.^[39]

An entity called the Alabama Fruit Growing and Winery Association was incorporated in 1894 to exploit 20,000 acres in Cleburn County, in the northeastern part of the state along the Georgia border. This was a speculation headed by investors from the Chautauqua grape belt in New York State, including Garrett Ryckman of the Brocton Wine Cellars. The New Yorkers hoped to promote immigration to the district and to develop fruit growing through a cooperative scheme. They named the town on their property Fruithurst, and by 1896 the planting of native grapes—Ives, Delaware, Concord, Niagara, and other familiar varieties better suited to the North than to the South—was under way. Fruithurst attracted a good many settlers, among them a group of Scandinavians. At least one winery was built and wine produced, but marketing difficulties, the shadow of prohibition in the South, and, above all, the native vine diseases had made the enterprise uneconomic by the turn of the century.^[40] In 1898 another outfit, called the Alabama Vineyard and Winery Company, promoted a property called Vinemont in the north central part of the state.^[41] The hamlets of Vinemont and Fruithurst remain on the Alabama map, but these undertakings, so far as I can learn, have left no other trace and are interesting chiefly as evidence of the persistent glamor of the idea of winegrowing, even where history was not encouraging and local sentiment positively hostile.

In South Carolina, where the tradition of experiment with winemaking goes back to the beginnings in the seventeenth century and where, as we have seen, a great variety of men had tried a great variety of different approaches to the challenge, things were not much different than in the rest of the South. The vineyards

at Aiken, established with such buoyant hope shortly before the Civil War, were still there afterwards, but the heart and means to develop them seem to have disappeared.^[42] In the seventies there was a brief burst of activity in grape growing in a new region, the Piedmont area around Greenville in the far northwestern corner of the state. Here, it had been discovered, was a favored spot, a "thermal belt," where the climate just suited the grape and where, for a time, the quickly established vineyards yielded immense crops. Then, in the late eighties, black rot appeared and grape growing faded away.^[43] A good instance of the optimism that prevailed for a time around Greenville is a M. Carpin, who came from France, where he had been a viticulturist, to the neighborhood of Greenville in 1876, determined, he said, to "make a wine farm on the French plan." He bought a hundred acres of hilly woodland, cleared it, and set out a mixture of native vines—Norton, Clinton, Concord, Ives, Martha, and Pocklington among others. By the end of a decade he had a vineyard of 80 acres and plans for 150 more; his wine production was 40,000 gallons annually, all of it disposed of through a Boston firm and most of it consisting of a dry red blended wine called "Bordeaux." Carpin himself, it was reported, was "much better pleased with the results of his labor than he ever was in France," and would "listen to no suggestions of failure."^[44] Whether Carpin in the event did fail I do not know. Bordeaux mixture may well have arrived in time to save him (South Carolina was one of the first places where it was tried in this country),^[45] but its effect was not powerful enough to preserve the Greenville area as a permanent center of winegrowing.

There were more positive developments in the South, too, though they were never quite uncomplicated or straightforward. In Virginia, for example, it might have seemed for a time that the spirit of Jefferson redivivus was at work. For there, in Jefferson's old territory in Albemarle County, grape planting and winemaking had been started afresh immediately following the Civil War. Just after the war, the Virginia farmers, with slavery gone, were forced to find a new basis for their work, and were desperately looking for different crops from those that they had used to grow. Grapes for wine were one of the first suggestions to be made: an advertisement in the American Agriculturist for July 1865, for example, invites investment from interested parties in a scheme for winegrowing in Virginia and North Carolina. This was within three months of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. One of the places where vineyards actually were planted was at Charlottesville, and, as so often was the case, the pioneer was a German. William Hotopp, a native of Germany then residing in Hudson, New York, came south immediately after the war, in 1866, and bought land near Charlottesville on which he planted vines. Other Germans followed him, and by 1870 Hotopp ventured to build a winery.^[46]

In 1873 a much larger enterprise, the Monticello Wine Company, was founded by a group of farmers led by another German, Oscar Reierson. The company built a four-story winery of 200,000 gallons' capacity to handle its native wines, and in only a few years was able to obtain awards at international expositions—such awards were apparently required of any American winery seeking respectability.

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Advertised in The Southern Planter  of 1875. this "wine and cider mill" shows that winemaking 
was still alive in Virginia, though such crusher-presses no doubt saw many more apples than grapes.

The Monticello Wine Company picked up its obligatory prizes at Vienna in 1876 and at Paris in 1878.^[47] Charlottesville wine was largely sold in the New York market, and trade was brisk enough so that by 1888 there were 3,000 acres of vines planted in Albemarle County and a Grape Growers' Association had been formed.^[48] The local boosters proclaimed Charlottesville the "Capital of the Wine Belt of Virginia," a modest enough boast, and no doubt true.^[49]

An advertisement for the Monticello Wine Company in 1888 lists its products as delaware, catawba, Norton, cynthiana, clinton, Ives seedling, Virginia claret, "Extra Claret," and brandy.^[50] Other establishments in the new Virginia wine industry presumably grew more or less the same varieties and made comparable wines. Among those others were Frash & Company in Orange County, Heineken & Peters in Prince William County, and Fritz Baier in Nelson County. In 1890 Virginia recorded a wine production of 461,000 gallons, fifth among all the states. And

then the crash. The numbers for 1900 were a pitiful 38,000 gallons.^[51] In 1910 Virginia reported nearly 50,000 gallons of wine produced, far behind such states as Iowa, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Indiana.^[52] What had happened? Diseases, as always, were part of the answer; trade depression another part; and competition from California yet another. Finally, and probably most destructive of all, came the growing encroachments of local prohibition, culminating in a statewide measure in 1914. The combination was too much, so that the sources of Virginia wine dried up, not to be renewed until very recent years.

North Carolina, like its neighbor state to the south, had long been the scene of varied experiments aiming to prove that the state could have a profitable wine industry. Some of this experimenting continued to be carried out on a purely fanciful basis, with costly results. A Swiss named Eugene Morel, a pupil of the great French viticultural scientist Jules Guyot,^[53] settled near Ridgeway, North Carolina, in 1870, convinced, as he later ruefully recalled, that the vinifera varieties of central and southern France would certainly do well there. He persuaded a group of French settlers to join him, and together they planted 100,000 cuttings of Aramon, Mourvèdre, Grenache, Carignane, Cinsaut, Mourastel, and Clairette vines. Five years later the failure was obvious. A penitent Morel moved on to California, where he employed his skills as a winemaker first in the Napa Valley and then, before his early death from tuberculosis in 1884, in Fresno for the pioneer vineyardist Robert Barton.^[54]

When the French viticultural expert J.-E. Planchon visited North Carolina in 1873 he found considerable interest in winegrowing, stimulated by Morel's plantings at Ridgeway (Planchon was rightly skeptical about them). The successful vineyards, he observed, were given over to Scuppernong, and some of these were quite substantial plantings. Everywhere, however, he noted that the winemaking methods and machinery of the state were "entirely primitive."^[55]

North Carolina's great success after the Civil War had direct links to a successful antebellum enterprise. The vineyards of Sidney Weller at Brinckleyville, where Weller had carried on a prosperous winemaking business for three decades before the war, were bought in 1867 by two brothers named Garrett.^[56] They continued the winegrowing that Weller had begun, selling both still and sparkling wines, mainly from Scuppernong, the rotundifolia variety whose wine Thomas Jefferson had favored early in the century. In 1877 the firm was joined by Paul Garrett (1863-1940), the son of one of the Garrett brothers, and its transformation began. Paul Garrett was evidently born to be a salesman, and since wine was given him to sell, sell it he did. His ability to sell was so far in excess of the winery's ability to produce that he eventually left it to operate on his own as Garrett & Company, founded in 1900.^[57] At first he contracted to sell New York State wines as well as those of North Carolina, but he soon determined to concentrate his efforts on the wine from the Scuppernong grape of his native state. He was inspired to call his most popular Scuppernong wine Virginia Dare, after the first child born to English

settlers in this country, on the island where the Scuppernong vine itself was supposed to have originated.^[58] So popular did Virginia Dare become, in fact, that its sales outstripped the supply of Scuppernong grapes. Garrett had constantly to exhort the farmers of North Carolina to plant more to feed his presses, and when his efforts fell short of his needs he had to resort to changing the formula: Virginia Dare may have begun as a pure Scuppernong wine, but as its popularity grew so did the volume of bulk California wine that Garrett was forced to add to it. In the end, it had only enough Scuppernong juice in it to "tincture the flavor."^[59] Only less popular than Virginia Dare were other Scuppernong wines called Minnehaha and Pocahontas. Garrett also made wines from other native varieties, a claret from Norton and Ives grapes, for instance; but these were by the way.^[60]

