University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

A cultivating enterprise: wine, race, and conquest in California, 1769-1920

(USC Thesis Other)

A cultivating enterprise: wine, race, and conquest in California, 1769-1920

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content
A CULTIVATING ENTERPRISE:
WINE, RACE, AND CONQUEST IN CALIFORNIA, 1769-1920

by

Julia Ornelas-Higdon

________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2014

Copyright 2014 Julia Ornelas-Higdon

ii

This is for my husband, Sean, and our daughter, Charlotte;

and for my parents, Patricia and Francisco;

Thank you.

iii
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Table of Contents iii
List of Figures iv
Acknowledgements v
Abstract xii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 From Mission to Market: Secularization and the Rise of Commercial
Winegrowing in Mexican California

21
Chapter 2 The Refinement of Nature: Winegrowers, Boosters, and the Instability of
Conquest

66
Chapter 3 Nation Building, Modernity, and the American Industrialization of
Winemaking

117
Chapter 4 Fermenting “Agricultural Citizenship:” Immigration and Race-Making in
California’s Vineyards, 1860-1900

162
Chapter 5 “American Vintner’s Song”: Wine and the Civilization of the Masses,
1870-1920

205
Conclusion

239
Bibliography 246

iv
List of Figures

Figure 1

Spanish fantasy image of Franciscan with Mission Indians 22
Figure 2

Old Poodle Dog Menu 76
Figure 3

Agoston Haraszthy's Buena Vista Ranch in Sonoma, California 97
Figure 4

Kohler & Frohling Wine Label 121
Figure 5

Grape Crusher & Stemmer 129
Figure 6

Chinese Vineyard Workers 164
Figure 7

Depiction of the "Mongolian and Mexican" in San Gabriel 165
Figure 8 Vineyard at Sunny Slope 171

Figure 9 Sunny Slope Vineyard and Winery

174
Figure 10

Chinese Workers in Vina Ranch Vineyard 201
Figure 11

The Wines of Los Angeles County 206

v
Acknowledgements

This dissertation was four years in the making. Though I spent many hours sitting at my
desk to write this dissertation, I was by no means alone. Many generous and kind individuals
have enabled me to research and write this dissertation.
My love of history began long before I arrived at USC. Katherine Gumbert, Madalynn
Reis, Sr. Pauline O’Reilly, and Sr. Janel Halverson made history exciting and instilled in me the
fundamentals of writing. At Pomona College, Professors Samuel Yamashita, Helena Wall, and
Jill Grigsby were amazing teachers and scholars. Their mentorship helped me land in graduate
school, and for this I thank them.
My advisors at USC provided extraordinary mentorship and support over the past seven
years. I have been fortunate to work with Professors George Sánchez and William (Bill)
Deverell. Despite their administrative, teaching, and research responsibilities, they have been
unfailingly generous mentors. George Sánchez encouraged me to be brave and bold in my
arguments. His thoughtful questions pushed me to explore ideas I had not considered and gave
me momentum as I drafted my chapters. Bill Deverell championed my dissertation from its
conception through its completion. He asked tough questions that strengthened this project and
that will continue to guide me as I move forward with this project. I am also grateful to both
George and Bill for their support when I was expecting my daughter, and for their
encouragement and motivation when I returned to work after she was born. George and Bill
never doubted that I had it in me to finish this project. As scholars, teachers, writers, and
exceptional human beings, I look Bill and George as models of the kind of historian I aspire to
be. Thank you both.

vi
I am indebted to many members of the USC community. Professor Karen Halttunen is a
gifted teacher who helped me break down the process of research and writing. This dissertation
grew from seminar paper I wrote for her class as a first year graduate student. Her thoughtful
feedback encouraged me to develop a more ambitious project. Likewise, Professor Judith
Bennett helped me organize my dissertation proposal and get this project off the ground.
Professor Janet Hoskins in the Anthropology Department at USC gave her time to read and
critique my project. Her feedback about colonialism and class have inspired me and will prove
instrumental as I revise this project into a manuscript. Finally, I owe much gratitude to Sandra
Hopwood and Lori Rogers in the History Department at USC. These women helped me navigate
the waters at USC and they made the History Department a warm and welcoming place to study.
Beyond USC, I have been incredibly fortunate to meet unfailingly generous scholars. At
UC Irvine, Vicki Ruiz took time from her busy schedule to talk to me about my research and to
offer advice about entering the profession as a woman of color. Her reminder to “put my head
down and write” played over in my head as I drafted my chapters. I was also lucky to participate
in the 2012 Western History Dissertation Workshop organized by Professor Stephen Aron at the
Autry Museum. I received incredible feedback from the workshop group, particularly John Mack
Faragher. He encouraged me to push the temporal boundaries of my project and reexamine the
Mexican period. My project is better for it.
Numerous institutions, archivists, and scholars provided important assistance for this
dissertation. I received generous fellowship support from the Provost’s Office at USC, from the
USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West, the USC History Department Foulke
Fund, and the NSF-EDGE Program. I was also fortunate to receive a Smithsonian Predoctoral
Latino/a Studies Fellowship for research at the National Museum of American History (NMAH),

vii
which provided an intellectual home away from home for me in Washington, D.C. Steve
Velasquez was an unfailingly kind and helpful mentor at the NMAH. The archivists at the
NMAH Archives Center helped me navigate the museum’s rich collections, particularly Kay
Peterson. I had the privilege to work alongside a stimulating group of fellows at the Smithsonian
NMAH, including Leticia Alvarado, Jennifer Fang, and Samantha Muka. Their camaraderie
made it a tremendously pleasant to work. Leticia Alvarado was especially helpful in counseling
me as I became a mother and struggled to strike a balance between my scholarship and
parenthood.
My research took me to numerous archives around the country. I am thankful for the
assistance of librarians at UC Davis, the Bancroft Library, Sonoma State, Cal Poly Pomona,
Stanford University, the Huntington Library, the Smithsonian NMAH, and the California State
Library. At UC Davis, Axel Borg gave me some important lessons in enology and the history of
viticultural education in California, and even shared his personal notes with me. The librarians in
the California History Room at the California State Library were exceptionally helpful in digging
out obscure materials and making their library a welcoming place to research. Finally, I am
indebted to Peter Blodgett and the Reader Services staff at the Huntington Library for their
assistance in navigating the library’s rich collections. They made the Huntington a truly special
place for me to write.
I have been incredibly fortunate to share the company of a congenial group of scholars at
the USC. My cohort of fellow Americanists, including Matt Amato, Jeanne McDougall, Allison
Lauterbach, and Elizabeth Logan, made the History department at USC a supportive and
intellectually vibrant place to study. I am especially thankful for Elizabeth, whose friendship and
humor helped keep me in graduate school. In the cohorts ahead of me, Jennifer Black, Sarah

viii
Fried-Gintis, Sarah Keyes, and Jessica Kim offered friendly advice and encouragement. Back in
2010, the women of History 700 helped me conceptualize this dissertation. Finally, the 2013-
2014 Huntington-ICW Writing Group—Rebecca Cerling, Priscilla Leiva, Monica Pelayo, and
Elizabeth Logan—tirelessly edited my chapters and pushed this project in new and exciting
directions. Thank you all for your fellowship.
During my time in Washington D.C., a group of dear friends supported me as I struggled
to establish myself as a scholar in a new city. Justin Nicholson and Katie Sharp brought some fun
into my life during those long east coast winters. I especially appreciate Katie’s companionship
during our long walks around the hills of Northwest DC. Claudia Montelongo and Sherylls
Valladares Kahn have been my tireless cheerleaders from the moment I submitted applications
for graduate school, to the weeks when I was madly scrambling to finish chapters while nine
months pregnant, to the final revisions. More importantly, they have kept me sane and grounded.
Thank you both for your extraordinary friendship.
I am so fortunate to have an amazing family. They provided me with crucial support
during the long process of writing this dissertation. I owe my in-laws, Ann and Lee Higdon,
much gratitude for raising their son to be a staunchly feminist partner. I am indebted to the
Southern California branch of my family as well. The “Claremont Higdons,” Maureen, Jim, and
Julie Higdon, took time from their busy schedules to go on weekend outings with me during
research trips to Los Angeles. In particular, Julie Higdon’s sunny personality has reminded me of
the importance of taking a break to enjoy my family. My Tía Nena Cervantes opened her home
to me during research trips and kept me well fed, as did my Uncle Sal Cervantes and his lovely
wife, Rosa Reynaga. They are truly the best godparents on the planet and I don’t think I can ever
repay their unconditional generosity and love. My aunt, Margarita (Maggie) Oregel, and her

ix
children, Sahira, Camille, and Zaid, have always made me laugh. In particular, Maggie has been
one of my biggest supporters. Thank you all.
My grandparents deserve my unending gratitude. My Ama and Apa, Elisa C. Cervantes
and Eutimio T. Cervantes, have been active participants in my education since I was a child.
From providing rides to school to sharing prayers and showing genuine interest in my reearch,
they have been steadfastly supportive of me and of all their grandchildren. Though my Apa
passed away as I was gearing up to begin my graduate studies, I know that he was tremendously
proud of me for pursuing a Ph.D. Both of my grandfathers, including my Abuelito Chuy (Jose de
Jesus Ornelas), worked as braceros in the 1950s. Their experiences inspired me to explore the
history of agriculture in California. In the years since my grandfathers’ passing, my
grandmothers, Elisa C. Cervantes and Lucia G. Ornelas, have sustained me with love,
encouragement, and countless bendiciones.
I would also like to thank my sisters, Gema Ornelas and Jennifer Ornelas. As I write this,
Gema and Jennifer have just reached important milestones in their own graduate educations.
Though their disciplines are different from my own, my sisters understood the challenges of a
rigorous graduate program and have offered unique support. When my energy flagged, Jennifer
in particular pushed me to finish the dissertation—jokingly reminding me that she too would
soon be a doctor, and would it not be embarrassing to be lapped by my baby sister. I am
especially grateful to Gema and Jennifer for their help in caring for my daughter so that I could
have long breaks for writing. Thank you both.
I owe the world to my parents, Patricia Oregel and Francisco Ornelas, or, as my sisters
and I have affectionately nicknamed them, Mr. and Mrs. O. During research trips, they
graciously housed and fed me. They loaned me their cars so that I could easily drive to archives

x
across the state of California. They kept me company as I sat at their kitchen table, copiously
filing and organizing my notes and photographs from the archives. After my daughter was born,
and my small family made its way back to California, they opened their home to their
boomerang adult daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter for an entire summer. Mr. and Mrs. O.
have proved to be amazing grandparents to my daughter. I am indebted to them for the loving
care they provided my baby as I hustled to write. Though it was difficult to leave my daughter
for long periods of time, I was reassured by the fact that she was with loving and capable
caregivers. Mr. and Mrs. O. have given me the best education possible and have pushed me to
reach for the moon, never doubting my abilities. They are quietly humble parents and lots of fun
to boot. Thank you.
My final note of gratitude goes to my wonderful husband, Sean Higdon, and our
daughter, Charlotte. My partner for the ten years, Sean has been my rock. He read and sharply
critiqued every blessed word of this dissertation (though all mistakes are mine, of course). He
asked thoughtful questions and pushed me to expand the boundaries of my analysis. No matter
how busy he was with his own work as a law student and later as a first year attorney, he helped
keep things running on the home front and made sure we never ran out of wine, which was
fitting given the nature of my work. Throughout this process, Sean has demonstrated saintly
levels of patience and unconditional love, and I am lucky to be married to him. I am especially
grateful to Sean for sharing the joy that is our daughter, Charlotte Rose. It has been a privilege to
see her grow from a tiny baby to a spunky toddler. As I entered the final months of writing and
editing, I watched in delight as my young “research assistant” entertained herself by
“organizing” my dissertation notes and browsing my history books with great interest. Though

xi
she is still too young to understand my work, I hope she will someday look to her mother, aunts,
and grandmothers, and be equally inspired to pursue her life’s work with passion and vitality.

xii
Abstract

“A Cultivating Enterprise: Wine, Race, and Conquest in California, 1769-1920” explores
the California wine industry from the Mission period through Prohibition. By focusing on the
evolution of the wine industry across three distinct political regimes (Spanish, Mexican, and
American), this project reconceives winegrowing as the economic engine for trade and
agribusiness throughout nineteenth-century California and as an exemplar of racial exclusion and
power. This dissertation argues that the wine industry operated as a nexus of conquest,
racialization, and citizenship.
The commercial wine industry was built on a foundation of concentrated land ownership
and racialized labor first established by the Missions, and later carried on by Mexican-
Californios and Americans. Laws regulating access to wine helped determine race, class, and
privilege. As American winegrowers took over the commercial wine industry following the
Mexican War, they confronted attitudes that dismissed California as a backwards and racially
dangerous place. To address these tensions, wine boosters promoted agricultural education and
used the language of Manifest Destiny to frame California as a healthful place full of natural
advantages. Viticulturists harnessed political power and public resources to advance their private
business interests and promote a campaign of refinement and Americanization. Using the
example of German vineyardists in Los Angeles and Anaheim, this project demonstrates how
winegrowers used the wine industry to further the goals of American nation-building by rooting
citizenship in modernity, landownership, and technological advancement. The wine industry was
not only an economic venture but also was part of a civilizing campaign to reform California
away from its Spanish and Mexican roots.

xiii
Wine industrialists also helped reconfigure racial hierarchies in California. Though
American winegrowers portrayed their industry as a way to attract white migrants from United
States and Europe, they required Indian, Chinese, and Mexican workers to maintain the financial
viability of the industry. Winegrowers helped redefine the parameters of whiteness and
agricultural citizenship on the basis of landownership, which had also been important in
determining status in Spanish and Mexican California. They likened Mexicans to Indians,
severing them from the former Californio ruling class in order to classify them as landless wage
laborers. Ultimately, American winegrowers asserted their whiteness on a fragile foundation of
economic overextension and environmental uncertainty. As the nineteenth century drew to a
close, winegrowers organized new trade groups to address environmental crises and temperance
campaigns. The cultural politics of the anti-temperance movement asserted the importance of
Anglo-Protestant culture in California. This further divorced the wine industry from its Mexican-
Spanish background and firmly rooted the industry as a modern, American agribusiness driven
by profits, scientific research, and international markets.

1
Introduction
In 1889, Frona Wait—a San Francisco journalist and wine booster—published Wines and
Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine-Drinking. By this point, winegrowing had
been an institution in California for nearly a century, beginning with the Missions. Wait credited
the Missionaries with planting the seeds of viticulture. Though she spoke with “reverence and
respect” for the memory of the Franciscans who had tried “to do the right thing at the right time,
she ultimately surmised that they had “planted neither wisely nor well.”
1
Wait quickly glossed
over the rest of the industry’s history under its Spanish and Mexican-Californio stewards to the
1880s, when the wine business found itself in disarray. At this point, Wait maintained that
“Enterprising and Prominent Wine Men,”—a group of Anglo and European growers—had used
their wealth, intelligence, and business acumen to save the wine industry. She elevated
viticulture to “a gentleman’s occupation and the highest type of agriculture.” Wait argued that
one had only to visit one of California’s many winegrowing pockets to find a “beautiful valley
and sunny slopes thickly studded with lovely country houses,” where a simple “glance at the
interior” was sure to reveal “the refined modern tastes of the viticulturist’s family.”
2
By Wait’s
estimation, the wine industry was not merely a farming venture, though she did seem to value the
modern business principles of the viticulturists she profiled in her book. Rather, Wait anointed
winegrowers as noble citizen-cultivators whose labors were improving California’s land and
people.
This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the wine industry’s past and
contextualize it within California’s long history of conquest and cultural change. This project

1
Frona Eunice Wait, Wines and Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine-Drinking
(San Francisco: Bancroft, 1889), 33, 88-89.

2
Ibid, 88.

2
deconstructs the role of winegrowing in shaping the cultural, economic, and racial transformation
of nineteenth-century California. Numerous questions guide this analysis. How did vineyardists
reorder and regulate the region’s natural environment? How did imported horticultural
technologies, plants, and tools—bottles, cork, and foreign vines—from Europe function to
“refine” and improve upon California’s native offerings and Spanish winegrowing methods?
This dissertation also questions the implications of converting winemaking from a Catholic,
largely clerical activity to a Protestant, capitalist enterprise driven by trade and profit. What was
the role of marginalized laborers—namely Indian, Chinese, and Mexican workers—in building
the state’s wine industry, and how did winegrowers and laborers disrupt and reorganize existing
hierarchies in post-1848 California? Finally, how did winegrowers conceptualize the role of their
industry in post-Civil War debates about immigration and race?
“A Cultivating Enterprise: Wine, Race, and Conquest in California, 1769-1920” answers
these questions by examining the wine industry from the Mission period through Prohibition. By
focusing on the evolution of the wine industry across three distinct political regimes (Spanish,
Mexican, and American), this project reconceives winegrowing as the economic engine for trade
and agribusiness throughout nineteenth-century California, and as an exemplar of racial
exclusion and power. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how viticulture laid the
foundation for agribusiness in California, long before the rise of citrus.
This dissertation argues that California’s nineteenth-century wine industry operated as a
site of conquest, racialization, and imperial expansion, beginning with the Spanish missions and
continuing through the commercialization of the industry by Mexican-Californios and
Americans. These newcomers used winegrowing to assert control over the region’s land and
people. Early on during the Spanish and Mexican period, winegrowing helped shape racial and

3
class hierarchies. Legal access to alcohol, grapes, and tools for winemaking denoted race, class,
and even citizenship. One’s place on the spectrum of winegrowing—from landowner, to vintner,
to laborer, to merchant—signified one’s status and had consequences beyond the confines of the
vineyard. As EuroAmerican and European immigrants became winegrowers after American
conquest, they found meaning and identity in vineyard landscapes. These ideas coalesced into
notions of agricultural citizenship, which helped define winegrowers by a set of parameters.
First, vineyardists were specialized horticulturists who replaced Spanish-Mexican viticultural
methods with science-based agriculture and modern tools and technology that promised to
maximize their vineyard production. Second, agricultural citizens were not Jeffersonian yeoman
farmers who worked the land themselves. Instead, they had a theoretical relationship to the land,
which was made possible by racialized Indian, Chinese, and Mexican wage laborers. Finally,
agricultural citizenship functioned as a way for EuroAmericans to reconfigure whiteness away
from prior Californio understandings of whiteness (which had been rooted in land-based wealth)
to one determined by modernity, science, and American enterprise. Although understandings of
whiteness in 1848 included both EuroAmericans and Californios, this transition towards
agricultural citizenship gradually reclassified Californios outside the boundaries of white racial
identity. By the turn of the twentieth century, whiteness no longer included both Californios and
EuroAmericans. Rather, this new ruling class used its agricultural citizenship to reconfigure
whiteness as Anglo-Californian, disrupting Mexican-Californios’ racial identity and native
belonging in the state.
By the early twentieth century, the term “agricultural citizenship” had emerged to
ennoble the work of California’s citrus farmers. E.J. Wickson, Professor of Agriculture at the
University of California, first published California Fruits and How to Grow Them in 1889. This

4
horticultural manual, widely read by California growers, was in such demand that it was reissued
multiple times. By the 1914 edition, Wickson had edited a chapter originally titled “The Orange”
to become “The Orange: King of California Fruit.” He expanded this chapter to describe citrus
culture not only as a promising economic venture (as he had in the past) but also as a “token of
our advancement in one of the highest of the agricultural arts” and “a demonstration of the
quality of our agricultural citizenship.”
3
According to historian, Douglas Sackman, Wickson
used this terminology to argue “that the fruited garden, not the frontier, was the space of the most
rapid and complete Americanization.
4

Though Wickson gave a name to agricultural citizenship in 1914, “A Cultivating
Enterprise” maintains that the principles conveyed by this idea emerged with earlier generations
of growers, namely the viticulturists who were among the state’s first horticulturists. As an
organized fruit industry, grape growers preceded California’s citrus industry by decades.
Wickson’s terminology—agricultural citizenship—helps define the civilizing goals of
EuroAmerican viticulturists beyond their work in cultivating the environment to cultivating the
people of California as well. These were not simply farmers; winegrowers seemed to attribute
more noble goals to their work. In California, agricultural citizens were decidedly different from
Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. This class of citizens had a different relationship with the land than
did Jeffersonian farmers, as they did not actually work the land themselves. Indeed, this class of
agricultural citizens had more of a theoretical interaction with the soil and vines in contrast to the
tactile contact that their wage laborers had. Their hired crews did the physical work of plowing,

3
Edward James Wickson, California Fruits and How to Grow Them, (San Francisco: Pacific
Rural Press, 1919), 294. Wickson likely added this to the 1914 edition. The 1889 and 1900
editions do not mention agricultural citizenship in the introduction to orange culture.

