Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings

NEW YORK: GEO. E. WOODWARD & CO., 31 BROAD STREET

ORANGE JUDD COMPANY, 245 BROADWAY. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by GEO. E. & F. W. WOODWARD, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.


It is less than twenty-five years since the first cold Grapery was erected on the Hudson. Since the success of the culture of the delicious varieties of the exotic Grape has been demonstrated, the number of graperies has annually increased, and during the last ten years in a very rapid ratio, until they have become recognized as possible and desirable, among those even whose circumstances are moderate and limited. The newly-awakened interest in this branch of culture is manifested in the number and variety of books and other publications on this subject, the space devoted to it in the agricultural and horticultural journals, and especially in the increased number of graperies and vineyards which have been erected and planted in the last decade. There seems to be a general consciousness of the fact that, in the struggle for wealth and the greed for wide possessions, as well as in the inherent difficulties of our situation—thrown as we have been upon a new and vast continent—we have too long neglected the culture of the Vine, one of the most ancient and useful arts of life; an art which has, in all ages, been the fruitful source of comfort and luxury, of health and happiness, to the masses of mankind. The neglect of this important and beautiful department of culture is the more remarkable, since our country embraces every degree of latitude, and every variety of climate and soil in which the grape is known to flourish.
It having been demonstrated by years of experiment, resulting in every case in utter failure, that the foreign grape cannot be successfully grown in the open air in the United States—the States of the Pacific excepted—we are obliged to confine our culture to glazed structures, erected for the purpose, where an atmosphere similar to the vine-growing regions of Europe can be maintained, and that bane of the foreign grape, the mildew, avoided.