Ironically, Garrett's growing success was matched by the growing power of prohibitionist sentiment in North Carolina. As district after district voted to go Dry, Garrett escaped the net by moving his operation over the line to Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903. There, in an imposing five-story winery, the fresh juice of North Carolina grapes was turned into Virginia Dare wine. But the dessication of the South continued its inexorable spread, and Garrett was forced in 1912 to move again, this time to Penn Yan, in the Finger Lakes of New York.^[61] By then he had expanded and broadened his operations in many ways, with large interests in wineries and vineyards in all the major winegrowing states: California, New York, Missouri, and Ohio, as well as in the muscadine-producing states of the Southeast. Thus, as the sources of the Scuppernong grapes with which he had made a national reputation progressively shrank, and as he had to move his operations farther and farther from their point of origin, his business persisted in growing. The eve of Prohibition found Garrett presiding over a complex of winegrowing establishments with a storage capacity of 10,000,000 gallons. But the North Carolina part of this empire was by that time only a minor territory.^[62]

Garrett was not the only producer of native wines in North Carolina, only the most successful. 'In the 1870s wineries specializing in Scuppernong wines were founded at Whiteville, in the southeastern corner of the state, and at nearby Wilmington. The Bear Winery, also at Wilmington, flourished in the late nineteenth century, and by 1912 had reached a capacity of 200,000 gallons a year, mostly muscadine.^[63] Fayetteville was another active center of winegrowing, dominated by the Tokay Vineyard of Colonel Wharton Green, whose hundred acres of vines yielded twenty to thirty-five thousand gallons of wine each year. The colonel made wine not only from the Scuppernong but from a varied mix of native grapes: some of the wines were labelled simply Dry Red, Dry White, Sweet Red, and Sweet White; others carried varietal names, such as Norton's Seedling and Delaware.^[64] Around Raleigh there were some substantial vineyards, as there were also in the far western corner of the state at Tryon.^[65] In 1893 the State Horticultural Society officially reported that the winemaking of North Carolina had "grown greatly in the past few years;"^[66] it seems likely that if the growers had not been beset by Prohibition

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Starting from a small North 120 Carolina winery that went back to Sidney Weller in the 1830s, 
Paul Garrett (1863—1940) eventually became the most successful of eastern winegrowers before
 Prohibition. His Virginia Dare wine, based on the native Scuppernong grape of the South, became 
the most popular of American wines. (From Clarence Gohdes,  Scuppernong: North Carolina's 
Grape and Its Wines  [1982])

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A bottle of Paul Garrett's Virginia Dare wine, from a company brochure 
published around 1913. The quantity of Scuppernong juice in the blend 
grew steadily less as the sales of the wine outstripped the ability of southern 
growers to supply the grapes, Virginia Dare, for whom the wine was named,
was the first English child born in the colonies. (California State University, 
Fresno, Library)

they would have continued to develop what they had so well begun. It is notable, however, that the most solid successes of North Carolina were all with Scuppernong wines. Without prejudice to those who admire these, it is possible to hint a doubt as to their acceptability nationwide and over the long run. Against that skeptical remark, though, one must set the fact that Paul Garrett's Scuppernong-based

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The Garrett Winery at Norfolk, Virginia, where, to escape prohibition in North Carolina, 
Paul Garrett moved his headquarters in 1903. According to company claims, the new 
building had "the largest clock on earth" and a wine capacity of four million gallons. 
But by 1912 prohibition in Virginia had forced Garrett to move once more, to New 
York State. (Huntington Library)

Virginia Dare, in versions both red and white, was the most popular American wine both before Prohibition and immediately after.

Other States

Here, at the end of this narrative of America's long struggle to discover the ways and means of winegrowing, what can be said about those states that have so far received no mention? In a few cases, almost nothing. So far as I know, the states of North and South Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana do not figure even in a token way in the story I have to tell.^[67] But given the meager historical materials on this subject, that is hardly a decisive statement. Much may have been done without having made its impress upon the record. All the rest of the contiguous forty-eight states have some experience to contribute to the general record, and most

have, by this point in the book, been mentioned in one connection or another. New Hampshire and Vermont have not been so mentioned, but might well have been. They figure repeatedly in the discussions of grape growing and winemaking carried on in the agricultural and horticultural press of the nineteenth century. Both the Vergennes and the Green Mountain grapes, varieties of some commercial importance, originated in Vermont.^[68] In the South, Mississippi had its share of viticultural experiment, though I have said nothing of it.^[69] And, after its creation during the Civil War, so, too, did West Virginia, especially along the Ohio River, where grape growing was carried on when the state was still a part of Virginia.^[70]

Another omission is Minnesota, but of course Minnesota contains wild grapes, and of course the first settlers tried their luck with cultivated varieties. They had success enough to encourage commercial grape growing at least in a modest way, for in the 1880s considerable quantities of local Delaware grapes were being sold in the markets of Minneapolis.^[71] There was also some work done towards hybridizing grapes to withstand the Minnesota winters: the variety called Beta, for example, from a riparia-labrusca cross made by Louis Snelter of Carver, Minnesota, and another called Beauty of Minnesota, a labrusca-Bourquiniana cross made by J. C. Kramer of La Crescent; and there were others.^[72] There is precedent, then, for the work towards developing a native hybrid fit for Minnesota conditions now being carried on by the University of Minnesota and by the Minnesota Grape Growers' Association.^[73]

In the West, Utah, despite the prohibition of alcohol among the modern Mormons, grew grapes and made wine in the region called "Dixie" around St. George in the southwestern part of the state. Moreover, this work was carried out under the directions of Brigham Young himself, who wanted the wine both for use in the communion of the Mormon church and as an article of commerce.^[74] A Bavarian-born Mormon, John Naegle, built a winery in 1866 at Toquerville in the Dixie region; this operated only briefly, but winemaking continued on a smaller scale thereafter.^[75] Arizona, which has had no previous mention, was a place of grape growing long before it became a state. J. De Barth Shorb, of the San Gabriel Winery, had property interests around Phoenix in the 1880s and sent cuttings to be planted there. They did well enough so that in 1890 the Arizona Fruit Growers' Association seriously thought of promoting dessert wine production, and some 25,000 gallons of wine were made in the state that year.^[76]

In Oregon and Washington, the history of winegrowing is practically a reversal of what happened in most other states. Usually, men tried to grow grapes in regions where they would not succeed; in Oregon, especially, but in Washington as well, Vitis vinifera will grow more or less unaided, but there were few who made the effort to grow it. Thus, though the possibility was always there, and though it was pretty clearly recognized in theory, no significant commercial winemaking developed in the Pacific Northwest until the second half of the twentieth century. The story of the region before that time is an irregular chronicle of isolated experiment.

