Carrying with it a picture of rustic elegance, sun-drenched hillsides, and verdant grapevines running parallel in organized prospect, wine growing easily outpaces romanticized images of other agricultural goods. To many Americans, vineyard scenes represent the trappings of a noble society. A 2005 PBS documentary,The Cultivated Life: Thomas Jefferson and Wine, argues as much. The narrator, over images of vines heavy with luscious grapes, explains that “Jefferson’s vision for the quality of American wine has been realized, but his dream of a genteel agrarian society has largely been relegated to the pages of history books. Except in one instance—the...

New York state was the center of the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. plant empire. As the nation’s primary hub of print culture production and distribution, as well as the terminus of the Erie Canal, the region was home to thousands of investors, plantsmen, and horticultural writers.¹ Although Boston and Philadelphia had led the nation’s botanical efforts in previous decades (with the Peales and Bartrams and others in operation, as well as horticultural societies, exhibitions, and libraries functioning in those cities), by the 1840s, the locus and drive of national horticultural pursuits had recentered in New York City. Indeed, by 1860 the city...

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the international horticultural press highlighted grapes as a specific and significant fruit for American gardens. Many horticultural handbooks devoted much more space to grapes than to other fruits, describing the various grapevines’ use and material and social value. An example of this is found in Thomas Bridgeman’sYoung Gardener’s Assistant, a book sold to instruct gardeners in their plant-related purchases—and one reprinted many times from 1833 to 1865. The popular book was sold at nurseries and seed shops across the East and Midwest, from Boston to New Orleans, from Cincinnati to Washington, D.C. As was...

Although quite common in the nineteenth century throughout all regions of the growing nation, fruit speculators have not received the same scrutiny as the traders, capitalists, and real estate men who more frequently populate the history of U.S. territorial and market expansion.¹ Nicholas Longworth (1782–1863), the “father of American wine” who made his millions in real estate in Cincinnati, is an ideal example of this type of horticultural cynosure. In romanticized mid-century fashion, Longworth’s family described his methods of wealth accumulation in verse in 1857. A poem written on the occasion of Longworth’s golden wedding anniversary described the early...

Surprisingly often, the world of professional grape growing served as a site for the construction of gentility—and race—in nineteenth-century America.The Horticulturistwas one of the clearest publications, but far from the only one, to articulate the connection between grapes and the construction of race in the Civil War and Reconstruction era. An October 1865 article, by a contributor with the pen name “Gladiolus,” detailed a recent excursion to the estate and vineries of a “gentleman of wealth and taste” in Orange, New Jersey. Gladiolus took seat with “two other friends (guests fresh from the land of Dixey),”...

In the summer of 1857,The Horticulturist,published in New York, ran an article on the California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition, held in San Jose the previous fall. Suspicious but intrigued, the author titled the piece “The Way They Talk in California,” listing the reported behemoth size of California’s vegetables and fruits, its acres under cultivation, and its general promise as an agricultural region. The journal also tied California’s agricultural abundance to the American people’s own racialized, expansionist vitality: “A whole new country, falling from the hands of an inert race into the...

“Today’s winegrowers on the North American continent are modern pioneers,” observes Barbara Ensrud at the beginning of her coffee-table bookAmerican Vineyards(1988). Indeed, she writes, “The sweep of human history is perhaps at its most powerful in the saga of the pioneers.” Sidestepping the “history of politics” in wine, she wrote her book of vineyards to map the “life and culture of those who crossed the continent, who settled the country and chiseled its destiny out of the earth.” But more than crafting history, Ensrud asks that when readers visit vineyards, they ponder what life was like when “the...

Well before he moved to California in 1881, grape scientist and promoter George Husmann published one of his most widely read books. Written from his home in Missouri, Husmann’sThe Cultivation of the Native Grape and the Manufacture of American Wines(1866) describes both East Coast and Midwestern wine-growing scenes: “I firmly believe that this continent is destined to be the greatest wine-producing country in the world, America will be, from the Atlantic to the Pacific,onesmiling and happyWineland, where each laborer shall sit under his own vine, and none will be too poor to enjoy the purest...