4
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 27.

5
planting, vine training, weeding, and harvesting. They were more similar to southern planters in
that regard, and as such, their physical relationship to the land was tenuous. Racial bodies—their
laborers—served as a barrier between agricultural citizens and land. Finally, racial and class
designations defined agricultural citizenship. They were businessmen and cultivators; conquerors
and civilizers of California’s virgin landscape. California’s vineyardists were not simply planting
new grapevines for local consumption as the Franciscans and Mexican-Californios had done.
They were bringing new technologies to California and exporting wine as an agricultural product
across the United States.
The California wine industry was born during the Spanish colonization of California,
achieved market expansion under Mexican rule, and underwent further territorial and economic
expansion after the Mexican-American War. Thus, winegrowing came to fruition amid violence,
territorial expansion, as well as cultural and social upheaval, beginning with the arrival of the
Spanish to California in 1769. Between 1769 and the 1820s, Franciscans operated Missionaries
across Alta California. There, they colonized and converted California Indians to Catholicism.
Colonization involved teaching Indians how to cultivate virgin lands into grain fields, fruit
orchards, olive groves, and vineyards. In addition to agriculture, cattle ranching comprised an
important part of the economy under Spanish rule. After Mexican Independence in 1821, the
mission system was secularized and its Indians were gradually emancipated. Still, cattle ranching
and limited agriculture, including viticulture, continued as mainstays of the California economy.
The American conquest of California extended well beyond the signing of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. This agreement formally ended the Mexican War, secured the U.S.-
Mexico border at Rio Grande, and annexed western territories, including Texas, California, and

6
the province of New Mexico.
5
In California, conquest entailed “political, economic, and social
domination of one empire, nation, or society over another one,” exemplified by “the systematic
acquisition of land…[and the] policies of territorial expansion.”
6
California slowly evolved from
a borderland outpost along Mexico’s northern periphery to a distinct part of the United States’
Western frontier. This was a place, as discussed by historian, Stephen Aron “where political
control was undetermined and boundaries—cultural and geographic—were uncertain.”
7

California emerged as a cross-cultural “zone of shared and contested occupancy” that evolved in
a non-linear, unpredictable fashion.
8

Agricultural cultivation was fundamental to the American conquest of California. As
EuroAmericans seized control of Mexican territories, they first transformed lands from cattle
grazing grounds—as had been the Spanish-Mexican tradition—to wheat fields, and finally to
specialized horticulture. Immigrants believed agriculture was a more profitable and judicious use
of the land than cattle ranching, reiterating earlier EuroAmerican arguments justifying the
conquest of Indian lands used only for hunting and gathering. EuroAmericans also justified their
westward expansion and their conquest of the land by juxtaposing their enterprising work ethic
and racial superiority to that of Catholic, Mexican Californios. California’s newest immigrants

5
The province of New Mexico encompassed the present-day states of New Mexico, Arizona,
Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The American
West: A New Interpretive History, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 212.

6
Ibid, 2.

7
Stephen Aron, “The Making of the First American West,” in A Companion to the American
West,” ed. William Deverell, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 6.

8
Ibid, 6.

7
thus established an economy based on regenerative wealth.
9
As this progression occurred, the
agriculture evolved from a world of small yeoman wheat farmers to one organized by corporate
capitalist growers who often specialized their produce.
10
By disrupting the cattle-centric
economic system favored by the Californio elite, EuroAmericans dominated the economy,
acquired legal authority, and garnered control over land. As Lisbeth Haas and Tomás Almaguer
have argued, class, race, and an upended economic system functioned together to shape racial
dynamics and hierarchies in California.
11

This dissertation is situated at the intersection of race, agriculture, and conquest in
California. As such, it engages with two historiographies. First, the literature that addresses the
conquest of California not only in terms of military conquest but also in terms of the economic,
cultural, and social changes that emerged during the region’s many political transitions,
beginning with the Spanish Mission period and continuing through to American rule after 1848
informs this dissertation. Second, this project engages the historiography dealing with agriculture
in California in order to contextualize how vineyardists throughout the state changed landscapes,
and further, to understand the implications of this human reordering of nature.
Historians identify economics, politics, and law as key factors that facilitated the racial
exclusion of non-whites and enabled the ascension of American institutions after 1848. The
literature suggests that the advent of American legal and economic systems and the increased
racial exclusion of former Mexican citizens functioned to debunk the power and land- owning

9
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936, (Univeristy of
California Press,1995), 65.

10
David Vaught, After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley, (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

11
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

8
wealth of Californios. Tomás Almaguer traces the historical roots of racial hierarchies within the
context of the capitalist and political transformation of California after the Civil War. Almaguer
argues that class and race interacted together to shape racial dynamics and hierarchies in
California. For example, the distribution of economic resources—particularly land ownership
and labor-market participation—worked in conjunction with socially constructed racial
hierarchies to exclude California Indians, Mexicans, Blacks, Chinese, and Japanese migrants. He
further notes the important role of the courts and legislature in imposing white hegemony.
William G. Robbins similarly interprets historical change within the context of market interests,
arguing that capitalism drove economic and political developments.
12
He posits an analytical
framework that relies on the “political economy and systems of power and dependency…to
understand historical change.”
13
Lisbeth Haas also deals with the ways in which white racial
identity and gender were constructed through social structures and through Mexican inter-group
struggles for access to land and citizenship rights, with particular attention to the gendered
experiences of women.
14

This project builds on the work of Almaguer and Robbins to identify how economic and
political changes swept across California’s agricultural landscape and transformed power
structures throughout the state. Haas’s model demonstrates how power over vineyard land and
space had broader implications for shaping the social status and racial identity of
EuroAmericans, former Mexican citizens, and other immigrant groups, particularly the Chinese.

12
Williams G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American
West, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994).

13
Ibid, ix.

14
Lisbeth Haas, 12.

9
This dissertation is also informed by scholars who examine the cultural changes that
accompanied the conquest of California. These scholars build on a tradition established by Carey
McWilliams to examine how EuroAmericans propagated a romanticized and sanitized version of
the Spanish colonial past to reinterpret California history
15
Kevin Starr has dealt with the ways
EuroAmericans utilized California’s Spanish colonial history.
16
In the late nineteenth century,
leading EuroAmericans sought to refine the state by molding its gardens, architecture, and cities
according to an idealized “Mediterranean” model. This Mediterranean analogy allowed
EuroAmericans to acknowledge the state’s Spanish Catholic past and satisfy a need for order,
history, and unique regional design. At the same time, they maintained a contradictory sense of
new beginnings that allowed elites to use the Mediterranean analogy to construct an idyllic
California.
This project also draws from the work of historians who challenge and expand Spanish
fantasy heritage to emphasize cultural production and memory-creation as tools of
Americanization and racialization. William Deverell demonstrates how Anglos who held social,
political, economic and cultural power built a modernized Los Angeles in direct response to
Mexican people and spaces.
17
Though these Angelinos appropriated Mexican culture in plays
and public celebrations, Deverell argues that Anglos in Los Angeles made it an “American” city
partly by concealing the “places, people, and histories that those in power found unsettling,”

15
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land, (Santa Barbara: Peregrine
Smith, 1946, 1979).

16
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973).

17
William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its
Mexican Past, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 6.

10
essentially “whitewashing an adobe past.”
18
Focusing on public memory, Phoebe Kropp argues
that the Anglo glorification of California went so far as to shape the “cultural landscape, from
built environment to social relations.”
19
Kropp maintains that Anglo women created a distinct
regional personality that drew from reimagined memories of the Spanish past. Anglos recast this
colonial past within the built-environment as a financial and cultural investment in the region’s
future through progress, modern development, and tourism.
20
These historians underscore the
importance of culture, memory, and space in shaping ethnic identity and social hierarchies that
defined Mexicans, Chinese, and other groups outside the body politic. Anglos established
themselves as proprietors of a romanticized regional history, juxtaposing this “Spanish” past
with the cultural reality of the American present.
Matt Garcia explores how Mexicans responded to this cultural appropriation.
21
In his
analysis of the citrus industry east of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century, Garcia argues
that Mexican people resisted EuroAmerican hegemony and created a distinct culture in suburban
Los Angeles. Mexicans challenged EuroAmerican hegemony both in public cultural spaces and
in the private home. They built distinct communities in which they could assert and celebrate
their genuine ethnic cultural identity.
Likewise, EuroAmericans cultural appropriated certain elements of Spanish-Mexican
winemaking when convenient and dismissed other parts as antiquated and dirty. This cultural

18
William Deverell, 7.

19
Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern Place, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006), 3.

20
Ibid, 5.

21
Matt Garcia, A World of its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900-1970, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

11
appropriation, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, functioned to recast winegrowing
as a modern, Anglo agribusiness. Kropp and Deverell’s interpretations of cultural authority and
progress informs this analysis of how the wine industry’s new proprietors negotiated the
Mexican-Spanish past with EuroAmerican culture to shape public perceptions of their business
and influence shifting racial hierarchies. Garcia’s work offers a model by which to consider how
viticultural workers’ may have responded to their employers to challenge the cultural agendas of
industry leaders. Further, Garcia demonstrates how to examine the interactions between diverse
laborers and how these interactions influenced new racial structures. This project builds on this
scholarship to examine the role of winegrowing as an outlet for modernity and racialization in
the remaking of California as an Anglo-American place.
Agriculture was another fundamental element of the transformation of California,
replacing cattle ranching with agricultural cultivation. As EuroAmericans seized control of
California, they first transformed the lands from cattle grazing grounds—as had been the
Spanish-Mexican tradition—to wheat fields, and finally to specialized horticulture, particularly
fruit cultivation. As this progression occurred, the agriculture sphere evolved from a world of
small yeoman wheat farmers to one organized by corporate capitalist growers who often
specialized their produce.
22
Steven Stoll demonstrates how farmers transformed California’s
rural landscape into a region dependent on industrialized, specialized horticulture.
23
Stoll argues
that the transition to specialized fruit cultivation in California instigated the industrialization of
farming, thereby foreshadowing broader changes in American agriculture. He maintains that the

22
David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920,
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

23
Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in
California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

12
success of intensive fruit cultivation necessitated collaboration among government agencies,
individual growers, scientific experts, and business firms, laying the foundation for the future of
agriculture in California and the rest of the United States. Douglas Sackman argues that the citrus
industry functioned as an empire because it controlled much more than orange groves, asserting
“hegemony over people and places,” recruiting and racializing international laborers, creating
consumers, and “colonizing public and private spaces across the country to convey its alluring
advertisements.”
24
Because the boundaries between nature and culture are permeable, Sackman
has contended that this hegemony also applied to the conquest of nature. David Vaught deals
with interactions between growers, laborers, their communities, and state/federal agricultural
offices.
25
He focuses on inter-ethnic relations and the role of formal farming institutions—such
as agricultural cooperatives—and the state in bringing modern, industrialized agriculture to the
forefront.
This dissertation builds on this agricultural historiography. These historians argue that
California agriculture emerged late in the nineteenth century as a uniquely capitalist venture
whose influence extended well beyond the fields. This literature does not, however, deal
extensively with viticulture as an earlier movement towards specialized agriculture organized
around business principles, technology, and environmental control. Aside from Sackman, this
literature does not fully address how agriculture fostered racialized labor structures. Nor does
this historiography fully deal with the broader implications of these new racial hierarchies,
beyond the world of agriculture. Scholars have emphasized growers’ roles as horticulturists and
economic developers but have not fully explored the influence of growers beyond these realms.

24
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7.

25
Ibid, 8.

13
This dissertation brings together the agricultural literature with that of Deverell, Garcia, and
Kropp in order to explore the cultural impact of horticulturists on new racial hierarchies. This
project investigates the role of growers in fashioning a post-1848 society that juxtaposed
Mexicans, Chinese, and others against an evolving white racial identity.
This dissertation argues that wine industry leaders’ cultural beliefs, market interests, and
changes to the environment functioned together to have implications well beyond the wine
industry in refashioning racial hierarchies organized around group inequalities. Multiple
analytical models help structure this project. This dissertation relies on Natalia Molina’s
approach to studying the process of racialization. She maintains that race is “premised on a
theoretical understand of race as socially constructed in relational ways, that is, in
correspondence other groups.”
26
Similarly, this project seeks to understand how different groups
in nineteenth century California intersected and related to one another to fashion new racial
hierarchies. Stuart Hall’s discussion of shifts in contemporary Black cultural politics reveals how
ideology can foster tangible inequalities between racial groups.
27
Hall argues that cultural and
ideological representations, though historically specific, are not just significant in shaping
discourse, but instead have real implications in shaping hierarchical social structures.”
28

According to Hall’s theory, “[t]his gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of
representation—subjectivity, identity, politics—a formative, not merely an expressive, place in
the constitution of social and political life.” Similar to Almaguer’s application of Hall, this

26
Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical
Power of Racial Scripts, (University of California Press, 2014), 3.

27
Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Race, Culture, and Difference, ed. James Donald and Ali
Rattansi, (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 252-260. See also Tomás
Almaguer, 3.

28
Stuart Hall, 254.

14
theoretical model provides an understanding of the formative role of culture and ideologies in
structuring social hierarchies and racial identities in nineteenth-century California.
Margaret D. Jacobs’ scholarship helps frame California as a settler-colony—not only
during the Spanish colonization of California, but also continuing through the American
occupation.
29
Jacobs differentiates settler colonies from extractive colonies by their large
populations of European descent with more equal representations of men and women. Unlike
extractive colonies, settler colonies required more expansive political and economic
infrastructures to maintain power. The ultimate goal of settler colonialism was generally land
acquisition, which generally resulted in the violent displacement and replacement of indigenous
populations.
30
In the frontier narratives of the West, moreover, this process has often been
described as a natural and inevitable part of progress. Mexican-Californios—the region’s first
settler colonists—had long before initiated the process of indigenous displacement. After 1848,
however, their position was slowly reversed, as they themselves became a colonized people.
Thus, this project identifies Mexican-Californios and California’s indigenous populations as
colonized populations who were ousted, supplanted, and either immediately or eventually
distinguished outside the boundaries of whiteness.
The language in this dissertation merits a short note on terminology. First, different racial
designations help structure this analysis. This dissertation employs Jacobs’ definition of
whiteness as a “fluid racial designation [that] came to signify entitlement to land, authority to

29
Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mothers to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the
Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 2009).

30
Ibid, 3-6.

15
govern, and a set of cultural and social privileges denied to those deemed nonwhite.”
31
This
project similarly identifies whiteness as an unfixed category whose meaning evolved over time
to distinguish European and EuroAmerican immigrants to California from indigenous peoples
and other groups. Californio and Mexican-Californio refers to the landowning elite whose power
and influence slowly declined in the decades following Guadalupe Hidalgo. EuroAmerican refers
to early migrants from the United States who were of European descent. Meanwhile, Anglo-
Californian designates the class of EuroAmericans who evolved to claim belonging and power
from the expense of the Californios.
Second, this project identifies conquest as a drawn-out, nonlinear process and a
framework to examine changes in cultural and racial understandings over time. Haas’s definition
of conquest as a process that “extends the political, economic, and social domination of one
empire, nation, or society over another one” informs this analysis.
32
This project also expands on
Haas’s explanation to demonstrate how conquest took different forms between 1769 and 1920.
For example, the arrival of the Spanish in Alta California brought conquest in the form of
military violence and religious conversion. Mexican Independence embodied a political change
in California while class hierarchies remained largely static from the previous regime. The 1848
American conquest of California entailed military force, territorial occupation, and systematic
political, legal, and economic changes. As Haas and Almaguer demonstrate, during the 1850s
and 1860s EuroAmericans imposed new economic and legal systems that furthered the American
project of territorial conquest and hegemonic control. I expand this period of conquest to include
the years between 1870 and 1920 when social and cultural changes brought about by

31
Margaret D. Jacobs, xvii-xviii.

32
Lisbeth Haas, 5.

16
EuroAmericans upended Mexican-Californio. Thus, this project identifies the conquest of
California not as single event in which one group invaded the territory or upended the culture of
another, but as one in which diverse groups interacted with each other to build, assert, and
challenge a hierarchical society over a protracted period of time.
Finally, this project employs specialized terminology to describe the people and process
of growing grapes to make wine. Horticulture is the science of fruit and flower cultivation.
Viticulture refers to the science of growing grapes for fruit, raisins, and beverages. Viticulturists
and vineyardists are used interchangeably to describe the horticulturists who specialized in grape
culture. Technically, viniculture refers specifically to the cultivation of grapes for wine, while
viticulture includes the cultivation of grapes for table-use and raisins. However, since nineteenth-
century grape-growers used “viticulturist” to describe themselves, that terminology is repeated
here. Winegrowing describes the entire wine production process, from the vineyard to the
winery. This project uses viticulturist, vineyardist, horticulturist, and winegrower
interchangeably to allow for variability in the text.
In order to trace the role of viticulture in the EuroAmerican transformation of California,
this dissertation interprets unpublished historical documents such as the personal papers of
growers, census data, and legislative documents related to the regulation of land, labor, trade,
and taxes. These documents reveal debates about the racial and social consequences of relying
on immigrant workers to develop the state’s wine industry. These documents showcase
contemporaneous debates, ranging from the merits of European winegrowing methods, to the
morality and health benefits of wine drinking, to the promise of cultural refinement, to the
dangers posed by Chinese pickers. The accounts of winegrowers and government papers
pertaining to viticulture also inform this project.