Both Washington and Oregon are sharply divided, north to south, into coastal

and inland regions by the Cascade Mountains. The narrower coastal part is wet, temperate, and fruitful; the high and wide inland regions, in the rain shadow of the mountains, are dry, hot, and barren, except where water for irrigation can be had. The coastal region was, of course, the earliest settled part of the Northwest, and the history of horticulture there goes back to the Hudson's Bay Company's establishment at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River—actually in what is now Washington but belonging to the region of metropolitan Portland. Grapes were raised there from seed brought from England in 1824, and some of those vines were still living early in the twentieth century.^[77] Since they came from England, they were presumably vinifera, and since they lived so long, they evidently took kindly to their situation. When the American settlement of Oregon Territory began in the 1840s, the Americans, familiar with the native grapes of the East, and no doubt taught to believe that vinifera would not grow in this country, did not follow the lead set by the English. Instead, they sent for cuttings of native vines: the first planter of record, the pioneer nurseryman Seth Lewelling, of Milwaukie, Oregon, came from Iowa, and the first vine that he planted, in 1847, was an Isabella.^[78] From native vines the Oregon people made wine at least good enough to compete in California. William Meek, of Willamette, Oregon, took a special premium in 1859 at the California State Fair for his Isabella white wine; Oregon wines were also exhibited there by Lewelling and by A. Stanborn.^[79]

The chances of vinifera were not entirely overlooked. At least as early as the 1860s, A.R. Shipley of Oswego, an enthusiastic amateur horticulturist, imported some vinifera as well as native vines into the Willamette Valley.^[80] Both vinifera and native grapes were shown at the Oregon State Fair in 1869, and the fair offered premiums in the seventies for "foreign" as well as "American" grapes.^[81] But in the next decade the "foreign" grapes disappear from the competition, while the number and variety of natives grows steadily: in the 1900 fair list, prizes were awarded for a whole spectrum of the familiar American varieties, now evidently well settled on the Pacific coast: Agawam, Concord, Delaware, Niagara, Worden, Diamond, Catawba, and others. These were, of course, mainly grown for the table; so far as I have been able to determine no commercial winemaking was carried on in the Willamette Valley, the main region of settlement and of fruit growing, in the nineteenth century.

South of the Willamette Valley, in the Roseburg and Grants Pass areas, things were a little different but not much. The region is essentially an extension of the coastal valleys of California: Vitis californica is native there, and so is Sequoia sempervirens , the redwood. Here the Van Pessl brothers planted vinifera in the 1880s, and at least one winery, that of Adam Doerner, opened in the 1890s and operated until 1965.^[82] Thus a beginning in winegrowing was made, and though it had not grown beyond those beginnings when Prohibition cut off all development, it is fitting that the revival of Oregon winegrowing should have begun in these southern valleys in the 1960s.^[83]

The potential economic importance of grape growing was recognized in 1890,

when a vineyard was established at the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station;^[84] but the already flourishing wine industry in California, the remoteness of Oregon from the important markets, and the continued mistrust of vinifera all made wine-growing look too risky for almost anyone to venture. There were, of course, bold individual exceptions: one Oregonian took a silver medal for his riesling at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904.^[85] In 1910 Oregon had some 381,000 bearing vines planted, enough to rank it eighteenth among the states; and in 1915, in a report presented to the International Viticultural Congress at San Francisco, both southern Oregon and the Columbia basin were identified as "splendid" locations for growing vinifera.^[86] About that time the chronicle ends, not to be resumed for many years.

The beginnings in Washington were just as tentative as those in Oregon, and were not made so early. Still, they were early. Some vinifera were being grown at Walla Walla in 1869, and about the same time German settlers planted vinifera at Tampico.^[87] The first vineyards leading to commercial production were in the wet western, not the dry eastern, part of Washington, and they were not of vinifera but of native American varieties; these were on Stretch Island, at the south end of Puget Sound, planted in 1872 by one Lambert Evans.^[88] When the beginnings worked out well, other vineyards were planted on the Stretch Island site. The favored grape in the Puget Sound region was an eastern hybrid called Island Belle locally but known elsewhere as the Campbell Early, a black grape of labrusca parentage, introduced in 1892.

In eastern Washington fruit growing, including grape growing, could not develop in advance of irrigation works. When large-scale development of water resources began in the Yakima Valley in 1905, grapes soon became an important crop; but the grapes were largely Concord and they were destined to become grape juice rather than wine. By 1910 Washington had a respectable total of nearly 700,000 grapevines officially recorded—say about a thousand acres. Grapes grew at other places dotted around the great Columbia basin, even as far east as Idaho, along the Clear Water and Snake rivers, and some of them were vinifera intended for wine.^[89]

The pioneer grower at Lewiston, Idaho, was Louis Delsol, a Frenchman, who planted vines there in 1872 and opened a winery not long after. Robert Schleicher, an Alsatian, began his Lewiston vineyard in 1880, and made wines that attracted attention in Portland, Seattle, and beyond.^[90] But for Idaho, Washington, and Oregon alike, the dominance of California and the threat of prohibition made the risks of winegrowing too great. Washington was to develop as a source of grapes for the table and grapes for juice; it was thus relatively unaffected by Prohibition, but its promise as a winegrowing land was effectively unrecognized for the better part of a century.

At least forty-three of the contiguous forty-eight states had made some sort of beginning in grape growing and winemaking before the end of the nineteenth cen-

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The pioneer of grape growing in western Washington, Lambert Evans, a former Confederate 
soldier, planted vines on Stretch Island in Puget Sound. He sent his grapes to market in 
Olympia; winemaking came later. (From J. Elizabeth Purser and Lawrence J. Allen,  The 
Winemakers of the Pacific Northwest  [1977])

tury, and in at least a dozen of those states winegrowing had become an established enterprise. Now, in our day, there has been a return to the beginnings that were cut off by Prohibition. Societies of grape growers and winemakers are springing up in states that have long been wrongly supposed to have had no history of winegrowing: Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Minnesota, for example. At the same time, both viticulture and enology, after long neglect by the state universities and agricultural experiment stations (except for those of California and New York), are being energetically taken up by those institutions in such states as Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Virginia, and Washington. State legislatures in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maryland, and a number of other states have in very recent years passed legislation enabling the operation of so-called farm wineries, so that the small grower-producer can sell his wine directly and without the burden of heavy licensing fees. These changes are both a response to the country's newly broadened interest in wine and a cause of it. Everything considered, the current scene in this country is more active, more exciting, and more promising than at any time since the middle of the nineteenth century, when successful winemaking had

at last been established and when the economic possibilities of newly settled regions were being explored for the first time. The point I especially want to make is that the current ferment of interest in wine in America is not so much a new thing as it is a return to and a continuation of an earlier state of things. Prohibition and its lingering effects have obscured that fact from us. It is now time to consider what Prohibition was, where it came from, and what it did.

16
The End of the Beginning:National Prohibition

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding all trade in alcoholic beverages, was ratified in January 1919; a year later national Prohibition went into effect. It remained in effect until the amendment was repealed in December 1933. For the fourteen years of Prohibition the wine industry, like the beer trade and the distilled spirits trade, was legally ended.^[1] As it turned out, the measure intended to kill Demon Rum^[2] in this country managed to give it hardly more than a flesh wound. Liquor of all kinds continued to be made by one means or another, and people, perhaps in larger numbers than ever before, continued to drink liquor of all kinds. Yet the interruption to the normal growth and functioning of winegrowing in this country had disruptive and destructive effects that are still being felt and will continue to be felt for as long as one can foresee.

It is often said, or suggested, that Prohibition was the result of a sudden aberration in the American public, something that came out of the dislocations of World War I. On this view, it was an unlucky accident rather than an expression of any important tendencies in our national life. That view is quite wrong. A little history will help us to understand what happened.

The ideal of temperance is perennial and permanent, as old as morality itself. It is an ethical ideal, to be achieved, if at all, by the inner will of the individual, acting freely. It is inclusive rather than exclusive, judicious rather than violent, permissive rather than dogmatic, complex rather than simple. It is also very difficult to achieve. Prohibition is everything that temperance is not: exclusive, violent, dog-

matic, and simple. It is achieved, if at all, not by the free consent of the individual, but by the communal imposition of external control. It, too, is very difficult to achieve. The story of this chapter is, in part, of how the American temperance movement turned into the prohibition movement, or, in other words, how the campaign to reform the individual drinker became a campaign to control the producers and sellers of drink.

