Chapter Nineteen:
Wine
"Soil good. Timbers: Whitewood, Butternut. + aplenty of grape vines..."
—Charles Parker, "Field Notes for a Survey of Euclid Township, July 1, 1797"
In the early 21st century, the feral descendants of the sprawling vineyards of Euclid Township still teem in the wild corners of the cities and neighborhoods which have been carved from it. If one knows to look, one will see the vines everywhere: in the gullies above Nine Mile Creek along Belvoir Road in East Cleveland, pouring like green waterfalls down the cliffs in the Euclid Creek Metropark in South Euclid, choking the banks of the mouth of the creek in Wildwood Park in Cleveland. The stoutest vines yet climb the chain-link fences meant to keep pedestrians off the railroad tracks in the industrial heart of Nottingham, the same vines surviving from the time just after the Civil War. They never left.
Grapes supplanted grain and dairy farming as the mainstay of agriculture in Euclid Township in the latter part of the 1800s and remained its predominant farm product until shortly after 1900, when the acres of vineyards began finally to surrender to the industrial and residential development which exploded at the beginning of the 20th century and continues, less vigorously but with characteristic persistence, to this day.
In 1879, when the first large wave of Euclid grape growers could still be found among their vines on the plain above the lakeshore, historian Crisfield Johnson noted the following:
"Since the [Civil W]ar more changes have been carried out in Euclid than in almost any other township in the county. Grape culture has become an important industry. It was begun in a small way near Collamer about 1855, but did not attain much consequence until after the war. We are indebted for some of the facts regarding it to Mr. Louis Harris, one of the largest grape growers in the township. Mr. Harris was the first man who planted a vineyard on Put-In-Bay Island [South Bass Island], but becoming satisfied that Euclid was a much superior locality for that purpose, he removed thither. He has no hesitation in saying that it is the best locality for Delaware grapes in the whole State of Ohio."
"It requires three years for a vineyard to get into bearing order. There has been but one year in the history of Euclid grape culture in which vineyards of that age or older did not bear. There are about two hundred and twenty acres of vineyards in the township, devoted to Concord, Catawba, Delaware, Martha, Ives, Diana and Hartford Prolific grapes, Concords and Catawbas being the principal varieties raised. The Concords produce about three tons per acre, the Catawbas two tons, the Delawares two, the Marthas two, the Dianas two and a half, the Ives four, the Hartford Prolifics no less than five tons per acre."
"An especially good characteristic of the Euclid vineyards is the fact that the vines require no protection during the winter, the slatestone of the soil producing strong hardy wood for the vines, impervious to all the winds that blow on lake or land. Land which, as Mr. Harris said, would not raise wheat enough to feed the grasshoppers, has produced good crops of grapes ten years in succession. The principal market is found in Cleveland, but large quantities are shipped to Chicago, Cincinnati and Louisville. Besides the grapes sold in bulk, considerable quantities are made into wine by Mr. Harris and others in Euclid, and thence sent away for sale."
*
There was a brief but intense period from about 1865 to about 1890 when vineyards completely covered the lake plain of Euclid Township and ran up the escarpment into the Heights. In a little better than a single generation they emerged, proliferated, and disappeared, leaving only their wild ancestors in out of the way corners, a testimony to the plants' hardiness and the suitability of the region for them. The key to understanding this phenomenon is the Lake Erie basin's extraordinary wine growing terroir.
Terroir is a French word that describes the soil chemistry, slope and elevation, coupled with the amount of sun, wind and rain it receives unique to a given area. For fruit, and particularly grapes, the terroir of the lake plain of Euclid Township is among the best in the world. The soil of the plain, tilled by the ancient glaciers that gave birth to Lake Erie, provided the vines a perfect home. "... from Cleveland east through Lake County along the lake plain," Susan K. Sifritt wrote in her 1976 treatise The Ohio Wine and Grape Industries, "vineyards were located on soils formed of sand and silt over silt and clay... On the ridge extending through Collamer and east into Euclid, a strong clayey loam had developed over shale and was preferred."
