heads of wine in a single season." Amadas and Barlowe, sent out by Baleigh in 1584, described the coasts of the Carolinas as, "so full of grapes that in all the world like abundance can not be found." Captain John Smith, writing in 1606, describes the grapes of Virginia and recommends the culture of the vine as an industry for the newly founded colony. Few, indeed, are the explorers of the Atlantic seaboard who do not mention grapes among the plants of the country. Yet none saw intrinsic value in these wild vines. To the Europeans the grapes of the Old World alone were worth cultivating and the vines growing everywhere in America only suggested that the grape they had known across the sea might be grown in the new home.
During colonial times and the first half century of the union, efforts to grow European varieties of grapes in America were continuous. Some of the experiments were on a large scale and in the hands of expert vine growers, yet all resulted in failure. Several large companies undertook grape-growing and wine-making in the years following the Revolution; the efforts of a few of these are worth noting.
Peter Legaux, a Frenchman, founded a company to grow grapes at Spring Mill, near Philadelphia, in 1793. John James Dufour, a Swiss, came to America in 1793 to engage in grape-growing and became the head of the Kentucky Vineyard Society in the valley of the Ohio in Kentucky and Indiana. The Harmonists, a religious-socialistic community, planted ten acres of grapes about 1805 near Pittsburgh, and later made another plantation at New Harmony, Indiana. When the Napoleonic wars were over, a number of Bonaparte's exiled officers came to America and founded the Vine and Olive Colony on land granted them by Congress on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. Here one hundred and fifty French settlers spent several years in vain attempts to grow European grapes in America. In a rough and hardly explored country, part of which was overflowed half the year, with all the sickness inherent to such a location, unaccustomed to field work and the hardships of a new country, the attempt to grow grapes, where failure was predestined because of natural obstacles, became for these French officers and their families a tragedy which ended in great suffering and the impoverishment of all and the death of many.
It is only on the Pacific coast and in favored valleys of the Eocky Mountains that Vitis vinifera, the grape of the Old World, can be grown. The great viticultural industry of California is founded upon the successful culture of this species. The native grapes can be grown, but they can not compete on the Pacific coast with the Old World grape for any purpose. The success attained in the cultivation of this species west of the continental divide makes all the more remarkable its complete failure east of the divide.
For three centuries from the first recorded attempt to grow the Old World grapes in America, the causes of the failures were a mystery.