Before the nineteenth century there were, of course, many advocates of temperance in drink, but they appeared intermittently, were unorganized, had no program, and can hardly be described as constituting a movement. Their typical plea was not for abstinence from drink but for decent moderation, not only in drink but in all sensual indulgence. In secular thought, Aristotle was the great authority for the ethical doctrine of "nothing too much." For the essentially Protestant culture of the United States, there were many authorities from the churches to provide the same counsel. It is a mistake to think that Christian temperance had anything austerely and rigidly prohibitory about it. Even the stern and unbending Calvin held that the pleasures of food and drink were given to us by God for our enjoyment, an evidence of divine benevolence not to be despised but welcomed. The Puritans, whose example was so powerful in the formation of early American cultural life, would have stared at the idea of prohibiting alcoholic drink. The greatest poet of the Puritan tradition, John Milton, praised wine; its greatest popular writer, John Bunyan, held that the Bible approved alcoholic drink. More practically, as we have already seen, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay planted vineyards for wine almost as soon as they had set foot on dry land: no doubt they had the scriptural precedent of Noah in mind, without necessarily meaning to imitate him in detail. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist communion in the eighteenth century, was in fact a prohibitionist so far as distilled spirits were concerned; the vastly increased production and consumption of gin and other spirits in Wesley's day had given a new character and scope to drunkenness. But Wesley had no idea of preaching, much less enforcing, total abstinence.^[3] The first Methodist bishop in the United States, Francis Asbury, followed Wesley in preaching against hard liquor, but, like Wesley, never thought of suggesting prohibitory laws.^[4]

Apart from the spiritual idea of moderation, there were arguments for temperance based on purely physiological grounds. The most influential of these was set forth by the distinguished Philadelphia physician, scientist, and patriot Benjamin Rush in a widely influential essay called "An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body," published in 1784. "Spirituous Liquors" especially rum and whiskey—were cheap and abundant in late eighteenth-century America: rum came from New England, where the molasses to make it from came. as part of the traffic in slave trading. Whiskey came from the corn fields of the western states, whiskey being a concentrated, portable, and saleable form of a corr crop otherwise difficult and expensive to transport to distant markets. In a society where whiskey and rum were everywhere available, and everywhere cheap, there was plenty of evidence of their destructive effect. The poor Indians, especially, had

been devastated by firewater, and there were prohibitory laws passed to protect the Indians long before they were enacted for the whites.^[5]

But one did not need to look to the Indians to find disease and social suffering produced by addiction to hard liquor. A generation of travellers and commentators on the American scene had noted the native style of excess in drink before Dr. Rush produced his essay, in which he took up and developed an already familiar theme. With zealous exaggeration, Rush attributed almost every physical malady and social problem to the abuse of strong drink: falsehood, fraud, theft, uncleanliness, and murder, as well as yellow fever, jaundice, dropsy, diabetes, gout, epilepsy, gangrene, and madness all flowed from strong waters.

The most vivid part of Rush's pamphlet was his scheme of a "moral thermometer," measuring the different degrees of moral and physical sickness caused by increasingly strong drink. Thus "toddy" would produce, on the moral side, "peevishness," and, on the physical, "tremors"; "grog," a stronger drink, led morally to "fighting" and physically to "bloatedness." The poor sinner who had progressed through grog, flip, and morning drams to the ultimate tipple of "pepper in rum" would find fraud, anarchy, and murder in his path, with the gallows at the end. But all of this extravagant denunciation was aimed against spirits. So far from prohibiting the temperate use of wine, Dr. Rush actually prescribed it for health and longevity. He was, we may remember, one of the investors in Legaux's Pennsylvania Vine Company, which was to be a source of wholesome wine to the new republic. "It must be a bad heart, indeed," Dr. Rush wrote in his "Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors," "that is not rendered more cheerful and more generous by a few glasses of wine."

The principal ideas of the temperance movement are the two just described: first, the spiritual idea of the general virtue of moderation; and second, the secular idea of the physiological healthfulness of moderation in drink. Most of the early American temperance movements are clearly based on one or the other, or most often on both of these ideas, with varying degrees of religious sanction and clerical support behind them. The churches were associated from a very early period with temperance in America; but one must not think that the movement originated with the churches or that it in any way depended on them for its essential principles—not, at any rate, at first. In time, it is true, fundamentalist Protestantism and tee-totalism became almost indistinguishable, but it is only an accident of our culture that the morality of bone-dry prohibition and of fundamentalist Christianity should have been so mixed up as they were, especially in the South and Midwest.^[6] Biblical teaching is patently unclear and divided on the subject of alcoholic drink, and there have always been at least some churchmen candid enough to admit that there is nothing biblical about prohibition nor any demonstrable connection between abstinence and piety.

Who was "first" among organized American temperance groups is disputed, and is probably not a very important question anyway, since the early organized groups were not the causes of the temperance movement but were themselves the

response to a feeling spread through the community at large. One of the very earliest of such groups was founded in 1808, at Moreau in upstate New York, under the inspiration of a local doctor. They called themselves the Union Temperate Society and had only a local purpose in mind; that is, by subscribing to a set of rules and by holding regular meetings, to help their members to do without strong drink. True to their name, the Temperate Society aimed at temperance rather than at strict abstinence. Hard liquor was prohibited, but wine and beer were not. A system of modest fines was the only safeguard against the dangers of backsliding.^[7] Though the Moreau society did not remain active very long, it struck a responsive chord and was widely imitated in other communities of the Northeast. The purely secular and purely voluntary character of this early model are worth noting.

A rather different sort of model was created not far away and at about the same time. This was the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, organized in 1813 by clergymen in Boston. It differed from the Union Temperate Society in two evident ways: its scope was statewide rather than local, and its direction was not in the hands of members who sought mutual support against their own weakness but of professional moralists who were bent on public reform.^[8] The name of the society echoes those of the many reforming societies founded by the Evangelicals in England in this same period of intense reforming sentiment: the Anti-Slavery Society is the best known, but it was accompanied by a swarm of others, all christened after the same ungainly fashion: the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Society for the Suppression of Mendicancy, the Society for the Suppression of Sabbath Travel, the Society for the Suppression of Blasphemy, and so on and on. The Massachusetts society also resembled its transatlantic models in another important particular. Like them, it was not content to work on individuals by moral suasion; it was out to change the laws. The main object of attack was hard liquor rather than wine and beer, so it was not devoted to total abstinence. But its concern with legislative means put it much closer to the later tendencies of the prohibition movement than were the easy-going and individualistic methods of the Union Temperate Society.

The Massachusetts society had its first legislative triumph in 1838 (by that time the original society had been several times reorganized and rechristened as it grew in strength and numbers); in that year the state of Massachusetts passed a law requiring the purchaser of spirits to buy not less than fifteen gallons at a time and to take his purchase off the premises.^[9] Though this obstructive law was quickly removed from the books, it deserves notice as an early piece of prohibition law in this country. It was, despite its own brief life, a portent of the future. At the risk of being tedious, one may repeat that beer and wine were still not included among the objects of this kind of attack.