17
These primary sources also include a diverse body of published materials pertaining to
viniculture, labor, and race in nineteenth-century California. Horticultural trade journals unveil
the business transactions and scientific thinking of winegrowers. Viticultural manuals and
treatises discuss the technical aspects of winegrowing, particularly those pertaining to land-use
and horticultural methods. These sources also shed light on debates over the use of native plants
instead of foreign plants from Europe, and the significance of these questions as metaphors for
miscegenation and refinement. Local and national newspapers and magazines reveal how the
wine industry, its leaders, and its laborers were portrayed and how the public reacted to them.
Published histories about winegrowing under the Spanish mission system provide a point of
comparison to winemaking under American rule. Books published during the early twentieth-
century also demonstrate how Americans remembered the nineteenth-century wine industry.
These diverse historical documents explain how nineteenth-century Californians interpreted the
state’s wine business in relation to race, conquest, and new understandings of citizenship.
This dissertation explores how winegrowing functioned to as an instrument of conquest
and racial change in California between the late eighteenth century and 1920. Chapter 1, “From
Mission to Market: Secularization and the Rise of Commercial Winegrowing in Mexican
California” demonstrates how the wine industry was built on a foundation of concentrated land
ownership begun first by the missions and carried on by Californios. After Mexican
Independence, Californios and immigrants from the United States and Europe commercialized
the industry. These vineyardists and winemakers relied on a racialized workforce to make wine,
a process that change the land and people of California through control and conquest. Finally,
across the Spanish and Mexican eras, the regulation of alcohol and wine served to determine
race, class, and white privilege.

18
Between 1848 and 1870, growers became increasingly concerned with modernity and
agricultural education to demonstrate California’s supposed Americanization. Chapter 2,
“Taming the Frontier: Winegrowers, Boosters, and the Instability of Conquest” tells the story of
American winegrowers who took over the commercial wine industry following the Mexican
War. As they did so, they confronted attitudes that dismissed California as a backwards,
immoral, and racially dangerous place. Winegrowers met these tensions over the suitability of
California head-on by promoting agricultural education and by relying on boosters who framed
California as a healthful and bountiful place. Thus wine industry was not just an economic
venture but was also part of a campaign for cultural change towards Americanization. Chapter 3,
“Modernity and the American Industrialization of Winemaking,” reveals how government
support of the wine industry blurred the lines between private and public and enabled
winegrowers to use the wine industry to civilize and modernize California. This story is told
using the examples of German winegrowers in Los Angeles and Anaheim. The early decades of
the wine industry under American control helped further the goals of American nation-building
in the west and helped define the meaning of citizenship as something modern, technological,
agricultural, and white.
Chapter 4, “Fermenting “Agricultural Citizenship:” Immigration and Race in California’s
Vineyards, 1860-1900,” discusses how wine industrialists helped reconfigure racial hierarchies
in California. Though American winegrowers portrayed their industry as a way to attract white
migrants from United States and Europe, they required Indian, Chinese, and Mexican workers to
maintain the financial viability of the industry. Winegrowers helped redefine the parameters of
whiteness and agricultural citizenship on the basis of landownership (which had also been
important in determining status in Spanish and Mexican California) and notions of modernity

19
and progress. They likened Mexicans to Indians, severing them from the former Californio ruling
class in order to classify them as landless wage laborers.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the wine industry confronted a series of
environmental crises as well as a national shift towards prohibition. Chapter 5, “‘American
Vintner’s Song:’ Wine and the Civilization of the Masses, 1870-1920,” discusses the
development of a new generation of professionalized trade groups, including the California Wine
Association, who led fight against vine diseases and temperance campaigns. This was a
continuation of the process of modernizing California first begun in the 1850s by the California
State Agricultural Society and the University of California College of Agriculture. The cultural
politics of the anti-temperance movement asserted white Anglo-Protestant culture in California.
This further divorced the wine industry from its roots in Mexican/Spanish culture and firmly
rooted the industry as a modernized, Americanized big-agribusiness driven by profits, scientific
research, and large-scale markets.
Conclusion
“A Cultivating Enterprise” maintains that winegrowing—its environmental impact, its
reliance on government, and its labor needs—proved critical to American imperial expansion in
the West. Beginning with the Franciscans, winegrowing emerged as a tool of conquest and
cultural change in the missions as the friars conscripted Indian laborers to work in their
vineyards and wineries. After Mexican Independence, Californios and new immigrants from
Europe and the United States took expanded vineyard culture and began producing wine and
brandy for commercial markets. The Mexican War and subsequent territorial annexation of
California by the United States brought even more changes to winegrowing. Vineyardists and
winemakers implemented agricultural education and technology in an effort to modernize the

20
industry and sever its ties to its Spanish-Mexican past. The industry underwent even more
commercial expansion. This necessitated regular access to inexpensive workers, namely Indian,
Chinese, and Mexican wage laborers who were racialized outside the boundaries of citizenship.
Despite the racial identity of their vineyard work crews, EuroAmericans paradoxically recast
their industry as a civilizing mission and as vehicle for attracting new EuroAmerican migrants
who promised to culturally and racially transform the region into a seamless component of
United States. As EuroAmerican viticulturists used the wine industry to recast California and
themselves as modern, Anglo, and American, they racialized Mexican-Californios outside the
boundaries of whiteness and planted the roots of agribusiness.

Chapter 1: From Mission to Market: Secularization and the Rise of Commercial
Winegrowing in Mexican California

Stories of California, a children’s book published by Ella Saxton in 1902, attempted to
synthesize the state’s “romantic” history for its youngest residents. The book began with the
story of the missions. There, “the Mission Fathers taught the Indians to plant and take care of
vines and fruit-trees.” Saxton went on to describe how Indians “built water-works to bring life to
the thirsty trees in the dry summers” and “trained grape-vines over arbors and trellises round the
mission buildings.” From these vineyards, the Indians made wine. This piece of Spanish-Fantasy
literature offered a romanticized view of the mission friars as gentle parents who taught
California’s Indians about the intricacies of agriculture, including the cultivation of the vine.
Despite the missionaries’ best efforts, Saxton sadly concluded that their efforts were in vain. She
recounted the demise of mission vineyards and fruit trees “when the Mission Fathers were no
longer allowed to make the Indians work for the church property, though a few old palms and
olive trees are still standing.”
1
Saxton’s rendition of this history painted an idealized picture of
the conquest, conversion, and cultural change that colored the history of the missions beginning
in 1769. While she was correct in crediting the Franciscans and Indians with establishing
viticulture in California, the birth of the state’s wine industry on mission grounds proved to be
far more complex and violent than what Saxton recounted in her children’s story.

1
Ella M. Sexton, Stories of California, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902), 83.

22

Figure 1 Spanish fantasy image of Franciscan "civilizing" Indians. The books, rosary, and grapes
represent education, Christianity, and agriculture. Courtesy of the California State Library, Sacramento,
California.
2

Franciscan missionaries laid the foundation for the commercial wine industry that served
as the catalyst for agribusiness throughout nineteenth-century California. Around ten years after
their arrival in 1769, missionaries imported grape vines suitable for wine. The friars conscripted
Indian laborers to plant vineyards across California on the vast tracts of land granted to them by
the colonial government in New Spain. Training in the art of agriculture proved to be part of the
process of conquest for mission Indians. As the Franciscans forced them to learn about
cultivation and wine production, they engaged in a form of cultural conquest that sought to
upend the way of life for indigenous populations. Though the missions could not produce wine
without Indian labor, regulations strictly prohibited Indians from enjoying wine—the fruit of

2
Menu, Hotel St. Francis, San Francisco, December 30, 1915. California Information File:
Textual File: Menus 1910-1915. California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento.

23
their labor—outside the mass. During their fifty-year tenure in California, the Franciscans
oversaw the planting of vineyards and wine production at missions with the end goal of
producing wine for sacramental purposes, with some limited trade and commerce of wine. This
ostensibly religious enterprise required grapevines imported from New Spain, concentrated land
ownership, and a racialized work force—a legacy that would carry on long after the demise of
the missions. As this work will demonstrate, viticulture and winemaking functioned as part of the
arsenal of weapons the Spanish used to conquer California’s Indian populations.
By the early eighteenth century, the changing political climate in Mexico hinted of
revolution and independence from the Spanish Empire. Mexico’s War of Independence from
1810 to 1821 slowly led to political and economic changes in California—changes that
ultimately brought to fruition a newly commercial wine industry. Mexican independence, 1822,
and the subsequent secularization of the missions in 1833 enabled a new generation of
winegrowers to supplant the Franciscans. First, secularization redistributed mission lands first to
former mission Indians, though ultimately much of this property eventually ended up in the
hands of wealthy and powerful Californios and immigrants from Europe and the United States.
This concentrated land ownership allowed Mexican-Californios to plant vineyards. Second, the
Mexican government liberalized trade laws legalizing the international sale of alcohol from
California—albeit under a system of taxes and regulations that limited access to liquor by race
and class. As the population in Alta California grew, a new generation of winegrowers
transformed viticulture from a venture that revolved around the sacramental needs of the
missions to one focused on providing wine and brandy for the market.
Although the commercial aspirations of winegrowers changed after Mexican
independence, viticulture developed as a means of asserting political, economic, and racial

24
control. Changes in property ownership and land-use, as well as free market participation of
viticulturists, created a newly commercial wine industry that further concentrated wealth and
deepened the racial stratification first established by the missions. Laws regulating wine sales
and access to liquor helped define the boundaries of whiteness and the rights of citizenship,
continuing in the same vein as Spanish laws that excluded Indians from the parameters of civil
society. Viticulture forced physical changes on California’s landscape and cultural changes on its
indigenous population. As did the Franciscans, Mexican-Californio winegrowers and foreign
immigrants reordered Alta California’s terrains, used Indians as a cheap and productive
workforce, and regulated the sale and consumption of wine in an attempt to assert control over
the region.
Mission Roots and Mythologies
Though the story of vine cultivation is a celebrated component of mission lore, many
details surrounding the wine industry’s birth in California remain unknown. Scholars are certain,
however, that the wine industry’s roots lie in the first conquest of California—the establishment
of the mission system—and that the Franciscan friars, Alta California’s first colonists, were
pioneer winegrowers. Much of the mythology surrounding viticulture during the mission period
can be traced back to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a military commander in the Mexican army
and elite landowner. In 1874, Vallejo stated that his father, Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo, had
often recounted how Father Junipero Serra had transported the grapevine into California in 1769
and immediately planted the first vineyard at San Diego.
3
Though Ignacio Vicente Ferrer Vallejo
had traveled to Alta California with Junipero Serra, his son likely stretched the truth to build a
fanciful story about the beginnings of winegrowing in the region. There is no record of Serra or

3
Roy Brady, “Alta California’s First Vintage,” in The University of California/Sotheby Book of
California Wine, ed. Doris Muscatine, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 11.

25
any of his peers transporting the vine in 1769 and Vallejo’s claims came at a time of growing
public nostalgia for the mission period and Father Serra. Although it is difficult to date the
missions’ first vintage, throughout the 1770s Father Serra regularly complained about his
difficulties in obtaining a regular supply of sacramental wine for the mass. This suggests that the
Franciscans had to import wine from Mexico or Spain.
4

In an effort to achieve their goals of conquest and conversion, the mission Fathers
collaborated with Spanish military forces to alter California’s “virgin” landscapes dramatically.
As the Franciscans oversaw construction of new mission compounds between 1769 and 1823
(when the system’s last mission, San Francisco Solano, was founded), untilled landscapes gave
way to gardens, vineyards, and fields of grain. This physical transformation of the natural
landscape included the introduction of foreign animals and plants, such as the mission grape,
which the Franciscans planted across California. Later generations of vineyardists would
routinely identify the mission (or California) grape as “native” to the state. In actuality this grape
was not indigenous to the region but was actually imported to California via New Spain. In other
parts of the Americas, this grape varietal was known as the Criolla grape, suggesting that the
plant was originally of European descent and had changed through its adaptation to conditions
and soils in the new world.
5
The mission grape was part of an arsenal of foreign plants and
animals that helped the Spanish assert control over California’s native terrains.
The rapid expansion of the missions created a network of vineyards and wineries across
California. The region’s first vintage likely came from mission wineries after the Franciscans

4
Junipero Serra, Writings, ed. Antonine Tibeser, O.F.M. (Washington, D.C. 1944-66), I: 263,
281, quoted in Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to
Prohibition, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 238.

5
See Thomas Pinney, “The Early Days in Southern California,” in The University of
California/Sotheby Book of California Wine, 4.

26
planted vineyards at San Juan Capistrano in 1779 or at San Gabriel in the early 1780s.
6

Gradually, winegrowing expanded to other missions constructed across Alta California. By 1808,
the missions at San Diego, San Luis Rey, San Juan Capistrano, San Gabriel, San Fernando, San
Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, San Miguel, San Antonio, Santa Clara, and San
Jose all had vineyards and wineries on-site, though the quantity of wine produced was likely
small.
7
In addition to wine, most of the missions also distilled aguardiente from grapes and other
fruits. Aguardiente was the common name for the distilled beverage made from mission grapes.
It was similar to brandy and was the most commonly available hard liquor available in California
through the Gold Rush.
8
The Franciscans also shipped wines between the various missions,
particularly to San Francisco de Asís and Santa Cruz, whose climates were unsuitable for grape
cultivation. They also sold limited quantities of liquor to soldiers at the presidios.
9

The most productive mission wineries proved to be at San Gabriel, San Fernando, and
San Antonio. The distillery at San Fernando had a reputation for making excellent aguardiente.
10

6
Pinney, A History of Wine in America, 238. Some scholars date the first Mission vintage
between 1781 and 1784 at San Juan Capistrano, but likely the first wines were produced a few
years later.

7
Herbert Boyton Leggett, The Early History of Wine Production in California (San Francisco:
Wine Institute, 1941), 21. Edith Buckland Webb, Indian Life at the Old Missions (Los Angeles:
Warren F. Lewis, Publisher, 1952), 96.

8
Charles L Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine: An Encyclopedia of Wine and
Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 3. In many records aguardiente and brandy are used interchangeably even though they
were two distinct beverages, the latter more often compared to moonshine.

9
There is little evidence that the missions traded wine with merchants before Mexican
independence in 1821. See Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, 241-242.

10
Wilson, Iris Ann, “Early Southern California Viniculture, 1830-1865,” Historical Society of
Southern California Quarterly 39, no. 3 (September 1957): 242. Hubert Howe Bancroft,
California Pastoral. 1769-1848, (San Francisco: History Company, 1888), 371-372.

27
The vineyard at San Gabriel, La Viña Madre, was the largest and most important in the mission
system. At its peak in 1820, La Viña Madre flourished with nearly fifty thousand vines planted
on a 170-acre vineyard.
11
Contemporaries also praised the wine and brandy from the mission at
San Jose. The viñero at San Jose, Padre Duran, was reputed to be very “skilled in this pious
industry. His aguardiente was as clear as crystal, or when treated with burnt sugar became of a
clear yellow. It was doubly distilled, and as strong as the reverend father’s faith.”
12
By 1797,
estimates suggest that San Gabriel and San Fernando each had an output of one thousand gallons
of wine and aguardiente.
13
These figures are likely inflated given that statistics from 1831 for
both San Gabriel and San Fernando suggest that these missions produced between four hundred
and six hundred barrels of wine and approximately two hundred of brandy and aguardiente.
14

Still, these figures demonstrate that winegrowing was well-established by the turn of the
nineteenth century.
The Franciscans applied Spanish viticultural methods to make production uniform across
all the missions and to train Indians in the art of cultivation. This imperial knowledge was part of
the process of conquering indigenous people and its virgin land. Mission wine production was
generally standardized across the system using Indian laborers to complete nearly all vineyard
work, particularly the hard field labor.
15
Initially, this included clearing land for new vineyards,

11
Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers,
1769-1913 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 30.

12
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 371-372

13
Ibid, 192.

14
Vincent P Carosso, The California Wine Industry, 1830-1895: A Study of the Formative Years
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 4.

28
planting the vines, and digging irrigation systems—all of which altered the physical landscape.
Indians pruned the vines using the “head-pruning” method, which meant that they trained the
vines to grow into low bushes that did not need the support of wires, trellises, and posts.
16
While
this lessened the labor initially required to plant the vineyard, the bending required to prune and
harvest the grapes was especially strenuous. The Franciscans relied on the Libro Segundo of
Agricultura General, an agricultural treatise imported from Spain around 1797, to guide them in
the cultivation of the grape. Libro Segundo offered guidelines on how to select the soil, lay out
the vineyard, plant cuttings, and harvest the grapes. It also detailed how to crush and ferment the
grapes and store the wine properly for fermentation.
17
Though the information from Libro
Segundo was written specifically for Spanish vineyards and wineries, the friars used this
viticultural knowledge to transform California’s native terrains.
After the harvest, the manufacturing process of winemaking began. The neophytes, or
converted Indians living at the missions, took charge of the fermentation process under the
supervision of a viñero, or winemaker.
18
Nineteenth-century historians of California depicted the
harvest and crush in the idyllic and primitive terms commonly used to romanticize memories of
the mission period. Herbert Howe Bancroft was one such historian who described in detail the

15
Vincent P Carosso, 3. Indians are an afterthought in Mission records and in published histories
of winegrowing at the Missions. Scholars have largely characterized Indians as silent
participants. Even though we have many details about Indian labor in regards to grain
cultivation, gardening, and the care of livestock, we know little about Indians who tended the
Mission vineyards and wineries.

Sue Ellen Hayes, “Those Who Worked the Land,” in The
University of California/Sotheby Book of California Wine, 28.

16
Thomas Pinney, “The Early Days in Southern California,” in The University of
California/Sotheby Book of California Wine, 2.