Bodies of water adjacent to areas create microclimates along their shores. Lake Erie keeps its shoreline plain warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than the area further inland, extending the growing season on it and protecting delicate buds from killing spring frosts. When temperature changes do occur there, they proceed slower and less abruptly. The temperature difference between the land of the plain and the waters of the lake also creates a steady breeze that dries vines and moderates the growth of damaging fungi.
These facts did not occur or present themselves to the first American settlers of Euclid, however. The winters in northern Ohio seemed, intuitively, too harsh for delicate fruit. It would take disaster, both natural and human-made, to bring viticulture to Euclid Township.
*
The story of the vineyards of Euclid Township begins south, in the Ohio Valley, where a chronicler found an unnamed French settler fermenting wine from the wild grapes growing on the river islands near Marietta in 1798. The next year, a pastry chef named Francis Menissier tried to grow a cache of several hundred non-native vines in Cincinnati, a planting that did not survive. Neither of the French efforts had a significant influence on the future of Ohio viticulture. But knowledge of the potential of Ohio River grapes persisted in the region.
In 1819, Nicholas Longworth retired at the age of 37 from a profitable Cincinnati law career and purchased the handsome home of Martin Baum, where Longworth planned to pursue his interest in gardening. About six years earlier Baum had planted his estate with several species of native and foreign grape vines and when Longworth took up residence he found a ready made horticultural laboratory with which to experiment. Longworth imported and tried over 200 species of vines from the East Coast and Europe, and studied the farm journals which had come into broad circulation in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century. From his study of the journals, Longworth learned how to avoid the mistakes of growers back East. He also contacted by mail those growers he had read about who had reported favorable results to purchase cuttings of successful species from their vineyards.
Four years after moving into the Baum mansion, Longworth made the first of two deals which, coupled with his business sense and the purchase of the propitiously planted manor, led him down the road to becoming the grandfather of Ohio wine. In 1823, he took a sharecropper onto the estate, a German immigrant named Papa Ammen. In exchange for Ammen's labor and half of his yield, Longworth provided the German with the land to work, a place to live, and the seeds and stock for a vineyard and orchard. Ammen found Longworth a genial landlord and the arrangement suited him. Eight more German tenants followed Ammen onto Longworth's estate in the next decade.
Longworth's second lucky deal, at least as important, came by accident in 1825, when he received a shipment of cuttings of native grape species he'd purchased from a Southern grower named John Adlum that contained Longworth's first Catawba vine. Longworth would later recall, "Maj. Adlum had a proper appreciation of the value of the Catawba Grape. In a letter to me he remarked: 'In bringing this grape into public notice, I have rendered my country a greater service than I would have done, had I paid off the National Debt.'"
As Longworth's high praise suggests, Catawbas were, and still are, very special grapes to Ohio growers. The native Catawba species adapted over eons to the North American climate and its vines stand up well to Ohio winters. The reddish berries of the Catawba have a spicy flavor, and make a wine that is clear with a faint pink or straw color. These tamed wild or "fox" grapes, as the pioneers called them, have a naturally lower sugar content than European grapes, which gives them a strong flavor and aroma, a so called "foxy" taste, unpleasant to some. But most of the unsophisticated drinkers on the Ohio frontier had never sampled more expensive wines and frankly didn't know the difference.
Longworth's German tenants brought more knowledge of grapes onto the estate than Longworth ever found in his journals, and they taught him to rely on native species rather than drive himself mad trying to force European varieties to grow in Ohio against their wills. They also brought their own German taste buds and noses and with them were able to produce for Longworth a wine to the liking of their immigrant countrymen who, like themselves, had come in droves from Germany to the Cincinnati region. It's unlikely that Longworth, who grew up in New Jersey, would ever had stumbled upon the magic blend by himself. He had business sense, but also luck. Longworth and all the growers in the surrounding territory flourished. In 1844, the Cincinnati area produced 20,000 gallons of wine.
Longworth's wine experiments continued and with the help of some imported champagne experts hit upon a Sparkling Catawba wine. "My own impression," Longworth wrote in 1847, "is that in skillful hands our Catawba will make a wine superior in flavor and aroma to the best French Champagne..." Longworth's "impression" proved right. The potion wowed the judges at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's 1848 meeting in Philadelphia. Longworth soon had more orders for Sparkling Catawba than he could fill. By 1853, 320,000 gallons of wine flowed out of Cincinnati, an explosive sixteen-fold increase in less than ten years.