Whether by persuasive or by coercive means, the temperance people had much to do in the first third of the nineteenth century. All testimony agrees that this was a period of appalling public drunkenness in the United States. In the phrase of the

Reverend Lyman Beecher, one of the first and most prominent clergymen to advocate prohibition, Americans were "a generation of drunkards."^[10] Beecher was no doubt exaggerating, but such statistics as we have give some color to his assertion. In 1810, for example, there were more than 14,000 distilleries reported in the United States; their production was estimated to be in excess of 33,000,000 gallons, a figure yielding a per capita consumption of spirits of 4.7 gallons.^[11] In 1823, per capita consumption was put at 7.5 gallons.^[12] By way of comparison, per capita consumption of distilled spirits in the United States in 1985 was 2.54 gallons.^[13]

In early nineteenth-century America drinking was a part, and a large part, of almost every social occasion, sacred or profane: dances, barn raisings, weddings, militia meetings, elections, funerals, husking bees, college commencements, log rollings, ordinations, or "any other reason why," as the old song puts it, were occasions for breaking out the jugs. In the North some of those jugs would be filled with cider; in the South, with peach brandy; but North or South, rum and whiskey were sure to be in plenty. Beer was not a common general drink in the early re-public—it had to wait on the large German immigrations after 1848.^[14] And wine was even less common than beer. But distilled spirits were available everywhere. They were largely untaxed; the Jeffersonians had repealed Hamilton's modest whiskey tax in 1802, and except for a wartime tax from 1813 to 1817, whiskey and other spirits were tax-free commodities until the Civil War. In 1860 the average retail price of whiskey was 30 cents a gallon.^[15] The combination of cheapness and availability would seem to be a sufficient explanation for the notorious American habit of heavy spirit drinking, though students of the subject have suggested any number of other reasons as well: the anxieties of pioneer life, for example, or the self-conscious spirit of democracy, which compelled a noisy, boozy, gregariousness even on those who would gladly have done without it. Whatever the reasons, the fact was clear to all: that Americans drank heavily and they drank hard stuff.

The style of much early temperance activity was to offer a kind of counter-attraction to the pleasures of social drinking. Meetings at which lectures were given and at which a kind of revivalist fervor could be enjoyed in the hearing of confessions and the receiving of pledges were the staple entertainment. Such groups as the Washington Temperance Society, founded in Baltimore in 1840, added the attractions of brass bands, parades, uniforms, and mass meetings to the business of redeeming the drunkard.^[16] Another way that temperance societies could distract their members from the temptations of drink was to imitate the secret and fraternal societies, complete with oaths, rituals, regalia, degrees, honors, and mutual benefits. The Sons of Temperance, the Templars of Honor and Temperance, the Independent Order of Rechabites, the Independent Order of Good Templars, and others, all took this route.^[17] For all of the temperance societies, whether open or secret, exclusive or comprehensive, the main means of enforcement was simply the Pledge. This had various forms, a familiar instance of which ran thus: "I hereby pledge myself, God being my helper, to abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors

[Full Size]

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A late form of the temperance Pledge, probably from 1917 or 1918, by which time most of the loopholes
 had been closed and the commitment required was complete, though still quite voluntary. (From  The 
Temperance Songbook  [1971])

(including wine and cider), except in cases of necessity."^[18] The only sanction for the pledge was the individual's uncoerced consent, however much that might be supported by solemn public profession in company with crowds of other penitents.

With no punishment beyond the guilt of the sinner, one may readily imagine that backsliding went on wholesale. Huck Finn's Pap illustrates the deplorable pattern: after tearfully taking the pledge at the new judge's house, Pap feels himself powerful thirsty in the night, gets hold of a jug of forty-rod, has a high old time, falls off the porch, and breaks his arm. When they find him in the morning he is nearly frozen to death. As for the new judge, "he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shot-gun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way."^[19]

The judge's conclusion neatly summarizes what actually happened: if free will did not work, perhaps force would. Huck Finn's Pap was a low-down sort of human being, but there were enough who were not so very different from him to make the sterner reformers despair of any movement that depended on voluntary participation and that permitted any sort of indulgence—as in that saving clause of the pledge, "except in cases of necessity." The ultras in the temperance movement wanted legal compulsion, and they wanted total abstinence. Both of these ideas came into prominence in the 1830s, after a generation of temperance agitation seemed to have made no important difference to the drinking habits of the nation. It is interesting to note that in both England and the United States this development took place at about the same time. Teetotalism is in fact a word of English coinage,^[20] expressing a sort of logic of despair. Since experience had shown that

people who drank no spirits might still get drunk on beer and wine, and that people who drank no beer or wine might still get drunk on spirits, the only conclusion was total abstinence from alcohol, not moderation or temperance. And the prohibition should be binding on all, not just upon the weaker brethren.

A national temperance organization had been created in 1833 through the cooperation of dozens of county and state groups (the American Temperance Union, it was called), but it soon split apart on the rocks created by the extremist doctrines of legal prohibition and teetotalism.^[21] As the conservative and moderate elements departed over these issues, control of the national organization passed to the ultras. Hereafter the story of prohibition in this country is the story of the successive legislative victories gained by the ultras—let us call them the Drys—working through a variety of organizations.

The first wave of laws passed in response to this pressure came in the 1840s: Portland, Maine, voted itself Dry in 1843, the first American city to do so; in 1844, the remote Oregon Territory passed a law forbidding the sale of spirits—striking evidence, on that distant frontier, of the general spread of prohibitionist sentiment. The most important and most publicized early legislation was the passage of a law prohibiting all intoxicating liquors in Maine in 1851.^[22] The "Maine Law," as it was called, became the model for convinced prohibitionists throughout the country and the leading exhibit of American intolerance to liberals throughout the world—John Stuart Mill, for example, gravely condemned it in his classic essay On Liberty .^[23] The Maine Law was quickly followed by similar laws all over the Union—Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nebraska Territory all followed suit in the next four years.^[24] So did many smaller localities. Evanston, Illinois, for example, declared itself Dry from the very moment of its founding in 1855.^[25]

These victories were, for the time at any rate, more apparent than real. It was comparatively easy to pass legislation that put an end to public drinking. It was quite another thing to enforce the legislation. The fact that liquor had been prohibited in state after state did not mean that people stopped making it, selling it, and drinking it. Whatever the law might say, where there were few means for enforcing it and even less will to do so, people went on doing what they wanted. Between 1850 and 1860, while the legislative triumphs of the prohibitionists were coming thick and fast, the per capita consumption of beer, wine, and whiskey in the country actually increased sharply.^[26] So sensationally obvious a contradiction between law and practice greatly injured the cause. It might also have taught the Drys that legislation was not enough; yet that lesson did not seem to sink in. Not the least curious thing about the whole story of prohibition is the fact that the Drys always appeared to take it for granted that once the laws had been passed the laws would be obeyed. Thus, when national Prohibition was at last achieved, they were quite content to accept only the most rudimentary provisions for enforcing it, with, for them, catastrophic results.

The Dry cause was sharply, but only temporarily, set back by the Civil War, which gave the nation something else to think about. The war also led to a development that was afterwards to form a serious obstacle to the Drys. In order to raise money for the expenses of the war, Congress passed an Internal Revenue Act in 1862 that required a licensing fee from every retail liquor dealer and put a tax on every barrel of beer and gallon of spirits and wine produced in the country (the tax on wine was 5 cents a gallon).^[27] Though it was intended simply to raise money, the act had the effect of "authorizing" the making and selling of liquor in the United States, since the government in effect recognized these as legitimate taxable activities.^[28] It also provided a major argument in defense of the liquor interest, since the liquor trade was now important to the government's revenues. After the war, the taxes were reduced, but like so many emergency measures they remained in force when the emergency had long passed.