17
Edith Buckland Webb, 54, 99.

18
Benjamin Davis Wilson, “The Indians of Southern California,” p. 2, 16. December 20, 1852,
Papers of James De Barth, Shorb, Box 146, Folder 4, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

29
grape crush at the missions. First, the winemaker, usually a Franciscan friar, selected a flat plot
of ground on which Indians built a platform covered with clean hides and piled high with newly-
harvested grapes. Next, a group of “well-washed Indians having on only a zapeta, [loin-cloth]
the hair carefully tied up and the hand covered with cloth wherewith to wipe away the
perspiration, each having a stick to steady himself with all, were put to treading out the grape
juice, which was caught in coras, or in leathern bags.”
19
Leather hides and bags often took the
place of wooden barrels because wood was so scarce.
20
Afterwards, the juices were poured into
large wooden tubs and covered with grape skins to ferment for two to three months. Whatever
juice and grapes remained in the original leather bags was juiced through a wooden press and
distilled in homemade copper stills to produce aguardiente. Indian labor was indispensible to the
winegrowing process, from the vineyard to the winery.
The mission vineyards and wineries proved to be an important part of the process of
conquest for the Franciscans. The friars’ urgency to establish vineyards and ferment wine lay in
the sacramental needs of the missions. Given that the missions existed to subdue and Christianize
the Indian populations of California and help secure Alta California for the Spanish crown, the
Franciscans needed a reliable supply of wine in order to properly celebrate the mass and
demonstrate transubstantiation to the neophytes. Without performing this key ritual, they could
not convert Indians to Catholicism. The neophytes’ labor in the vineyards—as in the Mission
gardens, stockyards, and grain fields—was also part of their education and training towards
becoming domesticated agriculturists. As historian Steven Hackel has argued, the Franciscans
saw agricultural labor as the best means by which to transform “savage Indians into industrious

19
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 371-372

20
Thomas Pinney, “The Early Days in Southern California,” 2.

30
Christians” and to correct their natural tendencies towards nomadic, unregulated lives.
21
In order
to properly Christianize and conquer Alta California’s Indian populations, the Franciscans
required wine for their religious rituals—wine they could not possibly produce without Indian
labor. By conscripting neophytes to labor in Mission vineyards, wineries, and stills, the
Franciscans forced them to become active participants in their own conquest and conversion. At
the same time, the process of winegrowing was part of a broader project of conquest that
comprised education and training towards European standards of productivity and land-use.
Trade Restrictions and Regulations
Though authorities first permitted sale of wine and grape brandy made in California in
1797, the Spanish viceroyalty in Mexico regulated and taxed the trade of alcohol.
22
Limited
production capabilities coupled with the Spanish Empire’s trade restrictions meant that the
missions generally did not export their wine and aguardiente.
23
In general, the missions enjoyed
relative freedom from government intervention when trading wine with rancheros and fur
trappers. The Missions also sold wine and aguardiente for local consumption, particularly at the
presidios and pueblos in Alta California.
24
Indeed, much of the wine produced at San Gabriel,
San Juan Capistrano and San Fernando was sold to residents of Los Angeles.
25

21
Steven W Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish
Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005), 280.

22
Herbert Boyton Leggett, 26.

23
Ibid, 26.

24
Vincent P Carosso, 3. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, 242.

25
Herbert Boyton Leggett, 26.

31
Restrictions over who could purchase alcohol offered a way for the territorial government
in Alta California to maintain its tenuous control over the region. Under mission regulations,
neophyte Indians found themselves strictly prohibited from freely enjoying wine and
aguardiente, the fruits of their labors. Since alcohol was available only to Franciscans,
Californios, and imperial soldiers, legal access to wine and aguardiente on the open market
became a way for the territorial government to denote racial status and privilege and for colonists
and Indians to challenge these boundaries. Though mission regulations prohibited neophytes
from enjoying wine, colonists in Los Angeles and other settlements still sold wine and
aguardiente to Indians. Bancroft gave an example of a Californio who “used to fill an empty
brandy-keg with water, expose it to the sun for a half a day, then put in burnt sugar and ground
chile. This he would sell to the savages as brandy; and when they complained that there was no
happiness in it, he would say that he had kept it so long it had lost its strength.”
26
The Californio
who swindled these Indians with artificial brandy used his racial privilege to sell an illicit
product to a group whose status denied them easy access to brandy on the open market. At the
same time, this colonist challenged the authority of colonial regulations and social taboos by
selling illicit goods to Indians. This example also demonstrates the delicate control maintained
by Spanish authorities in Alta California. The Californio in question here violated regulations
prohibiting Indian access to liquor, presumably to make a profit. Likewise, the Indians who
purchased the counterfeit brandy challenged Spanish authority for their own personal enjoyment.
The days of the missions were numbered beginning in 1810 with the start of the War of
Mexican Independence. Between 1810 and 1834 when the Mexican government formally
secularized the missions, the system underwent a slow decline. Still, winegrowing at San

26
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 371-372.

32
Gabriel, winemaking continued long after the Franciscans were forced to cede authority. Though
they were no longer in control, the legacy of the Mission Friars continued to shape race and labor
in California. Indeed, the legacy of the Franciscans influenced relationships of power between
different racial groups and continued to shroud alcohol as an illicit luxury that remained out-of-
reach for Indians. In the following story of winemaking at San Gabriel six years after
secularization, the Indians working at the winery found ways to challenge authority and procure
wine and aguardiente:
Janssens tells a story showing how the liquor-loving savages of San Gabriel used to
outwit him while making into wine and brandy the grape crop of the mission. It was in
1840, while Don Juan Bandini was in charge.
27
Jansenns observed that the Indians at
work about the stills were always more than half drunk, and well swollen out in face and
belly; the question was, How did they get hold of the liquor? In vain was everything
closely watched night and day, and every imaginary loophole kept under lock and key. In
vain liberal rations of wine were dealt out to them morning, noon, and night. The
mysterious intoxication increased, and bellies and faces waxed bigger and bigger. Finally
it all came out, and no thirsty Maine man or Boston anti-prohibitionist showed more
shrewdness in evading the law than these so lately gentle heathen, thus whitewashed by
civilization.
It was Janssens’ custom, after he had fed the stills, to leave the Indians tending the
fires, while he retired to his room, through which ran the tubes of the brandy stills and the
water, the only exit the fluid had. It was a comparatively easy matter to watch the master,
and while he was not looking, raise the cover of the stills and help themselves. This,
however, was soon detected and padlocks put on the iron. Then followed a neater trick.
The wine was conveyed from the fermenting vats in barrels, with one of the heads off, the
head being carried at the end of a long stick by the hinder most man. The burden was
heavy, and the poor carriers at the end of a long stick by the hindermost man. The burden
was heavy, and the poor carriers were permitted to set it down and rest occasionally. ‘O,
if this stick were only hollow, sighed the hinder most. ‘A cane would do,’ answered the
foremost, ‘and we could then take our turn carrying the barrel-head.’ And so it all came
about; after which the manifestation of the power of mind over matter, it were calumny to
say that these heathen could not be Christianized.
28

27
Governor Juan Alvarado appointed Don Juan Bandini as administrator of the San Gabriel
Mission in 1837. See William Ellsworth Smythe, History of San Diego, 1542-1908: The Modern
City (History Co., 1907), 164.

28
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 192.

33
In this example documented by Bancroft, the Indians at San Gabriel used their knowledge
of the winemaking process to outwit their overseer and enjoy the brandy. In his record, Bancroft
juxtaposed words like “savages” and “gentle heathens” with “whitewashed by civilization” to
convey the ambiguous status of Indians. One the one hand, Bancroft suggested that these Indians
were hopelessly lost souls who were not yet sufficiently civilized or moral enough to avoid
stealing from the stills. Moreover, these Indians could not summon enough self-control to
regulate their consumption of brandy and avoid intoxication. On the other hand, they were smart
enough to outwit their superior and challenge his authority. Together, this combination of
intelligence and savagery could be especially dangerous.
Bancroft also offered up the second example of cooperation among the work crew, which
seemed to demonstrate the Indians’ movement away from ignorance and primitiveness towards
civilization, perhaps because of the benevolent education they had received at the missions. In
this ambiguous description of the status of former mission Indians, and in particular his last line,
Bancroft worked hard to establish the mission system as a success in conquering and converting
Alta California’s Indians. At the same time, this example revealed limited authority Mexican
authorities had over former mission Indians, even though the relationship between Jansenns and
these Indians denoted status. Ostensibly, all groups worked in conjunction to make wine.
However, the role of these different groups along the line of winemaking—in this case, laborer
and overseer—indicated authority, privilege, and race. The labor involved with making wine had
greater significance than working towards a finished product. It served as a barometer of status
and racial privilege.
Secularization and the Rise of Commercial Winegrowing

34
Mexican independence and the subsequent secularization of the mission system were the
driving force behind the rise of commercial winegrowing in California. First, the onset of the
Mexican War of Independence in 1810 and the subsequent birth of the new nation-state in 1822
brought significant economic changes to the mission system. As the Mexican state struggled to
establish its government and economy, it instituted changes in the mission system that forced the
friars and neophytes to increase agricultural production.
29
The Mexican government eliminated
the Spanish viceroyalty’s annual stipend of four hundred pesos to each mission as well as
stipends to the Franciscans and to soldiers. After independence, the Mexican government also
imposed taxes and requisitions on mission goods and property.
Without the financial subsidies and the support of the ousted colonial government in New
Spain, the Franciscans had to rely solely on their own resources and the neophytes’ labor to keep
the missions running and to produce enough food to feed the roughly twenty thousand Indians in
the mission system. They increased production of animal hides, fruit, grains, and, of course, wine
and brandy.
30
The Mexican government also opened its domestic markets for international trade
in order to encourage economic growth. These liberal trade policies caused an increase in sales
of wine, aguardiente, and brandy across California. A mere ten years after Mexican
independence, Los Angeles had become a thriving vine growing region with more than 100,000
vines at the missions and beyond.
31
Indeed, Governor Manuel Victoria declared in 1831 “that

29
Mexico achieved independence from Spain and established the Mexican Empire in 1821.
Beginning in 1822, Mexico took steps towards establishing itself as a republic. Though Alta
California was on the fringes of the Mexican frontier, the region and the missions experienced
the chaos and uncertainty of the period.

30
Richard Steven Street, 80.

31
Vincent Caroso, 3.

35
viniculture promised to develop largely, and in time to become the most valuable of exports.”
32

The new territorial government in California had high hopes for the wine trade as a source of
economic growth.
Second, the Mexican government passed the Colonization Act of 1824 to entice
immigrants to colonize its northwestern frontier. This law allowed foreigners to reside
permanently in California either by converting to Catholicism and becoming naturalized
Mexican citizens or by settling on land twenty-five miles from the coast and national borders.
33

In 1828, supplemental regulations to the Colonization Act permitted territorial governors to
distribute land to individuals but limited the size of land grants and specifically forbade the
distribution of former mission lands, which were often the most valuable and desirable plots in
California.
34

Third, the secularization of the missions gradually transformed landownership and land-
use in Alta California. The Mexican government began taking steps to secularize the mission
system soon after independence. From the early 1820s through 1833 when the missions were
formally secularized, different governors proposed a variety of plans to secularize the missions,

32
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 349. Also partially quoted in Irving McKee,
“Mission Wine Commerce,” n.d., Thomas Pinney Collection, California Articles on 19th
Century Vertical File, Cal Poly Pomona University Library Special Collections. Hereafter
Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

33
Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. “Alta California’s Trojan Horse: Foreign Immigration,” in Contested
Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, and Richard J. Orsi, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 305. Douglas Monroy, “The Creation and Re-creation of
Californio Society,” in Contested Eden, 180-181.

34
David J Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 180-181. Steven W Hackel, 373-374.
See also George Harwood Phillips, Vineyards & Vaqueros : Indian Labor and the Economic
Expansion of Southern California, 1771-1877, (Norman, Okla: Arthur H. Clark Co.,, 2010), 159-
160.

36
most with the ultimate goal of returning church-controlled lands to Indian control. In 1826
Governor José María Echeandía proposed that Indians take possession of mission lands after
secularization. The plan was to divide up mission lands and distribute them to the Indian
households. Still, Indians would be subject to oversight by local alcaldes and gente de razón. In
January of 1833, Governor José Figueroa issued a new law, the Provisional Steps for the
Emancipation of mission Indians, which would gradually emancipate the neophytes and grant
them small plots of land, but also require them to return to their former missions if needed by
parish priests.
35
Ultimately, Figueroa’s plan failed and was discarded in favor of formal
secularization 1834, freeing neophytes from mission supervision and control.
36
The Mexican
government was, however, still bound to the 1828 regulation forbidding the distribution of
former Mission lands.
Initially, Governor Figueroa’s 1834 proclamation stipulated that mission lands should be
distributed to Indians. Single men and heads of household were to receive plots of land, and any
remaining land should remain under the guardianship of mayordomos.
37
Though secularization
ostensibly transformed Indians into landowners, their property rights were largely restricted. For
example, Indians could not sell their land or their cattle, and they could only slaughter cattle for
subsistence and were prohibited from slaughtering them in large numbers.
38
Historians Miroslava
Chávez-García and Steven Hackel document how Indian plots of land tended to be small, at most

35
Steven W Hackel, 386. Richard Steven Street, 84.

36
Edith Buckland Webb, 96.

37
George Harwood Phillips, 163-164.

38
Ibid, 164-165.

37
a couple hundred varas.
39
Indeed, “in only two instances did grants to native men exceed 1000
square varas, and in both cases, the allocations went to several people rather than to a single
individual.”
40
Ultimately, the missions’ “excess land,” which included the best coastal lands and
fertile valley properties, went to Californios in the decade following secularization, particularly
after 1840.
41

Over time, these political changes made many Mexican-Californio colonists large-scale
property owners who now had the land on which to expand viticulture. The government
distributed vast tracts of land for settlement not only to Mexican Californios, but also to
foreigners willing to populate California. In total, the Secularization Act transferred
approximately ten million acres of land to the hands of private landowners, shifting the balance
of power and wealth from the Catholic Church to a new class of landowners, the Californio.
42

The secularization of the missions and the increased migration to California caused a shift from
domestic gardening and sustenance-based agriculture—including family farms, vineyards,
orchards, and gardens—towards more commercial land use, particularly in terms of cattle
ranching.

39
Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to
1880s, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004), 62. Steven W. Hackel also makes this
argument in Children of Coyote, 370. A vara was a measurement of land that totaled just under a
yard. See George Harwood Phillips, 342.

40
Miroslava Chávez-García, 62.

41
After 1833, land was redistributed to Californios at a rapid pace. During Spanish rule, “fewer
than thirty soldiers received usufruct rights to land; in the first decade of Mexican rule, fewer
still gained title. But, after 1833, Mexican governor approved some seven hundred petitions for
land, most after 1840.” See Steven W. Hackel, 388-389.

42
Ibid, 389.

38
Inventories taken immediately following after secularization indicated the level of change
the missions had implemented over the land. Inventories taken between 1834 and 1836 at various
missions included a large number of vineyards and winemaking tools. The mission at San
Gabriel included four vineyards with a total of approximately 163,578 vines.
43
In addition the
mission owned one brandy distillery and three wine presses.
44 ⁠ The vineyard at San Fernando
included 32,000 vines. Though more modest in size, the mission vineyards at Santa Barbara, San
Antonio, San Juan Bautista, and San Juan Capistrano also merited mention in the Mission
inventories. “The various inventories of missions from 1834 to 1846 show a gradual
abandonment of field-work—broken down fences, useless ploughs, etc., fill the record—here
and there is an announcement of a small patch of grain. Orchards and vineyards are also half if
not wholly ruined.”
45 ⁠ Later inventories from 1843 also found stills for making brandy and
aguardiente at the missions at Santa Barbara, San Buenaventura, San Antonio, which also had a
wine press, wine barrels, and various valuable tools. Though wine production continued as some
missions for years after secularization, the remnants of mission wine production lay free to be
claimed by the influx of newcomers to California in the 1830s.
While scholars have focused on the dominance of the hide-and-tallow trade in Mexican
California, winegrowing experienced significant growth during the 1830s.
46
This distribution of
former mission lands—originally intended for Indians—enabled Californios and newly minted
Mexican citizens from the United States and Europe to expand the region’s vineyards and

43
Herbert Boyton Leggett, 32.

44
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 351.

45
Ibid, 372.

46
Thomas Pinney, “The Early Days in Southern California,” 5.

39
wineries into a budding commercial industry. As many of these new landowners adopted
viniculture, they began producing wine in large quantities not only for their personal home
consumption but also for markets throughout Alta California and beyond. In doing so, they
commercialized what had formally been the product of a church-based mission system. Indeed,
six years after the Colonization Act, the harvest for 1830 included 83 barrels of wine and 166
barrels of aguardiente.
47
Initially, the Mexican government worked hard to attract newcomers
with the promise of free land and cattle in the hopes these colonists would help it retain its
tenuous hold over its northwestern frontier. These political changes further concentrated wealth
and power and continued the tradition of racialized labor established by Missions.
Under Mexican governance, commercial winegrowing expanded in Alta California. The
stories of the Yorba family and of Jean Louis Vignes demonstrate how winegrowing was
transformed from a largely religious venture to a commercial one. Tomás Yorba was a Californio
landowner whose rancho bordered the Santa Ana River, southeast of the Pueblo of Los Angeles.
In addition to superintending his family’s cattle trade, Yorba was an avid agriculturist and
vineyardist. The Yorba family’s story reflects their status as members of the elite Californio
class—a group whose influence and power would greatly diminish after the beginning of
American conquest in 1848. Jean Louis Vignes, a Frenchman who arrived in Los Angeles in the
early 1830s, also helped lay the foundations for commercial winegrowing and may have even
imported European Vitis vinifera grape stock. Like the Franciscans before them, this early
generation of commercial winegrowers relied on free or cheap government land and inexpensive
Indian labor to build their wealth. However, Californios like Yorba and immigrants like Vignes

47
W.N. Charles, “Transcription and Translation of the Old Mexican Documents of the Los
Angeles County Archives,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, 20 (2), June
1938: 84, quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 125.