Luck is a capricious thing, though, and Longworth's impressive streak had to run out sooner or later.
*
"The 'rot,' as it is termed, is the great evil, especially in cultivating the Catawba."
—Robert Buchanan, Cincinnati Horticultural Society, 1850
For Longworth and the Cincinnati growers, sooner came in 1859, when "black rot," a fungus that turns fat grape berries to hard shriveled black husks, overcame the Ohio Valley vines. Later arrived in 1861, when slavery culminated in secession, and secession in civil war. As farm hands and laborers enlisted in the military, the vineyards of the Ohio Valley fell, untended, into neglect and abandonment.
"Powdery mildew" hit shortly after, a disease that chokes the stems and leaves of grape vines with masses of fine white threads of spores. The system of close planting employed by the Germans around Cincinnati allowed diseases to pass quickly between the affected vines. In the midst of the dual calamities of disease and war, Nicholas Longworth himself died in 1863, and southern Ohio's grape industry lost its most vigorous champion.
Six years later, on May 10, 1869, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads linked at Promontory, Utah. The now legendary wine regions of California, previously supplying wine outside the Golden State in just a trickle, opened in a flood to Eastern markets.
After that, for grapes and wine, Cincinnati was through.
*
"Not only is the production of grapes in Ohio largely confined to the counties along Lake Erie, but it is also localized in rather definite areas within those counties... Though formerly so, the Euclid-Willoughby section of Cuyahoga and Lake Counties is today of little importance."
—Paul Cross Morrison, "Viticulture in Ohio," 1936
Cunningham's Island lay just across Lake Erie's South Passage from Danbury Township and the peninsula that shelters Sandusky Bay. Datus Kelley and his brother, Ira, bought the island whole in 1833 and rechristened it with their family name. Three years later Datus finally took up residence there, and brought with him some Catawba vines from his garden in mainland Rockport Township west of Cleveland. The lake conditions on Kelley's Island held off the rot that devastated the southern Ohio vineyards in the years to come. Thus, by 1836, wine growing had arrived in northern Ohio. Isolated from the mainland and so spared from urban sprawl, the vineyards and wineries of the Lake Erie islands still produce today.
One year later, in 1837, James Houghton—about 32, an immigrant from England listed on the 1870 census as a "nurseryman" living in East Cleveland—planted a handful of vines in the northwestern part of Euclid Township, and had seven acres of vines growing on the lake by 1850. The reference to Houghton, found in the American Wine Society Journal, predates any of the others which record the names of the fathers of wine in Euclid Township by nearly 30 years. If not the first, Houghton was certainly among the first to cultivate the grape in Euclid. Whether the McIlraths and Ruples ignored Houghton's success with his odd crop or thought him lucky or mad is not known. It may have merely been a hobby or a personal garden. He may have sold his grapes as a sweet treat for his neighbors' tables locally. Before the opening of the railroad in 1851, delicate grapes might have spoiled before he could get them to any sizeable market for large scale sale. Dry grains and lumber were certainly more sensible products to give one's time and effort to in the ox cart era of Euclid Township, and James Houghton would have had little company in his vineyard until after the Civil War.
Then, overnight it seemed, everyone in Euclid was planting grapes. One wonders what James Houghton thought, if he felt vindicated.
*
"[Grape] production increased rapidly during the years 1869-1889. Ohio probably reached its peak acreage during the closing years of this period... The greater part of this acreage was in the lake counties... [H]undreds of carloads [were] being shipped from Dover, Euclid, Vermillion, Sandusky, and other grape belt stations. In 1888, some 350 carloads rolled from Euclid Station, Cuyahoga County, alone.
—Paul Cross Morrison, "Viticulture in Ohio," 1936
The last years of the 1860s are remembered by scholars of the Ohio wine industry as the "Grape Fever." Thirteen hundred new acres of grape vines were planted in Ohio in 1865, a figure which more than doubled in 1866, and continued rising into 1867, when 3,100 new acres of vines took root in the state. Things slowed somewhat the next year, and further the year after that, but what was considered "slow" by then had become relative, with more than 2,000 new acres being planted in 1868, and over 1,200 in 1869. With the three-year lag from planting to bearing, right on schedule, in 1870, the amount of grapes gathered in Ohio rose from 3.7 million pounds the previous year to nearly 16 million, the harvest more than quadrupling in twelve months.