The war was, after all, only an interruption for the Drys; their activities were quickly reorganized and reenergized as soon as it had ended. Some sense of the quietly growing power of Dryness may be given by its effects in a region where the wine trade had once been important. In southern California, the cradle of California winegrowing, temperance communities grew up side by side with the vineyards. The town of Compton, founded in 1865 by the Methodist church, was teetotal from the beginning. So, too, was the bigger and richer settlement of Long Beach, where the deeds to town sites contained a provision by which the property would revert to the seller if the buyer engaged in the liquor traffic. And the city of Pasadena, which included several vineyards from the earliest days of viticulture in the San Gabriel Valley and which lay in sight of the great vineyards and wineries operated by Shorb, Rose, and Baldwin, declared itself a Dry town and kept itself so simply by force of community sentiment. When a merchant challenged the system by stocking liquor for sale, the city passed a prohibition ordinance and successfully defended its constitutionality before the state supreme court. By 1890 nearly fifty towns in southern California had local option in one form or another, in a place where, but a generation before, the prospect of winegrowing was being hailed as the brightest hope for the region's future.^[29] California was far from Dry, but more than a small beginning had been made to that end. And as more and more migration from the Midwest poured into the state towards the end of the century, the Drys grew steadily stronger. There was plenty of opposition to the Dry campaign; but the opposition successes were tactical only. The direction of long-range strategy was in the hands of the Drys.^[30]

Elsewhere, just as in California, the aim of that strategy was to get a firm legal basis for prohibition; the main work was therefore all concentrated on acquiring political power. At first the Drys worked to obtain laws obstructing or prohibiting the liquor traffic in whatever way seemed possible or appropriate. But experience showed that this piece-work, uncoordinated policy was unsatisfactory: statutory laws provided too many loopholes, too little uniformity, and too much vulnerability to the shifting fortunes of party politics. What the Democrats had passed the

Republicans could repeal; and while one administration might prosecute the saloon keepers without mercy, the next might allow the policeman to turn a blind eye to even the gaudiest saloons.

Furthermore, "Dry" was almost always a relative rather than an absolute term; large exceptions might be permitted, and special cases allowed, that made it possible for people to continue drinking in some fashion. When Virginia, for example, enacted statewide prohibition, it was at first proposed to allow the winemakers and brewers in the state to continue to operate on condition that they sold their product outside the state; and since Virginia is a large grower of apples, it was also proposed to allow 6 percent cider to be made and sold in the state. These proposals did not pass into law, but when Virginia did finally pass its prohibition law, it allowed every householder to buy, out of state, one quart of spirits, three gallons of beer, or one gallon of wine per month.^[31] Niggardly measure, no doubt, but not exactly bone Dry. In fact, the distillers of Maryland prospered greatly from prohibition in Virginia, a contradiction that was bound to disturb any thoroughgoing Dry.

The Dry strategy was changed in the light of such results: the goal now became to base prohibition, not on state and local laws, but on a constitutional amendment, first in the states and then in the nation. The Drys did not abandon the work of getting state and local laws passed in their interest—indeed, they remained busy at that without interruption: but the new goal had been perceived and the policy of pursuing it became more and more distinct. Kansas was the first state to adopt prohibition by constitutional amendment (1880), but in the years immediately after, that hopeful example was followed by only four more states (Maine, Rhode Island, North Dakota, and South Dakota).^[32]

The bold idea of amending the U.S. Constitution was first revealed in 1876, when the newly formed National Prohibition Party made it a plank in its platform. The party was pitifully weak at the polls, but it provided the idea that its stronger associates would ultimately succeed in carrying out. Chief among these were the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874 and heroically directed by Frances Willard, and the Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1895 and the outstanding leader in the work of propaganda and politics for the Dry cause. The last, successful phase of the Dry campaign, culminating in national Prohibition, may be said to have been carried out by the Anti-Saloon League.

The league did not make national prohibition an explicit object all at once, but pursued whatever policy seemed likely to work in the circumstances. This kind of politic flexibility was the hallmark of league activity and its greatest strength. As Bishop James Cannon, the "Dry Messiah," once said, the league was "intensely practical" in seeking to "attain its ideal."^[33] If it was expedient to deny any wish to achieve national prohibition, then it simply did so. But whatever the league people might say at any particular moment, they in fact aimed at national prohibition. And the league would support any candidate who could stay sober long enough to vote Dry.^[34]

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the long and patient labor of the

Drys was at last making all obstacles yield. The most important practical element in this success was the Anti-Saloon League's policy of supporting any candidate, regardless of party, who was friendly to prohibition or could be scared into voting for it. By this means the Drys found themselves, in no very long time, in control of state legislatures throughout the South, the Midwest, and the West. And then began a dessication of states in rapid fashion. Georgia went Dry in 1907, Mississippi and North Carolina in 1908, Tennessee in 1909, West Virginia in 1912, Virginia in 1914. The process accelerated, so that by the time that the national prohibition amendment was passed in 1919, thirty-three of the forty-eight states were already Dry.^[35] In 1913 a decisive victory had been won when Congress allowed Dry states to enforce their own laws on interstate commerce in liquor, a remarkable and troublesome exception to the commerce clause of the Constitution.^[36] With this evidence of their new national power, the Drys determined that the time had come to strike for their ultimate goal, a prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The last push turned out to be surprisingly easy. Dry influence on the elections of 1914 returned a friendly Congress, and by the end of 1914 a resolution proposing the Eighteenth Amendment had been introduced into the House and passed by a majority, though failing of the necessary two-thirds.^[37] The Dry forces prudently waited for the next election, in 1916, and were rewarded. In the newly returned Congress a resolution to submit a prohibition amendment to the states passed the Senate in August 1917 and the House in December. Barely more than a year later the amendment had been ratified by the required two-thirds of the states: constitutional prohibition had been achieved.

The campaign that had at last succeeded in pushing it through had occupied only a very few years, but was the culmination of efforts stretching back over the better part of a century. And the victory, when it came, was apparently a popular victory, supported by large majorities in all but two states (for the record, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused to the end to ratify the amendment; yet Rhode Island had once had constitutional prohibition itself. Such were the ups and downs in the struggle between Wets and Drys). As Herbert Asbury has written, after surveying the complicated history of the prohibition movement, "it seems clear that the American people wanted prohibition and were bound to try it; for more than a hundred years they had been indoctrinated with the idea that the destruction of the liquor traffic was the will of God and would provide the answers to most, if not all, of mankind's problems."^[38] "American people" is too sweeping a term, as the defiantly law-breaking behavior of millions during Prohibition made clear. But it is inconceivable that it could have been achieved without a wide and solid basis of support for the agitators.

And what were the terms of this experiment, "noble in motive and far reaching in purpose," to use the solemn phrase of President Hoover, so often sarcastically invoked afterwards? The article amending the Constitution was directed exclusively against the "traffic" (a favorite word of the Drys) in liquor, declaring that "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the impor-

tation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited." Turning this principle into enforceable law was the task of the National Prohibition Act, usually called the Volstead Act after its chief designer, that went into effect a year after the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. That act defined the "intoxicating liquors" of the amendment to mean any drink having more than one-half of one percent alcohol by volume, which meant that beer and wine were not excepted.^[39]

Thus the hope that the winemakers had fondly clung to as Prohibition drew closer and closer, that wine would be recognized as an exception, was lost. There was, of course, a strong tradition, even in the United States, that wine was the drink of temperance rather than intoxication. Thomas Jefferson's is perhaps the best-known statement of the view: "No nation is drunken where wine is cheap," he had written in 1818. And there were many, both before and after Jefferson, to agree with him. Dr. Rush, in the very act of urging abstinence from spirits, recommended wine for pleasure and health alike. John Bartram dreamed of establishing viticulture in America for the sake of leading men away from strong drink. The federal government lowered the tariffs on imported wines in 1819 in order to encourage temperance,^[40] and, as we have seen, granted lands to the Swiss in Indiana and to the French in Alabama in hopes of creating a plentiful source of native wines. And most of the early temperance societies had had no quarrel with wine, only with distilled spirits. Clearly, though, it was unwise of the wine men to think that this view of the question had much of a chance after the idea of total abstinence had come to dominate the prohibition movement, as it had from the 1830s onwards. The absolutist thinking of the confirmed teetotaller simply had no room for accommodating a "temperance" drink like wine, yet the wine men seemed to have gone on without recognizing that absolutist character. They hoped against hope that the reformers would see a clear distinction between the products of distillation and the milder products of unaided fermentation.