40
did not necessarily view Indians as converts, as did the Franciscans, and did not establish
religious programs for their work crews. Because Californios saw them primarily as laborers,
Indians enjoyed far more personal freedom after secularization.
48
Though the Yorba family and
Vignes had very different backgrounds, they were united by wealth built from generous land
grant policies.
Unlike many other Californios, the Yorbas were unique in that their land grants came
from the Spanish colonial government and not from the Mexican government. Their wealth and
influence transcended the Spanish, Mexican, and American transitions of power in California.
The patriarch of the Yorba family, Antonio Yorba, had been an officer in the Spanish military
garrison in Alta California, Antonio Yorba shared a land grant with his nephew and partner, Juan
Pablo Peralta. The Spanish viceroyalty had granted these two families a large plot of land
bordering the Santa Ana River, where Antonio Yorba planted his first vineyard around 1810.
Both Antonio Yorba and Juan Pablo Peralta contracted Indians from the nearby San
Gabriel mission to work on their ranchos. The family had connections to missions at San Gabriel
and San Juan Capistrano. Though the Yorbas often clashed with the Franciscan administrators at
the missions—particularly about land and water rights—they often hired neophytes from the
missions as temporary workers to supplement their crews of gentiles. Fray Jose Maria de
Zalvidea, a Franciscan from one of the local missions, noted, “both men and women who are
pagans assist in the work of the fields. Also they are employed as cooks, water carriers and in
other domestic occupations. This is one of the most potent causes why the people who are called
gente de razón are given so much to idleness. Since the pagan Indians are paid for their labor by
a half or a third of the crops, they remain content in the service of the masters during the season

48
Steven W. Hackel, 369.

41
of planting. The latter, with few exceptions, never put their hands to the plow or sickle…”
49
In
addition to grapes, Antonio Yorba raised wheat and cattle on his rancho, the latter of which
allowed him to produce tallow, lard, soap, hides, suet, and pickled beef for the market. At the
time of his death in 1825, he left over eight hundred head of cattle, oxen, 250 sheep, nineteen
pack mules and saddles, his adobe home, as well as an orchard and a thirty-acre vineyard on the
banks of the Santa Ana River. His property was to be divided between his wife and sons,
including Bernardo and Tomás Yorba.
Antonio Yorba’s sons expanded their land holdings after his death and continued to
cultivate grapes and raise cattle with the help of large work crews of Indians. In 1834, Tomás
Yorba received title to Rancho Cañon de Santa Ana, where he lived with his wife and their seven
children, as well as seven Mexican servants, two non-Indian workers, and eighteen Indian
laborers.
50
Yorba used his land extensively for crop cultivation in addition to cattle ranching. His
contemporaries made note of this. For example, American newcomer J.J. Warner visited the
ranch and commented that the Yorba family cultivated more grapes than anyone else in the area,
primarily for the consumption of the family and its servants.
51
José Dolores Sepúlveda offered
similar observations, “during these years, he had a vineyard and corn and beans and wheat, and
had a great many servants engaged in cultivation. They worked Indians in those days—a great

49
Wayne Dell Gibson, Tomas Yorba’s Santa Ana Viejo, 1769-1847, Bicentennial History
Publication no. 2 (Santa Ana: Santa Ana College Foundation Press ; Rancho Santiago
Community College District, 1976), 47-48.

50
George Harwood Phillips, 161.

51
Terry E. Stephenson, Don Bernardo Yorba (Los Angeles: G. Dawson, 1941), 32-33.

42
many of them.”
52
At the time of the 1836 Mexican census, Tomás Yorba employed around sixty-
eight Indian servants and three Mexican servants on his rancho and paid them annually at the end
of the year.
53
Thus, the majority of Yorba’s workforce included Indians, presumably a mix of
gentiles as well as neophytes from the recently secularized missions at San Gabriel and San Juan
Capistrano. Of all the Yorba sons, Tomás proved to the one with greatest inclination for
agriculture. He cultivated much of his land along the Santa Ana River in order to facilitate
irrigation, raising sheep and cattle near the river. From his vineyards he produced wine and
brandy. At Santa Ana, Yorba operated a store that sold manufactured leather goods and soap.
After Tomás Yorba died in January of 1845, his wife, Vicenta Sepúlveda Yorba,
inherited most of his property, valued at 12,886 pesos. This included the still he used for making
aguardiente and brandy; valued at thirty pesos, it was the single highest item of value listed in
the will. Doña Vicenta Yorba assumed full management of the ranch after her husband’s death.
William Heath Davis and Doña Vicenta Yorba often did business when he called at her ranch to
trade an assortment of goods in exchange for products from her ranch, including hides, tallow,
wine, and aguardiente. William Heath Davis was trader who did brisk business shipping goods
between the California coast and the Sandwich Islands. As a ship captain, Davis’s business
involved bringing finished goods to inland California to sell or trade to rancheros, like the Yorba
family, in exchange for hides, produce, wine, and aguardiente. Davis greatly admired her capable
management of the Rancho after a visit to Santa Ana in June 1846, only a year and half after her
husband’s death. He purchased several hundred dollars of wine and aguardiente, which he

52
Testimony of Jose Dolores Sepulveda, The Anaheim Water Company, et. Al., Plaintiffs and
Respondents vs. The Semi-Tropic Water Company, et al., Defendants and Appellants. Transcript
on Appeal in the Superior Court of Los Angeles, State of California, Quoted in George Harwood
Phillips, p. 162,

53
Wayne Dell Gibson, 79.

43
planned to transport to his ship at San Pedro and, presumably, to sell abroad. In his negotiations
with Vicenta Yorba, Davis complimented her business acumen, noting that she “managed her
rancho with much ability” and commanded a price from him with “no haggling…she simply
named it when she said I could have the articles.”
54
Doña Vicenta Yorba entertained her guests,
serving them “some good California wine five or six years old manufactured by Tomás Yorba.”
Davis admired the large vineyard at Santa Ana as well as the productive winery that fermented
enough wine for the family’s personal consumption as well as for sale.
As historians Lisbeth Haas and Miroslava Chávez-Garcia have argued, Californio women
were an integral part of the economy as they negotiated gender boundaries to assert their
property rights and manage their land.
55
As a widow, Vicenta Sepúlveda Yorba likely enjoyed
more freedom than she had experienced as a married woman, who would have been required to
show obedience to her husband in all matters dealing with property.
56
Still, her position as a
widow left her somewhat vulnerable to threats to her rightful inheritance from people like her
brother-in-law, Bernardo Yorba, who tried to claim her late husband’s property as his own.
57

Vicenta Sepúlveda Yorba skillfully maneuvered her political and social connections in Alta

54
William Heath Davis, Seventy-five Years in California: (San Francisco: J. Howell, 1929), 222.

55
See Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest Gender and Power in California, 1770s
to 1800s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004) and Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and
Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

56
Under Mexican law, women had the legal right to own property on their own accord but their
marital status determined how much freedom they had in managing and controlling their own
property. For example, widows and single women of age could make decisions and conduct
business without supervision or intrusion from male family members. However, married women
needed approval from their husbands before making transactions. Similarly, a married woman
needed spousal permission before appointing an attorney. See Miroslava Chávez-García,
Negotiating Conquest Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1800s (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2004), 52-55.

57
Ibid, 64-65.

44
California to protect her inheritance. At the same time, she seamlessly managed operations at her
ranch so that business with traders, such William Heath Davis, was never interrupted after
Tomás Yorba’s death. Though her gender left her vulnerable to attacks from family members,
Dońa Vicenta Yorba’s status as a white woman and a member of the landed class of Californios
was undeniable, and she was unafraid to assert the privileges afforded to her.
As an immigrant, Jean Louis Vignes was a relative latecomer to the wine industry in Alta
California. His journey to the New World began in 1826 when he left his wife and four children
in Béguey, part of the Bordeaux region of France. From there, Vignes set sale for the Sandwich
Islands, via Boston, with the intention of establishing a sugar plantation. When this venture
failed to take off Vignes worked for a time at a rum distillery until that also fell apart. Vignes
again decided to uproot himself and explore new opportunities elsewhere. At the age of fifty-one,
he set sail for Alta California, landing in Monterey in 1831 before moving south to the pueblo of
Los Angeles in 1833.
58
At the time of Vignes’s arrival in Los Angeles—around the same time
Alta California’s missions had begun to undergo secularization—the town boasted nearly one
hundred acres of vineyards.
59
Vignes purchased a one-hundred acre parcel of land and an old
adobe house in the middle of the pueblo, along the Los Angeles River.
60
He recruited Gabrielino
Indians to plant and maintain his vineyards and orange orchards. He named his property El Aliso
after the landmark sycamore tree on his property. Over time, Vignes expanded El Aliso to

58
Scott Macconnell, “Jean-Louis Givnes: California’s Forgotten Winemaker,” Gastronomica:
The Journal of Food and Culture 11, no. 1 (April 2011): 90.

59
Vincent P. Carosso, 7.

60
Scott Macconnell, 90.

45
include a thirty-five acre vineyard, orange orchard, winery, brandy distillery, as well as facilities
to manufacture wine barrels. His first vintage was likely in 1837.
61

Don Luis Vignes, as he was known by his predominantly Spanish-speaking neighbors,
finally found financial success in Alta California. His vineyard and winery at El Aliso was an
ambitious commercial property. As did other California winegrowers, Vignes produced light
wines and aguardiente from mission grapes. However, he also sent to France for grape vines in
the hopes of experimenting with these foreign varietals and eventually diversifying his grape
stock.
62
Only a few years after bottling his first vintage, Vignes began shipping wine across Alta
California. In 1840, he sent a shipment of white wine and brandy north to Santa Barbara,
Monterey, and San Francisco.
63
Don Luis also paid steep freight charges to send his wines on
long ocean voyages before returning to California. As did many wine merchants, particularly in
the United States, Vignes did this in the hopes of aging the wines and improving the flavors. By
1843, Vignes’ s wines and aguardiente were well known and admired. Don Luis Vignes’s
contemporaries estimated El Aliso’s production at nearly forty-thousand gallons of both wine
and brandy.
64
As with many estimates of nineteenth-century wine output, this figure was likely
an exaggeration, as such production would mean that in only six years, Vignes had managed to
outpace the San Gabriel mission winery’s peak output of thirty-six thousand gallons.
65
Still, in a

61
Scott Macconnell, 91. Also see Vincent P. Carosso, 8.

62
Vincent P. Carosso, 8.

63
Ibid, 9.

64
Scott Macconnell, 91.

65
Vineyard acreage and gallon output of wines during this period varied greatly and are difficult,
if not impossible, to verify for accuracy. For example, in 1847 (ten years after Vignes’s first
reported vintage) Edwin Bryant estimated that the pueblo of Los Angeles had approximately

46
short period of time Vignes had established himself as a serious grower, wine merchant, and
respected member of the Californio community in Los Angeles. Indeed, William Heath Davis,
who was an old friend of Vignes, even went so far as to call him “the father of the wine industry”
who had vast “intelligent appreciation of the extent and importance of this interest in the
future.”
66
Davis had previously commended the pioneering efforts of Franciscan and Californio
winemakers, but for him, Vignes embodied an ideal vintner.
Don Luis Vignes took advantage of opportunities to showcase his wines, which had a
minor role in the resolution of a military crisis in California. In January of 1843, wines from El
Aliso were served at a banquet given for American Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones after
his apology to Governor Manuel Micheltorena for his misguided and premature attempt to seize
Monterey and conquer California.
67
At the banquet, the Americans were reportedly so “delighted
with his California wines, of different vintages, some as much as eight or ten years old, of fine

20,000 vines that produced roughly 24,000 gallons. See Irving McKee, “Jean Paul Vignes,
California’s First Professional Winegrower,” Agricultural History 22, no. 3 (July 1848): 178.
While Bryant’s figures are probably not completely accurate either, we can use contemporary
enology calculations to roughly estimate Vignes’s output of wine and brandy. According to some
enology estimates, one acre of grapes can produce anywhere from 1 to 30 tons of grapes. A
conservative estimate is 4 tons/ acres. Enologists also estimate that each ton of grapes can
produce roughly 150 gallons of wine, although this number also varies on the grape crop. Using
these estimates and knowing that Vignes eventually expanded his vineyard to 35 acres, we can
thus estimate that El Aliso produced 21,000 gallons of wine and brandy. Note that this is a very
rough estimate, especially given that growers during the Mexican period did not trellis their
grape vines and this likely affected the volume of their crops: the amount of grapes produced per
acre varies significantly according to various factors, including varietal, climate, soil, and
training method used. See Chris Gerling, “Conversion Factors: From Vineyard to Bottle,”
Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Viticulture and Enology Program, accessed
January 27, 2014, http://grapesandwine.cals.cornell.edu/appellation-cornell/issue-8/grapes-101-
vineyard-to-bottle.cfm.

66
William Heath Davis, 91.

67
Vincent P. Carosso, 9.

47
quality” that they asked to tour Vignes’s cellars.
68
At El Aliso, Vignes gave these officers a gift
of several barrels of his best wines and requested that they save some of it to take back to
President John Tyler so that he might be made aware of the region’s excellent wines.
69
While
there is no record of Tyler ever receiving this wine, the role of wine in this situation is
interesting. These Mexican officials used California wine—produced by a foreigner living in
Alta California—to celebrate an American Commodore who had presumptuously misinterpreted
the political tensions between Mexico and the United States as a sign to invade California.
Governor Micheltorena’s reaction to this attempted invasion was to offer the region’s best foods
and wines in honor of Commodore Jones, essentially commending the Commodore’s
imperialistic overtures. Meanwhile, Vignes seized this as an opportunity to market his wines and
introduce them to Americans. By going so far as to ask that the naval officers to personally
deliver his wines to President Taylor, Vignes seemed especially ambitious to promote his wines
abroad, and perhaps also to invite further American inroads into California.
Vignes proved to be an early wine industry booster as well. He wrote home to his family
and neighbors in France extolling California’s rich soils and ideal climate, going so far as to
declare that California would on day “rival ‘la belle France’” in winegrowing of all varieties,
including champaign.
70
Vignes wrote to France and encouraged his “more intelligent
countrymen” to emigrate to Los Angeles.
71
Vignes’s own nephews, Jean-Louis and Pierre
Sainsevain, soon followed their uncle to Los Angeles in 1839 and joined him at El Aliso. In

68
William Heath Davis, 90-91.

69
Ibid, 91.

70
Ibid, 92.

71
Vincent P. Carosso, 9.

48
1855, Vignes sold El Aliso to his nephews for forty-two thousand dollars. From that point,
Vignes’s vineyard and winery became known as Sansevain Brothers. At the time of its sale, El
Aliso was the largest commercial winery in California and its sale commanded the highest price
paid for real estate up to that point in Los Angeles.
Vignes died in January of 1862 at eighty-three years of age in Los Angeles, having never
returned to France.
72
He left a complicated legacy. As William Heath Davis predicted, Vignes
has often been romanticized as one of the “fathers” of California wine. But, Vignes also left a
long and complicated legal mess in which his children in France successfully sued the Sansevain
brothers over Vignes’s property. When we consider Vignes’s legacy in Los Angeles, it was
unique to his circumstances arriving in Mexican California immediately after the secularization
of the missions. Like William Heath Davis (who joined the ranks of the elite in California
through his marriage to Maria de Jesus Estudillo, the daughter of an esteemed Californio family),
Vignes had assimilated into Californio culture. Presumably Catholic given his French
background, Vignes would have been eligible for Mexican citizenship; and, given that he
purchased property within twenty-five miles of the coast, he likely became a Mexican citizen to
own his land. Indeed, his name—Don Luis Vignes—underscores his seemingly faultless identity
change from a Frenchman to a naturalized Mexican living in Alta California. Similar to the
Yorbas, Vignes helped revive winegrowing from the ruins of the missions. Vignes’s ambition—
coupled, of course, with a racialized work force and concentrated land ownership—are what
transformed winegrowing from a local, church-based enterprise to a commercial business with
lofty goals for international trade.
Taxes and Regulations

72
Vincent P. Carosso, 10. See also Scott Macconnell, 91. Irving McKee, “Jean Paul Vignes,
California’s First Professional Winegrower,” Agricultural History 22, no. 3 (July 1848): 179.

49
Though Mexico had adopted far more liberal trade policies than had its colonial
predecessor, its laws and taxes continued to regulate the sale and consumption of alcohol. The
goals of these regulations were two fold. First, taxes on local sales helped generate revenue for
the cash-strapped government. While accounts of tax rates vary, it is clear that bringing in
revenue from the sale of alcohol was important. As early as 1823, all exported wines were
subject to a six percent tax rate, while brandies were subject to a flat tax of ten dollars a barrel. In
1827, domestic sales of aguardiente were taxed at five dollars a barrel and wine at 2.50 a barrel
in Monterey and San Francisco, while rates in the southern presidios and towns were lower.
73

For example, some reports demonstrated that taxes for local mission grape wines hovered at ten
dollars a barrel for brandy and five a barrel on wine. These taxes remained static until 1834 when
Governor Figueroa lowered this three dollars for brandy and between 1.50-2.00 for wine.
74

Given the different currencies used by different historical sources and scholars, it is difficult to
compare the actual value of the taxes and duties imposed on wines and brandies. For example,
some documents refer to American dollars, others to Mexican pesos, and some, like Herbert
Howe Bancroft, used both dollars and Spanish reales. Though we cannot be certain as to the
actual monetary value of these fees, what matters most is that the territorial government in Alta
California imposed taxes in an attempt to control this new commerce and generate revenue. The
process of quantifying wine and regulating sales, regardless of currency, offered a way for the
Mexican government to impose order on the region. Given Alta California’s distance from
Mexico City and the duration and chaos of the War of Mexican Independence, the region had
long suffered from isolation and political instability. Thus, taxes on wines and brandies were not

73
Herbert Boyton Leggett, 28.

74
Irving McKee, “Early California Wine Commerce,” Wine Review no. January (1947) in
Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

50
necessarily used only to generate income. They could also be construed as a means by which the
new Mexican republic attempted to assert authority and control over its northwestern frontier.
Second, duties on imported wines and spirits were implemented to help drive up sales
and increase local wine and brandy production.
75
In 1821 and 1827, Captain Jose de la Guerra y
Noriega, who was in charge of the presidio at Santa Barbara, encouraged his superiors to impose
higher duties on foreign alcohol to promote more winegrowing among local growers.
76
In 1827,
duties rose to twenty dollars a barrel for imported brandy and ten per barrel of foreign wine.
77

Others proposed prohibiting the importation of all foreign liquors immediately. Don Juan
Bandini, who had been appointed the administrator of the San Gabriel Mission by Governor
Alvarado, supported such a ban in order to restore prosperity to California. Though his proposal
failed in 1840, duties on imported wines and brandies were altered to twenty-percent of the value
of the beverages instead of previous duties that had based the tax rate on the volume of wines.
78

Wine and aguardiente were regulated commodities whose trade demonstrated the
political power struggles in Mexican California as well as the nuanced interactions between
difference immigrant groups arriving in California. Winemakers, brandy distillers, and traders
resisted these taxes while local officials often failed to collect duties and taxes on liquors. Early
on, mission administrators clashed with the new government. For example, in 1821, Governor
Sola accused the Franciscans of smuggling wine and brandy to avoid paying taxes.
79
As wine

75
Herbert Boyton Leggett, 29.

76
Irving McKee, “Mission Wine Commerce,” n.d., Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

77
Ibid.

78
Irving McKee, “Early California Wine Commerce,” Wine Review no. January (1947) in
Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