The frenzy raged so high in Ohio from 1865 to 1869 that dabbling in viticulture by amateurs soon ran wild, with town-dwelling shopkeepers and merchants, who knew little to nothing of growing anything, rampantly planting whatever outlands they owned in grape vines in hope of cashing in on the fever. Euclid's vineyard acreage took off during these years, and before long vines overtook the wheat and hay planted on the lake plain, bringing, at first, healthy returns to the Euclid growers. In 1870, northern Ohio grape production surpassed that of the southern part of the state for the first time, and a single incredible generation, when simply everyone in Euclid Township had their hands, one way or another, in the sprawl of vineyards that spread all across the lake plain and up the escarpment, had begun.
*
Growers planted cuttings raised in nurseries beside stakes placed about three feet apart. Over several seasons the planters grew up the vines beside the stakes to a height of over six feet. Then they bowed and tied down the vines with a twig from a willow tree.
Converting the grape crop into wine was attractive for storage and preservation in the days before fast transport and refrigeration. Nineteenth century Ohio wine producers made wine in a press, a six-foot-wide wooden box beneath a large iron screw, similar to the cider presses in use at the time. Pressure applied to a lever pushed the press down into the grapes and juice flowed from an opening in the side. The winemakers poured the juice into casks with the stop left loose for several weeks until fermentation completed, then sealed the casks tight and aged the wine, sometimes for several years. The aged wine ready for consumption was poured into glass bottles sealed with cork. To keep the corks moist and thus the seal tight the bottles were stored on their sides.
Crisfield Johnson's account from his History of Cuyahoga County provides valuable knowledge of the varieties being grown in Euclid Township during the peak of the wine years. Beside the Catawba, the Concord was (indeed it remains) the most popular variety grown in northern Ohio. First bred by Ephraim Bull in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1843, Concords bear a medium-sized blue-black berry and are suitable for wine or just for eating. They make red ports, Burgundies and clarets, as well as being favored among southern European immigrants in the making of homemade wines. Today, Concords are used primarily to make juice and jam. Delawares—which Louis Harris had no hesitation in saying that Euclid Township was, in 1879, the best locality for growing in the whole state—were first introduced to Ohio in 1849. The vines produce small red berries that make excellent white wine. Dianas are amber-colored and hardy. Created in Massachusetts in 1834, they produce a lot of sugar and overcome much of the "foxiness" typical to most Ohio-grown grapes. Dianas are used to make red wine, and the fruit stores very well. Marthas produce a green berry and have a sweet flavor. This Concord cousin was first bred in Pennsylvania in 1868. The fruit is fragile and difficult to store and transport. Ives produce a black grape berry, so dark it is sometimes used to add richer color to wines and juices made from less chromatic grapes. Ives make poor grapes for eating. They were named for their creator, Henry Ives, of Cincinnati, who introduced them to Ohio in 1840. Little memory remains among contemporary Ohio wine experts regarding the grape known as the Hartford Prolific. One source describes the berries of the variety as large and black, plus "hardy, vigorous, and certain," which would have made them well-suited to winters on the lakeshore. Seven hundred six tons of these grapes left Euclid Township in 1890.
Nothing, of course, is perfect, and neither are Ohio wines. The Eastern American varieties came from native North American "fox" grapes that early settlers found growing wild and tamed for cultivation. The low natural sugar content of North American grapes often gives them and the wine made from them a bitter taste: "Foxiness." ("You can't fool me with Kelley's Island wine," no less than Mark Twain himself once wrote. "I can tell it from vinegar every time—by the label on the bottle.") European and California grapes don't have a problem with foxiness. Beginning in 1860, California winegrowers, up and coming in competition with producers in the Eastern markets, and feeling their sweet wines superior, began to assert themselves into the Ohio market. They lobbed accusations that Ohio, New York and Missouri vintners actually replaced the labels on California wines and passed them off as their own, beginning a so-called Wine War. The Californians also claimed the Easterners tried to ruin the reputation of the Western wines by putting the labels of California wineries on bottles of spoiled wine. Keen to the foxiness issue, California winemakers pushed lawmakers to regulate the amount of sugar that could be added to wine during fermentation. With their low natural sugar content, without added sugar Ohio wines would be highly acidic, and would not be able to produce enough alcohol during fermentation to even legally be considered wine. In 1894, a Pure Wine Law ended the Wine War, setting standards for wine production and allowing the use of sugar in winemaking, saving the Eastern industry. The Pure Wine Law saved Euclid Township's vineyards, but just in time for them to die.
