[25] Johnson, S. W., Rural Economy: 156. New Brunswick, N. J., 1806.
[26] John James Dufour, born in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, in 1763, came to America in 1796 to engage in grape-growing and wine-making. An account of his work is given in the text. In 1826 Dufour published the Vine Dresser’s Guide, which became the authority on the culture of this fruit at that time. Dufour must be remembered for this book, for the dissemination of the Cape or Alexander grape, and as one of the pioneer vineyardists and wine-makers of the New World.
[27] Dufour, John James. Vine Dresser’s Guide: 307. 1826.
[28] U. S. Statutes at Large, 3:374.
[29] American State Papers, Public Lands, 3:396.
[30] For fuller accounts of this dramatic episode in French and American history, and in American agriculture, see: The Napoleonic Exiles in America, J. S. Reeves, Johns Hopkins University Studies, 23 Series, pp. 530-656; The Bonapartists in Alabama, A. B. Lyon, Gulf State Historical Magazine, March, 1903; The French Grant in Alabama, G. Whitfield Jr., Ala. Hist. Soc., Vol. IV; The Vine and Olive Colony, T. C. McCorvey, Alabama Historical Reports, April, 1885.
[31] The last official account of this colony in the records of the United States Government is found in American State Papers, Vol. III. “In a letter of Frederick Ravesies to the treasury department dated January 18, 1828, is the following: ‘We have suffered severely from the unparalleled drought of the last summer; many of our largest and finest looking vines, which had just commenced bearing luxuriantly, were totally killed by the dry hot weather. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, the grantees, with increased diligence, are using every exertion to procure others which are thought to be more congenial to the soil and climate, and are now generally engaged in replanting.’” Quoted from Studies in Southern and Alabama History, 1904:131.
[32] William Robert Prince, fourth proprietor of the Prince Nursery and Linnæan Botanic Garden, Flushing, Long Island, was born in 1795 and died in 1869. Prince was without question the most capable horticulturist of his time and an economic botanist of note. His love of horticulture and botany was a heritage from at least three paternal ancestors, all noted in these branches of science, and all of whom he apparently surpassed in mental capacity, intellectual training and energy. He was a prolific writer, being the author of three horticultural works which will always take high rank among those of Prince’s time. These were: A Treatise on the Vine, Pomological Manual, in two volumes, and the Manual of Roses, beside which he was a lifelong contributor to the horticultural press. All of Prince’s writings are characterized by a clear, vigorous style and by accuracy in statement. His works are almost wholly lacking the ornate and pretentious furbelows of most of his contemporaries though it must be confessed that he fell into the then common fault of following European writers somewhat slavishly. During the lifetime of Wm. R. Prince, and that of his father Wm. Prince, who died in 1842, the Prince Nursery at Flushing was the center of the horticultural nursery interests of the country; it was the clearing-house for foreign and American horticultural plants, for new varieties and for information regarding plants of all kinds.
[33] Prince, Wm. R. A Treatise on the Vine: 337. 1830.
[34] 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.