51
culture expanded beyond the missions, lay winegrowers also attempted to circumvent
government taxes. In 1834 Gamboa y Caballero, a viticulturist near Monterey, sought permission
from Governor Figueroa to produce brandy. While Figueroa granted permission, he sternly
reminded the winemaker of his obligation to pay municipal taxes on his brandy.
80
Smuggling of
wine and brandy was very common as revealed by customs receipts that showed lower than
expected revenue in the early 1840s.
81
Local merchants also tried to keep their trade of alcohol
under the radar of local officials. For example, Josiah Belden, the branch manager of a store in
Santa Cruz, reassured his supervisor in San Francisco that he would likely be able to evade local
taxes, “‘The two barrels of liquor you sent I believe the alcalde knows nothing about as yet, and
I shall not let him know that I have it if I can help it. If he does, I think I can mix it up so as to
make it pass for country liquor’”
82
Beldon and his boss smuggled this liquor in an attempt to
disguise it as a local product and avoid paying taxes to the alcalde, the local government
representative.
Traders likewise circumvented paying customs duties. Wine and brandy trade proved to
be a significant part of William Heath Davis’s business. Like other merchants, Davis accepted
California wine and aguardiente as payment, describing these beverages as “just as good as gold,
and better, because there was a sure sale for both at a profit.”
83
Davis’s memoirs suggest that
merchants and Mexican customs officials often collaborated to avoid paying duties. Mexican law

79
Irving McKee, “Mission Wine Commerce,” Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

80
Hubert Howe Bancroft, California Pastoral, 371.

81
Irving McKee, “Early California Wine Commerce,” Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

82
Ibid.

83
William Heath Davis, Seventy-five Years in California: (San Francisco: J. Howell, 1929), 227.

52
required tax collectors to board and thoroughly examine all ships arriving in California. Local
officials often ignored letter of the law. Davis recalled that “Captains or supercargoes would
invite merchants from on shore and other friends to accompany the officials. Quite a party
assembled, the event being made one of entertainment. A handsome collation was provided of
meats, fowls, jams, jellies, pies, cakes, fruits, champaign, and other wines…We spread a table
and received and entertained the guests as handsomely as anyone could.”
84
Ship captains like
Davis lavishly entertained tax collectors and customs officials, suggesting that perhaps this
entertainment was a way of encouraging Mexican officials to look the other way when collecting
duties. Davis recounted another similar situation aboard his own ship, the Euphemia,
The customhouse inspector was a curious old Mexican…and while going through the
formality of looking about the vessel to examine her I accompanied him. The main hatch
was off, and I said that if he wished to go down into the hold I would have a ladder
brought for his accommodation and he should be assisted down. He replied that he was
not very particular. I remarked that there were a good many scorpions among the
cargo…When I mentioned the scorpions he stepped back, really frightened, and, making
up a ludicrous face, declaring vehemently that he had no desire to go into the hold—
thoroughly alarmed at the idea. The duties on the cargo amounted to $10,000.
85

Because Davis did not provide an itemized list of his cargo, we have no way of verifying
the taxable value of his load. However, his story implies that both Davis and the customs official
conspired to ignore duty regulations. Stories like that of Davis and Josiah Beldon, who were both
foreigners in California, underscore the delicate control the Mexico retained over its frontier in
the northwest. Try as it might, the territorial government in Alta California often failed to impose
order and maintain control. When individuals like Davis and Beldon circumvented local tax laws
in order to trade in alcohol, they resisted the authority of the Mexican state. Thus, in the same
way we can interpret the liquor taxes imposed by the authorities in Alta California as a tool of

84
William Heath Davis, 203.

85
Ibid, 203.

53
conquest, we can also interpret black-market sales of brandy and wine as resistance against the
government. Wine and aguardiente were more than manufactured agricultural products. The
market regulation of wine and challenges to these laws indicated the tenuous hold Mexico had
over the region.
Citizenship, Race, and Legal Access to Wine
Though this commercial wine industry expanded rapidly and reached new markets after
1822, it remained deeply entrenched in mission traditions. Vineyardists almost universally
planted mission grapes for their wines and aguardiente and used the same viticultural methods
employed by Franciscan vintners. Winegrowers continued to rely on Indians as a source of
inexpensive and often unfree labor, particularly at former mission sites. Indeed, Article Sixteen
of Pico’s 1834 Secularization Act stipulated as much: “The emancipated Indians will be obliged
to assist at the indispensable common labor which, in the opinion of the Governor, may be
judged necessary for the cultivation of vineyards, orchards, and corn-fields, which for the present
remain undisposed of.”
86
As John Harwood Phillips argues, “the secularization of the missions
did not free the neophytes but placed them under a different management.”
87

After the secularization process began, many Indians left their former homes at the
missions to live in Los Angeles. Indeed, most field workers left the missions within ten years
after secularization to work on ranches and vineyards across the Los Angeles region.
88
With
nearly 112 acres of vineyards and 100,000 vines planted in and around Los Angeles, it was an
attractive place for displaced Indians in need of employment. Between 1837 and 1842, Indian

86
John. W. Dwinelle, The Colonial History of San Francisco, (San Diego: Frey and Smith,
1924), 31. Quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 164.

87
George Harwood Phillips, 165.

88
Richard Steven Street, 94.

54
vineyard laborers in Los Angeles planted over one hundred thousand vines for winegrowers.
89

As they had at the missions, former neophytes labored in vineyards and wineries, including El
Aliso. There, Don Luis Vignes hired former mission Indians to complete all of the unskilled
labor, from digging irrigation canals from the nearby river to his vineyard, to plowing the
vineyards, to hauling and planting vines, and harvesting and crushing the grapes. For skilled
winemaking tasks, he brought from France experienced grafters and winemakers who had
presumably superior European winemaking knowledge.
90
Despite the rapid expansion of
vineyards, there still was not enough paid labor to employ the former mission Indians looking for
work.
In the 1830s and 1840s, chaos ruled in Alta California, as representatives of the new
Mexican state struggled to assert control of the region. As during the mission period, the
boundaries of citizenship and rights were largely economic, including the freedom to own land
and to participate in the markets and legal system. As they had been under the Spanish Empire,
Indians continued to be excluded from full participation in civil society. A major part of this
exclusion was defined by the state’s prohibition of alcohol to them, as Indians alone were
excluded from freely enjoying California’s newly liberalized markets. The numerous laws
regulating access to alcohol and the cultural taboos restricting Indians’ consumption of wine and
aguardiente made the wine industry an important tool in helping to reassert the privileges
associated with whiteness that were first established under the Spanish. Legal, non-criminalized
access to wine and aguardiente helped determine the full rights of citizenship. By defining
alcohol as an illicit good for Indians, the territorial government in Mexican California used

89
Richard Steven Street, 95.

90
Ibid, 81-82, 95.

55
alcohol restrictions to criminalize Indian bodies, conscript Indians to work without wages either
for the ayuntamiento or for ranchers, and incapacitate Indians and deem them unfit to manage
former mission lands.
As during the mission period, alcohol continued to be illicit for Indians. And, unrestricted
access to wine and aguardiente denoted racial status and privilege. One’s legal right—or lack
there of—to purchase, possess, and consume alcohol indicated one’s position on the spectrum of
whiteness as well as one’s legal and economic rights. Despite laws restricting Indian’s access to
liquor, vineyardists used wine and aguardiente as currency to pay their laborers. Indeed, access
to wine and brandy was not out-of-reach for former mission Indians. Government officials and
vineyard owners used Indians’ violations of liquor laws against them to exert punishment and
control over Indian workers.
Californios used Indians’ violations of liquor laws against them to enforce punishments
that racialized Indians into a permanent class of conscripted laborers. An 1837 case involving
Don Juan Bandini—who had been appointed administrator of the San Gabriel Mission and was
thus a representative of the government—offers an example of the relationship between liquor
and control of Indian bodies. Born in Peru to Spanish parents, Bandini arrived in California in
1820 as a young man. He was involved in politics from the late 1820s onward, serving in various
positions, from a member of the territorial assembly, to a customs inspector, to his involvement
in the administration of the secularized missions under Governor Pío Pico.
91
Further, Bandini
received multiple land grants that included former mission lands at San Gabriel and San Juan
Capistrano.

91
H. D. Barrows, “Juan Bandini,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern
California and Pioneer Register, Los Angeles 4, no. 3 (January 1, 1899): 243-244.

56
Bandini became involved in a scandal during his administration of the San Gabriel
Mission. Critics alleged that Bandini had taken to selling brandy to the former mission Indians at
San Gabriel and then punishing them for drunkenness. As a government representative in Alta
California Bandini undoubtedly would have been aware of liquor laws. Further, as an official
charged with overseeing the secularization at San Gabriel, Bandini was also responsible for
protecting the well being of the former mission Indians. In all likelihood, Bandini violated both
of these counts and abused his power to make a profit. Still, Bandini serves as an example of
someone who used Indians’ predilection to alcohol as a means of disciplining and controlling
Indians. He dispensed alcohol and punished them for drinking the beverages that he himself
provided.
Although we do not know the outcome of this case and whether or not officials punished
Bandini, it offers an example of how Californios used alcohol to control Indians. Indeed, Bandini
may have even needed laborers for his own vast landholdings. Punishment for Indians often
included imprisonment with some combination of compulsory, unpaid labor. Punishing Indians
for drinking alcohol (which was usually sold to them or given in lieu of cash wages) Mexican-
Californios to criminalize Indians and designate them as unfree laborers for the duration of their
punishment. This criminalization simply replaced the Franciscans with a new, albeit less
permanent, master: the Mexican-Californio rancher.
As public drunkenness and violence became more problematic after secularization,
particularly in Los Angeles, liquor laws targeted not only Indians but also those who sold wine
and aguardiente to them. Across Alta California, laws aimed to prohibit winegrowers,
merchants, and tavern owners from selling liquor to Indians and fine those who breached these
regulations. Winegrowers resisted these restrictions and struggles ensued. For example, in 1837

57
several tavern-keepers in Santa Barbara were charged with selling alcohol to Indians. One year
later in 1838, a group of nine merchants in Los Angeles petitioned the ayuntamiento in the
pueblo for permission to sell wine and liquors on feast days.
92
Despite their pleas, their requests
were denied the following year. Various representatives of the government—from local officials
for the ayuntamiento to territorial governors—tried to restrict Indians’ access to alcohol while
winegrowers and tavern-owners resisted these prohibitions against sales because it limited both
groups’ profits and restricted vineyardists’ access to an inexpensive and pliable workforce.
Governor Pío Pico enacted an extensive series of new liquor regulations in 1845, ostensibly
to protect Indians against excessive drunkenness and to prevent the theft of alcohol from
winegrowers and distillers. In reality, these laws even further delineated the rights of citizenship
and white privilege in Alta California. The language of the law read as follows, per Bancroft’s
records:
1
st
. Every owner of a vineyard who sells grapes in any quantity exceeding 15 pounds
must furnish a voucher to the purchaser, who will keep it for his protection. If such owner
gives to his servants over two pounds, he must also give them a paper stating the fact.
2s It is forbidden to purchase grapes from Indians and servants of the orchards,
without they produce the voucher spoken of in the preceding article
3c. Any person, not the owner of a vineyard, desiring to establish a place for
fermenting grape juice, must obtain a permit from the first I, and submit himself to the
police visits that must be made to examine his premise, tubs, etc., and submit himself to the
police visits and produce, whenever it is demanded, the vouchers mentioned in article first.
4
th
. The alcaldes will visit all premises reported to them where fermentation is carried
on, and every citizen is bound to render every possible assistance, for the fulfillment of
each one of the articles of this decree.
5
th
. The alcaldes personally, or through trusty persons, but still under their own
responsibility, will make a daily examination in the huts of the Indian Rancherias that may
be in the environs of this city, to ascertain if there are in them any grapes, or fermentation
thereof, which have not been lawfully acquired.
6
th
Those officials in the same manner will visit and examine all taverns, at least
twice every week; also the houses of persons having the license mentioned in the article
third.

92
Irving McKee, “Early California Wine Commerce,” Thomas Pinney Collection, CPPUL.

58
Any owner of a vineyard infringing the proviso of article first, incurred the fine of $50, or
had to undergo the penalty of forty days in the public works. In a tavern or house having
permission to ferment grape-juice, if any of this fruit was found without proper voucher, as
per article first, the grape and juice were confiscated, and the tavern-keeper or owner was
subjected to a fine of $50, or two months in the public works. Any person caught stealing
in a vineyard, upon being convicted, was to suffer the punishment of four months at public
work, with shackles to his legs if a civilian; if of the military, he would, within the time
prescribed by law, be turned over to military authority, with the proofs of guilt, to be
punished according to the magnitude of the offense.

These series of laws protected the rights of property owners while punishments for
violations relegated Indians to conscripted laborers. Being a landless person meant that one had
no rights to possess grapes in large quantities and therefore had no right to make or sell wine, or
even participate in the free market. The possession of grapes over two pounds or equipment used
for fermentation was cause for suspicion. The possession of fermentation equipment was cause
for suspicion. One had no economic rights without access to land, and in Alta California,
economic power trumped race and could buy entry into the elite class. To be a winegrower and
be involved in the industry as a stakeholder and not merely a laborer, an individual had to own
property. Pico’s law translated private Indian spaces within the rancherias—or quarters on
ranches where Indians housed themselves—into public spaces subject to regular investigation.
Just as during the mission period, Indian living quarters underwent strict policing and oversight.
Further, punishment fell along racial lines. While a tavern owner or winemaker would likely
have the money to pay fines, Indians usually did not and thus were often relegated to months of
forced labor for the public. These crews were often hired out by the ayuntamiento in Los
Angeles to rancheros throughout the region. Or, they were used to dig irrigation ditches and
make general improvements for the pueblo. Laws like these used alcohol to define citizenship,
privilege, and whiteness. Further, Pico’s series of alcohol regulations created a cycle of criminal
peonage whereby Indians became a permanent class of laborers for Los Angeles’s vineyardists.

59
The late 1840s brought further political instability to California as Mexico and the United
States inched closer to war. Beginning with the American annexation of Texas in 1845, the
United States began mounting a campaign to expand the United States across the continent.
From 1846 to 1848, Mexico and the United States were at war and American forces moved
westward into California. In 1848, the two nations signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in
which Mexico ceded its northern territories—including Alta California—to the United States.
Though the treaty guaranteed the rights of American citizenship to Mexicans residing in the
newly conquered territory, the following decades brought about social and economic changes
that challenged the property rights of Californios.
93
Still, when the California State Constitutional
Convention of 1849 convened, it clearly defined the rights of citizenship as a privilege for “free
white persons.”
94
Because the United States classified Indians as non-whites, as California
became a state in 1850, former mission Indians again found themselves excluded from the
privileges of citizenship. Though they were no longer physically constrained to boundaries of the
missions, little seemed to change for former mission Indians in terms of privilege, status, and
labor requirements. Indeed, the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians,
informally known as the Indian Protection Act, which created a legal structure custodial

93
For more on the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on California see Albert
Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in
Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979), Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking
Californians, 1846-1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Tomás Almaguer,
Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest Gender
and Power in California, 1770s to 1800s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

94
Tomás Almaguer, 54-55.

60
wardship, convict leasing, debt peonage, indentured servitude, and a loosely defined idea of
apprenticeship by which Californios and Americans could restrict Indian freedom.
95

The new American government in California picked up where Mexican officials had left
off in trying to regulate Indians’ access to liquor as a means of controlling them, particularly in
Los Angeles. As early as 1847—even before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—
General Stephen W. Kearney, military governor of California, ordered that all taverns and
establishments selling alcohol be closed on Sunday and that all drunken individuals be arrested.
96

Though Kearney’s orders were not necessarily aimed directly at Indians, his law demonstrates
the importance of alcohol restrictions in maintaining order given the instability of war. Later in
1847, Americans officials implemented regulations prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians
with steep fines of fifty to one-hundred dollars or imprisonment of three to six months for those
found to be in violation. As had Mexican officials before them, Americans confronted resistance
to these laws. For example, juries of Californios refused to convict individuals for selling alcohol
to Indians.
97
Local Mexican officials also protested these regulations. For example, one
anonymous alcalde wrote to American officials in December of 1847 directly contesting the
earlier regulation prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians and requiring him, as a local official,
to enforce this law. The alcalde wrote, “Moderate drinking is good for working men, and the
Ind[ian] Will not work for anything else. Abuse of liquor is what should be punished; and the

95
Michael Magliari, “Free Soil, Unfree Labor: Cave Johnson Couts and the Binding of Indian
Workers in California, 1850-1867,” Pacific Historical Review 37, no. 3 (2004): 350-351. See
also George Harwood Phillips, “Indians in Los Angeles, 1781-1875: Economic Integration,
Social Disintegration,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 3 (August 1, 1980): 444-445.

96
Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California 1846-1848, Vol. XXII (San Francisco: The
History Company, 1886), 608.

97
Ibid, 608.

61
whites behave worse in this respect than the Ind[ian].”
98
This alcalde refused to enforce this law
by punishing winegrowers or tavern keepers but instead encouraged officials to punish
drunkenness, including, presumably, that of Americans. This official noted the legal biases that
differentiated between Indian and white drunkenness and made intoxication by the former group
a dangerous offense.
During the 1850s, escalating violence in Los Angeles led to tension between vineyardists,
Indians, tavern keepers, and pueblo officials. Attempts to regulate liquor extended to all
proprietors of liquor. In doing so, the pueblo’s leaders were attempting to curb violence and
murder by stopping up the flow of liquor. An 1854 grand jury in Los Angeles blamed “the evil
existing in this community” on the “sale of ardent spirits.”
99
The grand jury went even further,
identifying individual tavern owners by name and blaming them for enabling public
drunkenness. Though city newspapers in Los Angeles decried Indian drunkenness—and, indeed,
relied on stories of inebriation, violence, and murder against Indians for sensational news—the
fact remained that winegrowers in the Pueblo relied on Indian workers to tend their vines and
crush their grape crops. One visiting federal Indian Affairs Officer, Thomas Henley, observed as
much, “If it were practicable or desirable in their demoralized condition to remove them to the
Reservation [Tejon Reservation] it could not be accomplished, because it would be opposed by
the citizens, for the reasons that in the vineyards, especially during the grape season, their labor
is made useful and is obtained at a cheap rate.”
100
Henley’s proposed solution was to remove

98
Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California 1846-1848, 631.

99
Southern Californian, November 16, 1854, quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 572.

100
Thomas Henley to George W. Manypenny, December 18, 1855, Letters Received at the
Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-81, California Superintendency, Microcopy 234, Ross 35, United
States National Archives, quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 274.