*
One reason for the proliferation of varieties tried in Euclid and all of northern Ohio was the growers' hope that perhaps a new breed might prove immune to the parasites and diseases that infested the southern Ohio vineyards. None were, to their chagrin. Like Longworth's downstate, Euclid Township's luck would eventually run out, and her brief obsession with the grape shortly ended. Black rot showed up in northern Ohio in 1862, and growers reported bad rot in the lakeshore vineyards in 1867. The same powdery mildew that had hit Cincinnati came to Euclid, along with "downy mildew," the fungus Peronspora viticola. American growers found sulfur-based chemicals could control the powdery mildew, and French growers experimented with products containing copper, and had some success fighting downy mildew and black rot with them. But though successful chemical remedies had been discovered, Ohio farmers often used them incorrectly and therefore ineffectively. Furthermore, if not properly cleansed, the treatments left a bad taste on the grapes. False word spread that the preparations didn't work, or that one's vines were just better off being left with disease. All this confusion allowed rot and mildew to pound the lakeshore vineyards again and again, hitting hard in 1875, 1881, 1883 and 1885.
Like those of past plagues that entered Europe from the distant East, the first anxious rumors of a parasitic species of louse called Phylloxera came to the ears of American growers from France in 1870. As they had for the fungus and mildews, Americans hoped their North American and hybrid species would be immune to the European pest, but by 1876 American horticulturalists had found the Phylloxera on their vines. At a loss for a remedy, so-called experts suggested flooding vineyards for four to five weeks in order to drown the bugs. The flooding proved useless, and the Phylloxera spread, eventually finding their way to Euclid.
*
"On the north of Euclid Avenue, from Bliss Road, which is now East 222, on out east, was all grape vineyards, which my father, Charles, worked in until about 1904-5..."
—Rollin Hazen, Euclid, O. resident, b. 1886
Once the Grape Fever had subsided and the difficulty of infection and infestation entered the equation, yet another factor emerged to speed the decline of grapes in Euclid Township: mere dilettantism. With a three-year commitment required just to bring vines to bearing, many of the urban dwellers playing at viticulture soon became bored with the project, and by the mid-1870s many of these fair-weather horticulturalist had either abandoned their vineyards or left them neglected. Half of the vineyards planted in Ohio in the 1860s had been abandoned by 1876.
Following the dazzling rise of the Euclid vineyards came an equally dramatic and rapid fall. The 1890s witnessed the stresses on the vineyards of Euclid Township attain a critical mass for the grape industry there, combining to constitute a disaster for grapes from which the Euclid vineyards would never recover. During that decade a particularly severe plague of rot began in the Ashtabula vineyards and spread slowly west, into Euclid and beyond, finally reaching Lorain County in 1899.
Ohio wine historian Susan Sifritt:
"In Euclid, between 1893 and 1897, the grape crop failure resulted in the dissolution of the Euclid Grape Growers' Association and its bank. By 1903 the growers were selling their baskets of grapes for four cents; the basket cost two cents, pickers one cent, and with the addition of other expenses, profits were zero. The majority of Euclid's growers faced bankruptcy. Many were forced to sell their land to Clevelanders, who wanted summer or resort homes or suburban property."