Their sense that they were different, not to be confused with the real enemies of temperance, appears to have confused and paralyzed their abilities to meet and respond to the threat of prohibition. If they separated themselves from the manufacturers of distilled spirits, the winemakers would seem to give their support to the prohibitionists; but if they threw in their lot with the distillers, they would then be identified with Demon Rum and be indiscriminately attacked with it. Finally, if they went their own way, they would have both distillers and prohibitionists as their enemies. Given these alternatives it is not surprising that the wine industry as a whole had no idea of how to fight the steady attack of the Dry forces. The one side knew what it wanted and how to get it; the other could merely protest its innocence and hope, in vain, for the best.^[41]

National prohibition was enacted, but it had still to be enforced, and it was here that its unreality was made clear. The police arrangements of the Volstead Act were superficial. The Internal Revenue Service (not, as many thought should have

been the case, the Justice Department) was put in charge of enforcement, through a commissioner who presided over a national system of regional directors and inspectors. They were armed with various powers of searching and seizing defined by the act, and the courts were empowered to impose appropriate fines and sentences on persons convicted of violating the act.^[42] Yet the machinery of enforcement was absurdly slender and flimsy in relation to the job to be done, a fact that makes clear the innocent expectations of the Dry workers.^[43] They imagined that once the law was made, compliance would follow. But that was not what happened. Prohibition instead created a nation of law breakers. All the provisions of the act were defied systematically and persistently by large sections of the population. And if the numbers of prohibition agents had been multiplied a hundred times, they would still have been powerless to stop what happened. The liquor "traffic," so far from being ended, was simply driven into the hands of bootleggers and gangsters; drinking, so far from being stopped, seemed actually to increase. And while the main objects of prohibition were being completely defeated, there was growing up in the country a general contempt of law. Seldom in the history of moral legislation can there have been a completer contradiction between expectation and result. It almost seems that the sharper and shrewder the Drys grew in political experience, the more simple-minded they grew in moral perception.

The intention of the law was simply to shut down all traffic in liquor—production, transportation, sales—and essentially it succeeded so far as the regular trade in wine was concerned. Spirits were far more attractive to the bootlegger than wine could ever be. And such wine as the bootlegger did deal in was likely to be homemade. All that most wineries in the country could do was quietly go out of business. And so they did. Production of wine in the United States in 1919 was over 55 million gallons; in 1920 it sank to 20 million; in 1922 it was just over 6 million, and by 1925 it reached a low of 3,638,000 gallons.^[44] That some wine continued to be made was owing to special provisions in the Volstead Act. Sacramental wine could be legally made, under license, and so those wineries that managed to secure a license could maintain a precarious hold on existence. Wine could also be prescribed as medicine. Wine could be made for sale to the manufacturers of vinegar, and to the manufacturers of wine "tonics" of more or less medicinal character. Wine could also be used as a flavoring, in cooked foods and in tobacco, for instance. Since much sacramental wine was fortified and so required brandy, some wine could be made for the purpose of distillation into brandy to supply this need. There were thus several legal provisions allowing the continued production of wine, and since this very limited production could be legally carried on, it could be—and no doubt was—illegally extended. I have no figures that even suggest to what extent the legal permissions were abused. All writers on the subject take it for granted that abuses were widespread, but there do not seem to have been enough prosecutions to allow a guess at what was going on.^[45]

Besides producing wine for the authorized purposes, some wineries tried to keep going by making juice (in the East especially, where Concord grapes were

available) and other grape "products": jams and jellies mostly. And there were experiments with "non-vinous" commodities like concentrated juice and winebricks; the bricks were whole grapes pressed into solid form and wrapped for sale. Both concentrate and winebricks were sold with yeast tablets, and a caution against allowing illegal fermentation to take place.^[46] Towards the end of the Prohibition era, a combination of wineries called Fruit Industries, organized by the resourceful Paul Garrett, undertook to deliver grape concentrate to the buyer's home and there to supervise its conversion into wine and to bottle it for storage and consumption. This complete domestic service was assisted by a large grant to the grape growers from the federal farm relief program, and it advertised itself in this remarkable way:

Now is the time to order your supply of VINE-GLO . It can be made in your home in sixty days—a fine, true-to-type guaranteed beverage ready for the Holiday Season. VINE-GLO . . . comes to you in nine varieties, Port, Virginia Dare, Muscatel, Angelica, Tokay, Sauterne, Riesling, Claret and Burgundy. It is entirely legal in your home—but it must not be transported. . . . You take absolutely no chance when you order your home supply of VINE-GLO which Section 29 of the National Prohibition Act permits you.^[47]

The company's confidence in the legality of its operation was bolstered by the fact that it had succeeded in hiring as its attorney Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who for eight years had been assistant attorney general in charge of prosecuting violations of the Volstead Act. It is even stated that Willebrandt had helped to work out the terms of the Vine-Glo scheme before she left her public office to return to private practice.^[48] In any case her quick change of sides inevitably provoked a lot of smart remarks, among the best of them this one by Al Smith, who had suffered much as the recognized leader of the Wets in American politics and who had no reason to feel kindly towards Willebrandt:

I congratulate the Fruit Industries in securing the services of so competent a person as Mabel. She did two things for them, two wonderful things. She convinced the Department of Justice that this 12 per cent wine was not intoxicating. That was some stunt when you figure that old Andy Volstead fixed it at half of one per cent, and she jumped it up 11½ per cent and still robbed it of every intoxicating character. But she did something else for them that was equally important. She got the Farm Board to lend them $20,000,000.

So when all is said and done, Mabel collected a beautiful fee for making the Volstead Act look like thirty cents.^[49]

But, after all, Willebrandt failed to turn this astonishing trick. The Justice Department threatened to bring suit against Fruit Industries, and Vine-Glo was taken off the market at the end of 1931.^[50]

The most striking paradox of Prohibition, in California at any rate, was that it led to a large increase in the planting of vineyards. The provision of the Volstead Act allowing the legal production of "fruit juices" in the home led to an immediate

demand for fresh grapes all over the country. The result was remarkable: the price of grapes shot up from $10 to $100 a ton and even higher as the produce agents competed for each carload of grapes. An episode in Alice Tisdale Hobart's novel of the wine country, The Cup and the Sword , describes the California scene in the early days of Prohibition:

Passing the station he saw a steady line of men coming out of the freight office, bills of lading in their hands. They did not get ten feet before they were accosted. Sometimes there were half a dozen men trying to talk to the same grapegrowers at once. Buyers from the East, was John's quick conclusion. . . .

"What's up, Dietrick?" John called out.

"Just sold my grapes for seventy the ton."

John whistled.

Dietrick grinned. "Sold 'em first for fifty. Bought 'em back when they went to sixty. Now I've got seventy."^[51]

California had about 300,000 acres of vineyard in 1919; by 1926, after six years of Prohibition, that acreage had almost doubled, and shipments of grapes had grown by 125 percent.^[52] Then, unluckily for the growers, the market was oversupplied. The boom went bust, and the years of Prohibition ended as they had begun, with the spectacle of discouraged growers pulling out their vines.

