Note 34 — Chapter I · THE OLD WORLD GRAPE

Nicholas Longworth, known as the “father of American grape culture”, was born in 1783, in Newark, New Jersey. At an early age he went West making his home in Cincinnati where he became a lawyer, banker, and a man of large business affairs in what was then the far frontier. From his boyhood Longworth was interested in horticulture and as a young man became greatly interested in native grapes. He was one of the men to whom John Adlum sent the Catawba and he became its disseminator and a promoter for the region in which he lived, making this grape the first great American grape and Cincinnati the center of the foremost grape-growing region of the Continent. He was the first vineyardist to make wine on a large scale and perfected methods of making wine from the native grapes so that the product was comparable to that from the best wine cellars of Europe. Longworth introduced the first cultivated variety of the wild black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, under the name of the Ohio Everbearing. His interest in the strawberry was second only to that in the grape and he not only did much to encourage its cultivation in America but also, after a long controversy with horticulturists and botanists, fully established the fact that many varieties of this fruit are infertile with themselves and that under cultivation infertile varieties must have sorts planted near them capable of cross-pollinating them. Longworth took a deep interest in horticulture generally and gathered about him a group of pioneer horticulturists who did much for American fruit-growing in the middle of the nineteenth century, in many respects molding and guiding the horticulture of that time in this country. Longworth wrote much for the contemporary horticultural magazines and published two small books, “The Cultivation of the Grape and Manufacture of Wine” and “Character and Habits of the Strawberry Plant.” He died in 1863, aged 80, at Cincinnati, one of the most distinguished, enterprising and wealthy citizens of his State. For further discussion of his life see Bailey’s Evolution of Our Native Fruits: 61-65. 1898.