62
Indians to a camp of sorts a short distance outside the city where they could live and be
prohibited from entering the pueblo without authorization from an Indian Agent. Under the
protection of such an agent, Indians could enter the borders of Los Angeles only to labor in the
vineyards or to collect their pay. This proposed program never came to fruition because of high
costs. Still, this case highlights the tensions between the needs of winegrowers who cultivated
vineyards and required Indian labor and the demands of the city at large, which wanted to expel
Indians under the guise of morality and temperance.
As during under Mexican governance, vineyard owners continued their tradition of
paying Indians with wine and aguardiente instead of cash. Horace Bell, an American who
arrived in Los Angeles in 1852, was a member of the Los Angeles Rangers. The Rangers were a
vigilante militia comprised of Americans trying to restore order in Los Angeles during this
chaotic time. Bell later published a memoir detailing his experiences during his stay in
California. He recalled how vineyardists would pay
Indian peons with aguardiente, a veritable fire-water and no
mistake. The consequence was that on being paid off on Saturday
evening, the would meet in great gatherings called peons, and pass
the night in gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery. On Sunday the
streets would be crowded from morn till night with Indians, males
and females of all ages….By four o’clock on Sunday afternoon Los
Angeles street from Commercial to Nigger alley, Aliso street from
Los Angeles to Alameda, and Nigger alley, would be crowded with a
mass of drunken Indians, yelling and fighting.
101

Indians congregated in clearly segregated blocks of the city that were seemingly
demarcated for this purpose. Bell went on to describe how the city marshal and his team of
“Indian special deputies, who had been kept in jail all day to keep them sober” would drive
around the city to arrest and corral all of the intoxicated men they could find. The next morning,

101
Horace Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in Southern California (Los
Angeles: Yarnell, Caystille & Mathes, Printers, 1881), 49-49.

63
these individuals “would be exposed for sale, as slaves, for the week.” Bell decried this system
as a deplorable slave market, similar to that in New Orleans. Further, he outlined the cyclical
nature of this system in which an Indian would be arrested on Sunday night and sold out to a
vineyard owner as a convict laborer on Monday morning. Afterwards, that same Indian would
work all week at a Los Angeles vineyard and earn several dollars in wages, a portion of which
would be paid in aguardiente or wine. And again, that same Indian would again “be made
happy” for another Saturday night and Sunday. Bell lamented the “thousands of honest, useful
people were absolutely destroyed in this way. Though an American, he blamed this debauchery
on the arrival of the “conquering Saxon” and his “his boasted perfection of laws, and his much-
vaunted ‘advance civilization.’”
102
Bell was in favor of the more rigid social and political order
that the United States had brought to California, he implied that the benefits of this new
“civilization” had left the Indians behind.
Conclusion
By 1850, California had formally launched its campaign towards Americanization by
joining the Union. Los Angeles County had roughly one hundred vineyards with an annual
output of over fifty-seven thousand gallons of wines. After just twenty years of commercial wine
production, this region had out produced all other counties in the United States.
103

Despite these successes, winegrowers soon found themselves without a reliable supply of
laborers as disease struck the Indian populations of California. Between 1850 and the late 1860s,
multiple waves of small pox devastated Californians, particularly in Los Angeles. Though small
pox transcended race and class, it especially affected the Indian populations of Los Angeles. In

102
Horace Bell, 49-49.

103
Scott Macconnell, 89.

64
his memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913, Harris Newmark remembered how
“the dread disease worked its ravages especially among the Mexicans and Indians, as many as
dozen of them dying in a single day; and these sufferers and their associates being under no
quarantine, and even bathing ad libitum in the zanjas, the pest spread alarmingly.”
104
In the
winter of 1862-1863, the Los Angeles Star recorded two hundred cases of small pox and one
hundred deaths in the city of Los Angeles alone.
105
The small pox epidemic of 1868 marked the
demise of Indians in Los Angeles. Though it is impossible to calculate the exact number of
Indians who died in that small pox plague, historian George Harwood Phillips has documented
how newspaper accounts of Indian misbehavior declined dramatically as their remaining
numbers were removed far from the city.
106

These smallpox epidemics caused a steep decline in the availability of Indian workers in
and around Los Angeles. This coincided with increases in agricultural production brought about
by improvements in Los Angeles’s irrigation networks of zanjas, which allowed growers to
expand vineyards and orchards. In 1863 the Los Angeles Star estimated that over 1,000,000 vines
were in production.
107
By the end of 1868, labor shortages accompanied this agricultural
expansion and steep competition for day laborers nearly doubled the wages they could command.
By 1869, the completion of the transcontinental railroad made scores of Chinese laborers
available to viticulturists in California. Soon, the Chinese would replace Indians in California’s
vineyards and wineries. Like Indian laborers, the Chinese were largely landless. However, they

104
Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 322, quoted in George Harwood
Phillips, 284-5.

105
Los Angeles Star, February 21, 1863, quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 284.

106
George Harwood Phillips, 292.

107
Los Angeles Star, August 16, 1870, quoted in George Harwood Phillips, 286.

65
differed from Indian laborers in several key ways. First, they were known for abstaining from
alcohol, and this made them highly desirable workers for vineyardists. Second, the Chinese were
migratory workers. They did not permanently settle in rancherias as had Indians, but instead
moved around to find seasonal work. Finally, their racial status would put vineyardists at odds
with the general public in California.
From its inception, the California wine industry served as a site in which whiteness,
privilege, and citizenship was negotiated and conquest was enforced. From 1769 through the
1830s, the Franciscan missionaries established an industry on the foundation of free land grants
and coerced Indian labor. The friars used the process of winegrowing to civilize Indians away
from their non-agrarian culture and they used the product of this cultivation, wine, to convert
Indians to Christianity. The earliest rendition of the California wine industry was thus built on a
foundation of concentrated landownership and racialized labor—a tradition that would shape the
trajectory of agribusiness in California throughout the nineteenth century. After 1822, Mexican
Independence brought forth a commercial wine industry. As during the Spanish period, one’s
role in the winemaking process denoted privilege and citizenship. And, citizenship in Mexican
California remained strongly connected to landownership. However, a myriad of new laws
regulating the sale of wine and aguardiente offered new ways to determine rights. These
regulations restricted access to wine by race, excluding Indians from the right to own or produce
wine and aguardiente. Thus, the freedom to make wine and aguardiente were indicative of land
ownership and whiteness.

Chapter 2: The Refinement of Nature: Winegrowers, Boosters, and the Instability of
Conquest
In 1853, James and John Warren, the father-and-son editorial team of California Farmer,
petitioned Congress to create a College of Agriculture for California. James Warren had arrived
in California in 1849 and soon became active in the state’s agricultural circles, both through his
San Francisco newspaper and through the California State Agricultural Society, which he helped
found in 1852.
1
Warren was especially interested in promoting California as a wine region. The
Warrens glorified the state’s natural advantages, describing the region as nature’s “land of
Promise” and a “vast field of wealth.” California’s fertile soils would soon be transformed into
fruit orchards, wheat fields, and vineyards. They hoped that forests would be cleared to make
way for “that onward march of the Anglo-Saxon race, o’er mountain, hill, and valley, and
marking its progress onward along the Pacific, by civilization, cultivation and Christianization.”
The Warrens invoked themes of conquest, mission, and Manifest Destiny to encourage
agricultural expansion and to cultivate California into a refined and civilized place
For these boosters, the potential riches of western agriculture necessitated a campaign of
development and education—one that would foster American culture, conquest, and refinement
along the frontier. By relating civilization and conquest with agricultural cultivation, the Warrens
echoed the arguments of Manifest Destiny that were especially popular in the 1840s. James and
John Warren went beyond traditional campaigns in support of land-grant colleges when they
framed California as a “great mission ground” whereby students from all nations could be

1
Charles L. Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine: An Encyclopedia of Wine and
Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), 389.

67
educated in the American ideals of freedom and liberty through the agricultural arts.
2
The
Warrens suggested that civilization and Christian mission were predestined instruments that
would transform the West, and they emphasized agriculture as the most important tool of
Manifest Destiny. Further, agriculture could help smooth out the rough edges of the state’s
population of miners. For the Warrens, training Californians in the art of cultivation would
reform California’s population and transform the state into the Promised Land.
Tensions over the stability of American conquest and the viability of integrating
California into the broader United States shaped the trajectory of the wine industry during the
1850s and 1860s. As EuroAmericans sought to expand vineyard acreage and wine production in
California, they confronted negative stereotypes that depicted the West as a dangerous, unsavory
place still colored by its Spanish and Mexican-Californio past. Winegrowers relied on the
language of Christian mission to publicize California’s natural advantages, legitimize their
territorial expansion, and encourage cultural reforms through changes in land-use. Commercial
grape growers also organized trade groups in the mid-1850s, allying themselves with other
cohorts of like-minded agricultural growers to form, most notably, the California Agricultural
Society. Though its rosters included growers of diverse crops—including wheat, hops, oats, and
various fruits—winegrowers would prove to be a vocal cohort during the Agricultural Society’s
first ten years. Winegrowers relied heavily on boosterism to implement their cultural campaigns.
Wine industry boosters refashioned California as a Mediterranean archetype in national
publications the hopes of civilizing the frontier for consumers and potential immigrants outside
the state. Wine industrialists also publicized their scientific knowledge about viticulture in an
attempt to publicly replace the decades of winegrowing experience established by the Franciscan

2
“Memorial to Congress on an Agricultural College for California, 1853,” Agricultural History,
40, no. 1 (January 1966): 55.

68
missionaries. Thus, the EuroAmerican expansion of the wine industry was not simply and
economic venture for new immigrants to California. It was part of the campaign to reform and
enlighten California and secure American conquest in the West. Winegrowers and boosters’
work highlights the tension between their campaigns for cultural change the instability of
American conquest. What these winegrowers achieved was not yet an Anglo-American society,
but a new “Mestizaje,” or hybridization, that could not override or erase Spanish and Mexican-
Californian culture from California’s vineyards but instead combined elements of the two.
Ultimately, the trajectory of California’s nineteenth-century wine industry demonstrated
its struggles to break its ties to a past many American winegrowers found to be unsavory.
Winegrowing would prove to be a crucial element of the agricultural arts to which the Warrens
referred. Vineyard culture and winemaking had begun to undergo a dramatic transformation
following the chaos of the Mexican war and the political changes that followed soon after. New
immigrants to the West reorganized vineyards into capitalist enterprises that expanded far
beyond the regional confines of their predecessors, Spanish and Mexican-Californio winemakers.
As transplants from the eastern United States and Europe attempted to construct a new
commercial wine empire after 1848, they sought to Americanize the uncultivated Western
frontier and sever the wine industry’s ties to Spanish-Mexican Catholicism in the wake of a
growing Protestant population.
California: Dubious Potential
Not all contemporaries of John and James Warren praised California. Others—
particularly those writing from the East—viewed the far western frontier with caution, even
pessimism. Charles Loring Brace was one such individual. Trained as a minister, Brace had
founded the New York Children’s Aid Society in 1853. Concerned with the living conditions in

69
New York City’s urban immigrant enclaves, Brace initiated the Orphan Train operation in 1853.
3

This program gathered immigrant children, particularly Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants,
and sent them to be adopted by Protestant farming families in the West. By removing children
from the perils of the urban environment, Brace believed that healthful rural conditions and
morally upright Protestant American families could save them. He supported the Orphan Trains
as a means of Americanizing European immigrants, namely Catholic children. In 1868, perhaps
as part of a tour of the West to where he was sending children, Brace toured California and
published a travel narrative. Brace waved a righteous banner of truth, distinguishing his writings
from other books about the West that only used “the language of compliment about whatever is
Californian.”
4

Brace blamed California’s primitive state and sub-par wines on its Mexican and Spanish
background and existing populations. His tour included many California towns he criticized for
retaining their Spanish and Mexican elements. In his eyes, Sonoma remained “a wretched run-
down-looking village, with one of the poorest hotels in the State, sorely needing, as an old
Spaniard Gen. Vallejo, frankly informed us, an arrival of Yankee settlers to wake it up.” Still,
Brace saved his harshest criticisms for Los Angeles and its environs, populated not only by
undesirable Mexicans, but also by Southerners. He described Los Angeles as the American
“South” of California. An ardent abolitionist writing soon after the Civil War, Brace found many
similarities between the residents of Los Angeles and Southerners, namely that they were

3
Linda Gordon discusses the racial and religious complexities of the orphan train movement.
Gordon tells the story a group of Irish-Catholic orphans who were sent to Mexican-Catholic
families in Arizona, and the fallout that ensued when outraged Anglo-Protestants removed the
orphans from Mexican homes. See Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

4
Charles Loring Brace, The New West, or California in 1867-1868, (New York: G.P. Putnam
and Son, 1869), 253.

70
“warm-hearted, hospitable, slovenly, lazy, and profane.”
5
California suffered despite the fact that
nature had “done everything for it, and man very little.”
6
In particular, Brace faulted “native”
populations of Mexicans and Californians whom he suggested were incredibly slow to adapt to
change or improvements.
Brace found no shortage of qualified praise for California’s rich natural resources and
environmental treasures. The state simply needed the right kind of immigrant to make
improvements on the environment and the native populations. Brace lamented that only one-third
of the region’s twenty thousand residents were EuroAmerican, or, as Brace called them, “native
American.” The other two-thirds neglected their properties and left them in sad disrepair. “It is
rare that you pass a thrifty, well-kept farm, and hear that this a Spaniard’s or Mexicans. As a
general thing the Spanish owner has gambled, or drunk, or otherwise wasted his property, or has
been passed by his neighbors in competition, or has lost large portions of his ranch by sharp legal
practices among the Yankees.”
7
Brace was critical of the behavior and poor stewardship of
Mexican-Californio land-use practices, even going so far as to describe it in terms of immorality.
Interestingly, he acknowledged unscrupulous legal practices utilized by new American
immigrants to claim ownership of Mexican-owned lands. Brace did not find these behaviors to
be immoral but instead rationalized that it was in the state’s best interest for land-ownership to be
shifted away from Mexican/Spanish owners in favor of Americans. He further questioned the
validity and legality of Mexican land-titles, arguing that a Mexican’s “own original title was
often hardly more equitable or legal than that of the squatters on his neglected acres…Many

5
Charles Loring Brace, 277.

6
Ibid, 277.

7
Ibid, 285.

71
were probably manufactured after the conquest of California, by enterprising brokers and
speculators”
8
Instead, Brace supported legislation in favor of American land ownership that
would be in the best interests of communities throughout the state.
Given the context of Charles Loring Brace’s professional interest in reforming Catholic
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, his critique of Mexican-Californios may have
also stemmed from concerns about excessive drinking in Catholic families in the Eastern United
States. Brace expressed grave concern about the state’s winemaking ventures. He blamed the
false claims of travel writers and journalists who, he argued, used their writing only to “flatter
and compliment this important branch of culture.” He criticized inexperienced growers, many of
which, he claimed, were themselves ignorant of proper winegrowing methods and who were
unexposed to good wine, having never tasted it themselves before embarking on careers as
winegrowers. Brace acknowledged that the wine industry’s situation was not hopeless. He
conceded that winegrowers might one day succeed in producing wines comparable to those in
Europe, but adamantly declared that the industry had yet to meet the benchmark set by Europe.
As a New Yorker, he opined, “Californian wines have lost all reputation in New York, and…are
seldom seen now on gentlemen’s tables.”
9

For Brace, the problem with California vineyards lay not in the soil or in any of the other
elements of the region’s natural environment. Instead, the fault lay in problems of morality and
“honesty of work” within the state’s populations, perhaps alluding to its Mexican-Californio
residents.
10
California winegrowers did not lack “intelligence, and energy, and enterprise,” but

8
Charles Loring Brace, 285-286.

9
Ibid, 255.

10
Ibid, 256.

72
instead had “a great want of honesty and thoroughness, especially in agents or branches of this
business in our large cities.”
11
This vein of dishonesty, he further explained, was evident in the
impure wines, the “perverted specimens of Californian wine, being shipped out of the state, and
was the main reason the business had not yet reached its full potential.
12
Unlike their western
counterparts, winemakers in New York had learned the art of producing “pure natural American
wine,” genuine and free of the added alcohols, brandies, essential oils, and artificial ingredients
that California winemakers used to adulterate their product.
13
They managed to achieve this
without the rich soils and perfect Mediterranean climate enjoyed by Western winegrowers.
Brace highlighted California’s natural advantages, comparing the natural environment to
that in other wine producing regions throughout the world. He underscored California’s
moderate rainfall, which prevented the dampness, rot, and frost that growers in Germany and
France confronted. Similarly, the region enjoyed a Mediterranean climate with average annual
temperatures similar to that of Cadiz and Malaga in Spain. Here, Brace identified a small
element of civilization and refinement, or rather hope of improvement towards a European
Mediterranean ideal. California had the potential to achieve this goal of Mediterranean culture.
Finally, Brace shifted his attention to the most popular grape varietal, the Mission or California
grape. He attacked growers’ reliance on the Mission grape. Brace derided this ‘inferior’ grape,
dismissing it as “nothing more than the old Catalonian grape, brought here by the Spanish
padres, which makes the sailors’ wine of Spain—a rough, strong, heady wine.” The most
enlightened wine makers in California were making good “Rissling” wines from the foreign

11
Charles Loring Brace, 256.

12
Ibid, 257.

13
Ibid, 186.

73
“Johannisberg” variety.
14
He encouraged inexperienced growers to follow the example of their
more experienced and successful growers in Europe by either mixing Mission juices with that of
foreign grapes or eschewing it altogether for imported grape varietals. Despite California’s rich
soil composition and temperate climate, its winegrowers still had difficulties producing high
caliber wines.
Brace identified other key handicaps that were holding back winemakers. Unlike
winemakers in the eastern United States or in Europe, the region winemakers had to import
bottles, cork, and barrels at high cost, thereby limiting their profits. For example, bottles ran one-
dollar per dozen and corks forty-dollars per thousand.
15
California lacked native ash or oak from
which to construct wine casks/barrels. A dearth of scientific data about California wines was also
problematic for Brace. He derided wine cultivators for the lack of solid information about wines,
particularly about sugar and alcohol contents. For Brace, this demonstrated sloppiness and a
severe lack of precision. By using precise, scientific winemaking methods, vintners could avoid
making impure adulterated wines. He encouraged vintners to use modern technology to produce
a pure and honestly-produced product similar to that bottled by New York vintners. Brace
largely described California as an outlier to the rest of the United States, as a “humble and
primitive” society still wanting in cultivation and enlightenment.
16
Though he gloried in the
state’s “divine” climate, he found much lacking in the region’s development. One way to remedy
this was to increase access to “great moral agencies of society” in California, such as churches,

14
Charles Loring Brace, 265.

15
Ibid, 269.

16
Ibid, IV.

74
schools, colleges, newspapers, charitable organization, hospitals and other roots of civilization.
17

Indeed, Brace encouraged the state to speed up its creation of a State University, a process
already begun with the initial transfer of property from the Oakland-based College of California
to the State. Brace believed that education was one sure way by which to lift California out of
her primitive state.
California was not yet a hopeless case. As more Americans and Protestant-minded ideals
penetrated the state and energized her populations into reformation and improvement, she could
be saved. Los Angeles, Brace pontificated, was “not deficient in some of the appliances or aids
of civilization, despite the rather Mexican air of the town.”
18
He further applauded the efforts of
“pioneer” winegrowers such as Mateo Keller, Benjamin Davis Wilson, who had crossed cultural
boundaries between American and Mexican-Californio culture. Brace also praised the Sansevain
brothers who he credited with “stirring up” Spanish landowners to develop and make
improvements upon their lands through grape, orange, and lemon cultivation instead of cattle and
sheep rearing. Unlike many other winemakers who still employed Indians to crush grapes,
Wilson and Kohler & Frohling had mechanized this process. Brace found the use of mechanical
grape presses preferable to “treading out grapes with these dirty Indians,” though he did
acknowledge that impurities were removed through fermentation. He indicated preference for
modern, mechanical methods instead of “useless and antiquated method[s]”
19
The mechanical
grape press was indicative of modernity and of whiteness because it erased Spanish and
Mexicans’ backwards methods of using Indian feet to trample the grapes. In particular, Brace

17
Charles Loring Brace, 154.

18
Ibid, 293.

19
Ibid, 289.

75
was impressed with Mateo Keller as an “exceedingly intelligent wine-grower.”
20
He praised
Keller for his use of Pasteur’s newest methods.
21
Though he was concerned about the effects of
Pasteurization on the flavor of the wine, he still applauded Keller’s application of modern
science.
The Chosen Land: Natural Advantages and Agricultural Civilization
Under the banner of Manifest Destiny in the 1850s, the advancement of agricultural
cultivation in California consistently revolved around discussions of natural advantages,
discipline, and hard work. California’s horticulturists believed that their labor had implications
beyond their vineyards, orchards, and wheat fields. Land development became a way of
legitimizing their labors and encouraging new migrants to take up the plow, particularly in the
1850s when mining was still attractive to some newcomers. The Los Angeles Star hoped the
winegrowing would soon expand so that California might export her wines to “foreign shores”
and become “distinguished, less as a gold bearing country, than as the seat where the vine, the
fig, the olive, and kindred fruits, attain their greatest excellence, and contribute importance of the
land.”
22
Growers believed that their success in the vineyards had been the result of heavenly gifts
bestowed on them in the form of moderate climates, fertile soils, and verdant plants—ideal
environmental conditions that allowed them to enjoy the fruits of their labors. As such,
Christianity and divinely bestowed natural advantages lost “explanatory ground to various
modernizing, scientific, and pseudoscientific discourses, though it remained the reigning

20
Charles Loring Brace, 288.

21
Ibid, 288.

22
“Native Wines,” Los Angeles Star, October 23, 1858.