Worse than that, over the long run, was the fact that the grapes that shipped well and looked good in the market were not the best wine varieties. Alicante Bouschet, a splendid-looking grape, with large clusters of dark thick-skinned berries loaded with color, was the popular grape for amateur winemakers. But though it pleases the eye, the Alicante Bouschet at best makes only a mediocre wine.^[53] Flame Tokay and Emperor, which are not wine grapes at all but table grapes, were also much favored. There was no encouragement to plant the superior, more delicate, yet less attractive-looking, varieties; indeed, there was every reason not to, when the market demanded the coarse, heavy-bearing sorts. The result was that the vast new plantings that went in during the Prohibition years were of the poorer sorts. The damage that this deterioration in the varietal quality of California's vineyards did to the reputation of California wines persisted long after Prohibition was a thing of the past. Table grapes, raisin grapes, and inferior, but productive, varieties of wine grapes were the overwhelming basis for California winemaking for years after Prohibition. Even as late as 1961, a whole generation after Repeal, there were only about 800 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon to supply the entire American wine industry! The same sorry figures held for the other distinguished varieties: 600 acres of Pinot Noir, 450 of Riesling, 300 of Chardonnay—absolutely appalling numbers at a time when California already had 424,000 acres of vines.^[54] And no adage is truer in winemaking than the one that says the wine can be no better than its source. The degradation of the California source was a direct and lasting effect of Prohibition.^[55]

Still, the "fruit juice" provision of the Volstead Act certainly helped to reduce

the economic disaster of Prohibition for California grape growers. It also made an obvious, yet legal, mockery of Prohibition, since home winemaking did not need to be concealed. In San Francisco at vintage time, according to a New York Times reporter, this was the scene:

A walk through the Italian quarter reveals wine presses drying in the sun in front of many homes. The air is heavy with the pungent odor of fermenting vats in garages and basements. Smiling policemen frequently help the owners of these wine presses to shoo away children who use them for improvised rocking horses.^[56]

No doubt there were not many places quite so vinous as the Italian quarter of San Francisco, but what one saw there was only the extreme form of a situation to be found in every considerable town and city of the country.^[57]

People are perfectly able to live with all sorts of contradictions and inconsistencies, but those created by Prohibition were impossible. Repeal, when it came in 1933, was met not so much with loud rejoicings as with a great public sigh of relief. Obviously the wine men had more reason than most to be joyful. But they had much to make them rueful too. The degenerate state of the vineyards has already been noticed. And of course the closing of the great majority of the wineries meant that the material basis of the industry had to be built all over again: buildings were out of repair or converted to other uses; machinery had been dispersed, or, if still in place, was out of order or obsolete; the vats and casks had been broken up or had dried out and fallen apart. More serious yet was the absence of experienced workers and managers: the continuity of tradition had been broken, and though there might be survivors who could pass on what they knew, there had been no young generation to receive it. That was the view on the production side. The market was equally derelict. The whole system of packaging, distributing, advertising, and selling wine had to be made anew.

Long before Prohibition the movement of wine through the United States had been complicated by the crazy-quilt patterns of local laws. Now, after Repeal, things were made even worse, perhaps more by accident than by design. The Drys, though they had been routed, were by no means dead; when the Twenty-first Amendment, the Repeal amendment, was drawn up, it recognized the persistence of Dryness in its section 2, which reads: "The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited."

Section 2 was clearly meant to allow state prohibition, even at the very moment that national prohibition was being swept away. A further question of interpretation was raised at once: did section 2 mean that "intoxicating liquors"—spirits, wine, and beer—were to be denied the protection of the commerce clause of the Constitution? They had been so denied even before Prohibition, when state and local option laws were upheld, beginning with a Supreme Court decision in 1847.^[58] Now, after Repeal, that special status was affirmed by the language of the Twenty-

first Amendment and supported by a number of decisions written by Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court. In effect, the states—not just Dry states but all of the states—were given absolute authority to do as they pleased in regulating the liquor traffic within their borders.

The result has been a chaos of varying and conflicting practices and regulations. Taxes vary wildly—from the 1 cent a gallon for table wine in California to the $1.75 a gallon exacted in Florida. Regulations vary wildly—some states have complete state monopoly of all liquor sales; some states have only a partial monopoly; some turn over everything to private licensees. In some states, you may buy table wine in a private store but dessert wine only in a state store, or wine by the bottle but not by the glass, or wine in drug stores but not in a grocery store, and so on through literally dozens and scores of other irrational permissions and prohibitions. In those states that allow for local prohibition, some put it on a county basis, some on a city basis, some on both. In other states, local option is not allowed at all.

Pricing is equally erratic, having little to do with costs; instead it is in large part the outcome of state and local taxes, licensing fees, and state-required minimum markups. A bottle of California wine in Washington, D.C., bought 3,000 miles from its source, may well cost less than the same bottle bought in Arizona or Nevada, states neighboring California. The catalogue of conflicting and arbitrary regulations is immense, so that any firm engaged in interstate commerce in wines requires the services of a professional staff to see that the rules are identified and complied with. The daily labor and confusion created by this tangle of balkanized regulations tells us at least two things: one, that we are still suffering from the legacy of Prohibition; and two, that we are still far from regarding wine as a simple commodity just as much entitled to unrestricted sale and consumption as, say, bread and cheese. If the federal government had simply undertaken to regulate alcoholic beverages on a national basis, this balkanizing would have been avoided; its failure to do so may be seen as another unwanted effect of Prohibition: after the failure of that experiment, the federal government seems to have wanted nothing so much as to wash its hands of further responsibility. Since then, it has confined itself to tax gathering and to monitoring such matters as the form and content of wine labels.

The Drys made themselves felt in another significant way just after Repeal. Among the projects of Franklin Roosevelt's first administration was one designed to help American winemaking get back on its feet. Rexford Tugwell, an assistant secretary of agriculture, planned to have the department again take up its historic role of assisting grape growing and winemaking through research and educational programs. Under his direction a model experimental winery was built and equipped at the department's Beltsville, Maryland, experimental station; another was put up at the department's research station in Meridian, Mississippi. Tugwell, who came to Washington from his position as professor of economics at Columbia, had a special interest in agricultural history and knew how important a role the federal

government had played in the earlier history of American winegrowing. What he had not reckoned on was the entrenched strength of the Drys in strategic places. A power on the House Appropriations Committee was the veteran Missouri prohibitionist Clarence Cannon; when he learned of Tugwell's plans, Cannon threatened to block the whole departmental appropriation: the wicked work on "fermentation" must be stopped, or the whole work of the department would be brought to a halt. Faced with this desperate choice, the department gave way; the model wineries, still virgin, were converted to other uses and their machinery sold.^[59] So shaken was the department that for the next generation it did nothing that could in any way be construed as having to do with winemaking. It hardly dared mention the word "wine" in its publications or to hint that grapes might in fact yield anything more exciting than "juice" or "jelly." As in the case of the government's abandoning the commerce in liquor to the chaos of state regulations, here was another evidence of the timid anxieties created by the experience of Prohibition. Repeal had been achieved, but not that frame of mind in which wine could be regarded as a valuable and decent commodity, to be produced, sold, consumed, and studied without apology.

That was the worst consequence of Prohibition—the way in which it had warped American attitudes towards drinking. The very extravagance implicit in the idea of enforced total abstinence seemed to have provoked an answering extravagance: if one was not austerely Dry, one had to be flamboyantly Wet.^[60] The notion of decent moderation was overwhelmed in the conflict between these absurd opposites. Even now, more than half a century after the repeal of Prohibition, anyone who knows anything about the patterns of American drinking can observe the continuing effects of this conflict: for many Americans, it is hard to be natural and straightforward on the question, whether one drinks or does not drink. There remains something problematical and troubling in the subject, whatever side one takes.

The immediate question for the winemakers looking over the desolate scene left behind by the Dry years was to educate the American public in the renewed use of wine. If they were older Americans, they had forgotten what the civilized use of wine was; if they were younger, they had never known. How this was done lies outside of the scope of this history, which must shortly conclude. From what has already been said it will be clear that a hard and bitter labor faced the American winegrowers: their vineyards were debased, their wineries decayed, their markets confused by arbitrary and unpredictable barriers, and their public ill-instructed and corrupted by the habits of a hard-drinking bootleg style. Add to this the facts that Repeal did not take place until the country was plunged in deep economic depression, followed by the disruptions of a world war. Perhaps no activity ever knows anything like "normality," but it is hard not to feel that the American wine industry, passing through the uninterrupted sequence of Prohibition, depression, and war, has had particularly hard measure.

Yet it has, despite all these things, both survived and prospered. That it has

managed to do so is a tribute to the persistence of many individuals—vineyardists, winemakers, scientists, publicists, dealers—who worked with a dedication more often associated with a cause rather than with mere commerce. Some of that growth was also owing to the roots already sent down during the life of American winegrowing before Prohibition. To make clear what that life was, and to suggest something of the connection between past and present, has been the aim of this history.