The rising Temperance Movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s contributed to the decline of the vineyards of Euclid Township as well. Since as early as 1846, Ohio growers had been railing against Temperance advocates. As the movement grew and spread, individual towns, counties and whole states voted themselves "dry" at the beginning of the 20th century, closing wineries and leaving grapes to rot on the vines and in the rail yards. Ohio banned alcoholic beverages in 1919, the same year as the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the ratification of which began the failed experiment in national abstemiousness known as Prohibition. Grapes could still be grown to be eaten as harmless fruit, of course, but, as stated earlier, wine has the advantage of providing a form for grapes to take that allows preservation and easy shipment, and table grape growers deprived of these valuable assets certainly suffered as a result of the outlaw of wine.
The end of Prohibition in 1933 caused a brief upswing in the acreage planted in grapes and the tonnage of them shipped from Ohio, but the amount never came close to its pre-1919 level. By the time of the Second World War, industrial and residential development had overrun Euclid Township's best winegrowing areas on the lake plain. The increase in property taxes both types of development brought squeezed many of the smaller growers—those whose vines were not literally paved over—out of Euclid Township, if not completely out of business. In the latter years of the 1800s into the early 1900s, the focus of the vineyards on the eastern lakeshore moved progressively east into Lake and Ashtabula Counties, where what remains of Northeast Ohio's lakeshore wine industry will be found today.
Despite the land use changes that have taken place on the lake plain of Euclid Township in the last hundred years, the natural conditions that made it and all of lakeshore Ohio one of the world's finest wine regions have not changed since Lake Erie settled into its present state 4,600 years ago. East and west of Cleveland, and on the Lake Erie islands, the vineyards continue to grow as they have since the 1830s, tourist attractions now, rather than economic engines. Hardy wooden vines, abandoned and grown wild, persist in Euclid Township in the last scarce few undeveloped square yards of land, those too soft or too steep to build upon, in the gullies of Dugway Brook, in suburban backyards, and along the steep sandy banks of Euclid Creek.
They're there right now, all over. In Collinwood and Richmond Heights and Lyndhurst. Go look.
The information in Chapter Nineteen is drawn from the following sources:
"Euclid Pioneers" file, Euclid Historical Society archive, Euclid, Ohio.
“Lake Effect and Terroir.” Lake Erie Quality Wine Alliance website. www.lakeeriewine.com.
“Lake Erie Appellation Climactic Charts.” Lake Erie Quality Wine Alliance website. www.lakeeriewine.com.
“Native Grapes.” Old House Chronicle Magazine website. www.oldhousechronicle.com/archives/vol01/issue01/technical/grapes.html.
Buchanan, Robert. A Treatise on the Cultivation of the Grape in Vineyards. Wright, Ferris & Co., 1850.
Cahoon, Garth A. “The Ohio Grape and Wine Industry from 1860.” Manuscript provided by the author.
Cahoon, Garth A. “The Ohio Wine Industry from 1860 to the Present.” American Wine Society Journal, Fall Issue 1984.
Ellis, Michael. “Grape Black Rot.” Ohio State University Extension website.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/3000/3004.html.
Flagg, Mezer. Remarks on the Culture of the Grape and the Manufacture of Wine in the Western States. L’Hommedieu & Co., 1846.
Johnson, Crisfield. History of Cuyahoga County Ohio. D. W. Ensign & Co., 1879.
McGrew, John R. “A Brief History of Grapes and Wine in Ohio to 1865.” American Wine Society Journal, Summer Issue 1984.
Morrison, Paul Cross. “Viticulture in Ohio.” Economic Geography, Vol 12, No 1, 1936.
Parker, Charles. "Field Notes for a Survey of Euclid Township, July 1, 1797." Mss v. f. P. WRHS archive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Popenoe, E.A., et al. “Notes on Grapes in the Experimental Vineyard.” Kansas State Agricultural College Experimental Station Bulletin No 14, December 1890. Published electronically at www.oznet.edu/historicalpublications/pubs/sb014.pdf.
Reisch, Bruce I., et al. “Wine and Juice Grape Varieties for Cool Climates.” Cornell Cooperative Extension website. www.nysaes.cornell.edu/hort/faculty/reisch/bulletin/wine/winetext2.html.
Sifritt, Susan K. The Ohio Wine and Wine Grape Industries. Doctoral Dissertation. Kent State University, 1976.
Expert consultation:
Garth A. Cahoon, Professor of Horticulture, Ohio State University, emails June 18, 2000; October 29 and 30, 2002.