76
ideology of cohesion.”
23
The ideas that diligence and natural advantages were the primary
reasons for successful agricultural cultivation were replaced by the notion that science and
knowledge would further the modern progress of winegrowing. Thus, science, education, and
technology were merely the latest means by which EuroAmerican winegrowers asserted their
cultural superiority over their Spanish and Mexican predecessors.

Figure 2 This undated image is taken from a menu of the Old Poodle Dog, a famed San Francisco restaurant,
founded in 1849. This image shows progressive sweeping the California landscape in the form of wheat
cultivation. Courtesy of the California State Library, Sacramento, California

.
24

23
Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 67.

24
Bergez-Frank Old Poodle Dog Collection, Box 2759: Folder 3, California History Room,
California State Library: Sacramento, CA.

77
Throughout the West—as in California—Manifest Destiny denoted a sense of mission
and nationalism that gave purpose to the work of all agriculturists, including vineyardists. As did
many Americans during the antebellum period, California’s new cultivators believed that
American expansion across the continent would “spread progress and enlightenment to all
mankind.”
25
Manifest Destiny offered direction to growers and fostered a sense of place and
nationalism, which emerged as “a dynamic capitalist orientation” channeled through westward
expansion.
26
Given the context of national expansion throughout the 1850s, California’s new
vineyardists associated their own arrival with the onset of civilization along the Pacific. Western
agriculturists lamented Californios’ ignorance of “the agricultural resources of their State” This
attitude dismissed Californios’ management of the region as viticulturists, like the citrus farmers
who would follow in later decades, used their labor to “legitimize the uprooting of Native
Californians and Mexicans.”
27
In the ten years since annexation, EuroAmerican growers had
transformed California by expanding its population and increasing wealth not only through gold
mining—as had the first waves of immigrants—but also through agriculture, industry, and trade.
Thus, these vineyardists and winemakers embraced their self-appointed roles as cultivators of
grapes and of California itself.
Vineyardists, winemakers, and boosters alike used religion in their descriptions of grape
cultivation in order to establish a sense of moral authority for their labors. As such, farming—
and viticulture, in particular—was elevated as a noble profession serving a higher purpose on the

25
Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 21.

26
Anders Stephanson, xiv, 28.

27
Sackman, Douglas Cazaux, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Empire, (University
of California Press, 2005), 19. See also David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers,
Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1873-1920, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

78
frontier. Newly arrived agriculturists throughout California portrayed themselves as patrons of a
rich and unique environment. Growers described California as a divinely-bestowed Promised
Land, and they heralded nature’s gifts in the hopes of expanding cultivation across the West.
Throughout periodicals, farming manuals, and agricultural conventions, boosters and cultivators
alike proclaimed the glories of Pacific terrains. An article in Atlantic Monthly glorified “Our
Pacific sister, from whose generous hands has flowed an uninterrupted stream of golden
gifts…her luscious grapes rich with the breath of an unrivaled climate…”
28
Boosters used poetry
to emphasize to audiences in California and elsewhere the promises of the West,
O California, Prodigal of gold
Rich in the treasures of a wealth untold,
Not in thy bosom’s secret store alone
Is all the wonder of they greatness shown
Within thy confines, happily combined,
The wealth of nature and the might of mind,
A wisdom eminent, a virtue sage
Give loftier spirit to a sordid age.
29

This poem, shared at a statewide convention of agriculturists, drew upon religious themes to
underscore the wealth of natural advantages in the west. The poet acknowledged the state history
in gold speculation, but quickly moved beyond the promise of quick riches to draw the reader’s
attention to the “treasures of a wealth untold.” These environmental wonders promised to
unleash untold treasures upon the tillers of the land. The poet painted images of a moral
landscape built upon the foundations of nature. This natural environment could even redeem
Californians from its “sordid age,” perhaps in reference to its recent mining past, and guide them
towards virtue and wisdom. This wonder towards California’s imagined natural advantages was

28
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864: 600.

29
“Annual Address of Joseph W. Winans, Esq.” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society for the Years 1866-1867, (Sacramento: State Printer, 1868), 88.

79
not uncommon amongst the state’s immigrants. However, vineyardists—a subgroup of
specialized horticulturists—especially took to heart this call of action.
EuroAmericans drew upon Judeo-Christian metaphors to affirm their conviction that
California was the chosen land. At agricultural conventions, attendees rejoiced over the natural
bounty which “the Creator of the Universe bestowed upon California,” from “its generous soil
teeming with fertility” to “its glorious, health-giving climate—its beautiful valleys, clad in
flowers and verdure….”
⁠30
EuroAmericans basked in rich “virgin” soils—a natural advantage
they believed would, under prudent management, lead to unprecedented levels of prosperity.
31

The California State Agricultural Society congratulated its members on their noble labors in
helping to improve the West through cultivation, taking full advantage of the region’s
unsurpassed soils, temperate climates, and other natural elements most desirable to the farmer or
horticulturist. The Pacific Shores were home to the “bounties of nature prodigally displayed as if
this far west bordering the sea had been chosen out as the favored of Providence for the sunniest
blessings and happiest destiny.”
⁠32
One grower declared before an audience of fellow
agriculturists, “what country under Heaven presents so many inducements to tempt the cupidity
of the avaricious, to inspire the laboring man with hopes of opulence and ease…to bring back to
the roseate hue of health to the pallid cheek of the invalid? Nature appears to have lavished her

30
California State Agricultural Society, Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial
Exhibition, Held at San Jose, October 7
th
to 10
th
, 1856, (San Francisco, California Farmer
Office, 1856,) 28.

31
“Appendix,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual Fair 1856, 70.

32
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1870-71,
(Sacramento: T.A. Springer State Printer, 1872), 79.

80
best gifts upon this favored land.”
⁠33
This western region seemed exceptionally healthful, truly an
“inheritance” of “virgin soil, prolific of all things but the ague and pestilence.”
34
For
contemporaries, these rich natural bounties were not accidental, but a deliberate blessing for
which Californians ought to offer “unreserved gratitude…to Him at whose hand” they had
received them.
35
Growers invoked themes of Manifest Destiny to denote the mission of the
United States to “overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development…”
36

Agriculturists even suggested that divine predestination and fortune had led them to settle in the
West. They pointed to the timing of the gold rush immediately following the Mexican War as a
sign that “Providence had reserved it to be made by a people distinguished for energy and
enterprise, and whose form of government was best calculated to develop its wonderful
resources.”
⁠37
Thus, California’s newest residents associated the natural landscape with divine
favor. In their eyes, it was not simply luck or happenstance that they had claimed a terrain
teeming with rich soils and favorable climates, but divine favor.
Growers and their supporters also employed Christian language to encourage their peers
to take full advantage of the natural bounties at their feet. Unlike farmers in the eastern states
who labored to uproot seemingly endless forests, the shores of the Pacific were blessed with
“millions of acres already cleared, of surpassing fertility and productiveness, and clothed in the

33
California State Agricultural Society, Third Annual Fair 1856, 32.

34
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858, (Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1859), 63.

35
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1868 and 1869,
(Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, 1870), 3.

36
Anders Stephanson, xi.

37
California State Agricultural Society, Third Annual Fair 1856, 25.

81
richest verdure, unequaled in loveliness of scenery and salubrity of climate.”
⁠38
California
abounded in land free of towering forests and needing only “hardy pioneers” to take up the plow
and capitalize on the region’s rich gifts. Newcomers could undoubtedly improve the state
through agriculture, making for themselves “homes in California which shall suffer in
comparison with none in the nation.”
⁠39
T. Starr King, a New York transplant to San Francisco
and Unitarian minister, addressed California’s growers during State Agricultural Society’s 1862
annual fair. King was an ardent unionist acutely aware of the dangers facing the Union; he spoke
of California’s natural wealth as the foundation of a strong nation. He encouraged these farmers
to treat the soil and natural “treasures” of the region as a trust, offered to them on the condition
that they use them to build “stable wealth and a rich civilization.”
⁠40
William Daniels, whose
vines garnered premiums at multiple agricultural fairs, attributed his success to the natural
advantages afforded him in the West. He expressed hope that “this boon of a beneficent
Providence to the people of California may be duly appreciated and that the men placed in this
Garden of Eden” improve it and preserve it” by pursuing vine culture.
41
Though not himself a
grower, Governor Leland Stanford also described agricultural work as a noble pursuit serving a
higher purpose.
42
He drew from Biblical and historical examples to support the idea that farming

38
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1860, (Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1861), 326.

39
Ibid, 25.

40
“Annual Address of T. Starr King,” in Transactions of California State Agricultural Society
During the Year 1863, (Sacramento: O.M. Clayes, 1864), 65.

41
William Daniels, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 160.

42
Stanford did own vineyards, orchards, and gardens, but he did not himself labor in the fields or
even have a direct role in managing his farmlands.

82
was in and of itself a righteous profession that engaged an “active intellect” connected to “the
education and intelligence of a country.”
⁠43

Vineyardists and winemakers interpreted their early successes as a sure indication that
California was naturally endowed with the best environmental conditions for grape cultivation.
Religious expressions and feelings of predestination were incredibly influential in propagating
the idea that California was divinely suited for viniculture. Dr. J. Strentzel, an active member of
the Agricultural Society from Contra Costa County, described his region as “highly favored by
nature for a wine country.”
⁠44
The temperate climate allowed grapes to ripen on the vine for three
months longer than in eastern locations, producing superior juices.
45
Strentzel also claimed that
local soils nurtured highly productive vines with only a “trifling degree of care,” which allowed
them to leap “lavishly, like magic from its soil.”
⁠46
Strentzel claimed that California’s virgin soils
contained the ideal balance of minerals for the vine. He encouraged growers to plant varietals
best suited to their localities, following the “enterprise, perseverance, and good judgment of
pioneers of viniculture” like Agoston Haraszthy who had brought to California centuries of
experience from Europe, ostensibly placing the state on an equal footing with the best and

43
“Annual Address of Governor Leland Stanford,” in Transactions of California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 43, 50.

44
“Dr. J. Strentzel, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 162.

45
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1859, (Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1860), 301; “Dr. J. Strentzel, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 162.

46
Ibid, 150.

83
oldest” wine regions of the world.
⁠47
The fact that the vine thrived in the state’s arid climate
suggested to some that “heaven” had singled out “the vine for its especial protection.”
48

Viticultural boosters such as Strentzel almost universally wrote without formal training,
expertise, or scientific evidence. Many lacked even basic experience as vineyardists in the West
beyond a few growing seasons. Without credentials or experience to support their claims,
boosters and growers relied on Christian language, mythic language, and hyperbolic claims—
themes that would resonate with audiences both in the West and throughout the United States.
Conquest required growers to go beyond regulating the natural environment to create of a
body of knowledge specific to the state’s vineyards and wineries. In the absence of an
agricultural college or other formal institution of agricultural learning in California,
horticulturists published their opinions in an attempt to share information and establish scientific
standards.
49
In some cases, growers—sought to establish themselves as proficient and
authoritative cultivators. By sharing knowledge and alleging their purported scientific expertise,
EuroAmerican grape growers reaffirmed their appropriation of California. As vineyardists shared
information with one another, they engaged in a distinct form of conquest in which the
California’s newly colonized vineyards “functioned as sites where important new linguistic,
scientific, and historical models were formulated and contested.”
50
Growers created a new

47
J. Strentzel, “Observations on the Planting and Pruning of the Vine,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1870 and 1871, 490.

48
“Vineyards of California,” J.S. Silver, Overland Monthly 1, no. 3, (September 1868): 307.

49
The University of California was not founded until 1868. I discuss this in chapter 3.

50
Tony Ballantyne, “Paper, Pen, and Print: The Transformation of the Kai Tahu Knowledge
Order,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53:2, (2011), 233. Ballantyne points a body
of literature that argues that colonial spaces were not only places where natural raw materials
were extracted, but also operated as sites of creation. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism:

84
paradigm of vineyard culture and winemaking. The standards of California’s recently
commercialized wine industry diverged from that of Spanish and Mexican winegrowers in that
they focused on the environmental conditions, grape varietals, and viticultural methods that
would yield the highest economic returns. By undermining Spanish and Mexican standards of
wine production and challenging the knowledge passed down from Franciscan missionaries with
new tropes, immigrant winegrowers used science to assert their power and engage in a form of
cultural triumph.
In 1854, the Committee on Agriculture within the State Legislature appealed to public
concerns about civilization, progress, and morality to urge the State Government to establish an
Agricultural Society. The committee members heralded crop cultivation as “the basis of the
wealth and prosperity of all civilized nations,” and the only means of obtaining an accurate index
of the state’s “moral, mental, and scientific progress.
51
Thus, the Committee encouraged
legislative officials to support such “an enlightened system of agriculture” to prevent the state
from regressing to a barbarian condition under “the present Mexican….and the ancient Spanish
cavalier” which the cultivation of crops, trees, and flowers was nonexistent.
52
They further
argued that the financial and administrative backing of the legislature was integral to the creation
of a “great Pacific empire” founded upon the tenants of land ownership, agricultural arts, and
environmental beauty. The Committee charged the legislature with a paternalistic moral duty to

Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860,
(Cambridge University Press, 1994); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial
Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (Yale University Press, 2000); James Delbourgo
and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (Routledge, 2008)

51
“Appendix,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual Fair, 1856, 69.

52
Ibid, 57, 69.

85
protect and nurture agricultural industry.
53
The patronage of the state government would enable
the large-scale cultivation of California’s virgin soil, decrease the importation of food and
manufactured goods from the East, and improve the state’s finances by increasing exports of
local products to the rest of the United States and even to the newly opened markets of China and
Japan. As such, this proposed Agricultural Society would benefit the state as a whole, regardless
or industry or class.
54
They further prescribed a sense of citizenship and nationalism to their
campaign, maintaining that the agricultural pursuits of “the cultivated man constitute the
foundation upon which the social system rests, and binds the citizen to his country by the
strongest of all ties.”
55
An agricultural organization could strengthen the connections between
California’s citizen’s and the nation as a whole.
The work of the California Agricultural Society between 1854 and 1870 offers window
into the role of organized agriculture as an avenue of conquest and reformation away from
Mexican-Californio cattle ranching. In an effort to transform the state’s miners into farmers
whose work might modernize and refine California, the Assembly passed a bill founding the
State Agricultural Society in May 1854. The legislature further charged the Society with the
responsibility of holding regular agricultural exhibitions and with establishing an experimental
station for scientific research. Combined with membership dues and revenue from annual fairs,
this legislative appropriation would pay for premiums at exhibitions awarded at exhibitions and

53
“Appendix,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual Fair, 1856, 70.

54
Ibid, 60.

55
Ibid, 69.

86
for the publication of educational pamphlets.
56
The Society’s supporters strived to make
connections between their new organization and similar groups in the eastern United States that
advocated for scientific innovations in cultivation and husbandry and modernized farming from
“mere routine of ignorant drudgery to an elevated and intelligent system of scientific labor.”
57

The Agricultural Society’s supporters hoped that its impact would extend far beyond the
confines of farming to affect society at large. Samuel B. Bell, a minister based along the San
Francisco Bay and an avid supporter of a college for the state, predicted that the Agricultural
society would raise California and, indeed, the United States out of the confines of “barbarism,
mental and physical, and spiritual poverty.”
58
Though membership in the State Agricultural
Society was open to any individual pursuing agriculture or husbandry, viticulturists were a vocal
faction within the Society.
During the Society’s early years, its members challenged the merits of mining and
encouraged growers to experiment with crops other than wheat. One of the primary activities of
trade groups such as the California Agricultural Society and its specialized sub-group, the
Special Committee on the Culture of the Grape-Vine, included the distribution of educational
promotional pamphlets. Usually published by the state printer, these booklets often adopted an
informational bent, seeking to teach locals and potential immigrants abut the basics of farming
and husbandry in California. Other publications shared the reports of the visiting committee,

56
“Appendix,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual Fair, 1856, 70;
“Financial Summary, 1854-1858,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society
for the Year 1858, 44.

57
Official Report of the California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth Annual Fair, Cattle Show
and Industrial Exhibition 1857, (San Francisco: O’Meara & Painter, 1858), v.

58
“Annual Address given by Honorable Samuel B. Bell,” Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1858, 57.

87
officials whose chief responsibility it was to tour the state and report back on the work of
especially progressive farmers, usually in order to award premiums. These reports often
celebrated the most productive or innovative growers whose methods might serve as models for
other growers. In addition to sharing data about soil, climate, plant varietals, and irrigation, many
of these educational pamphlets assumed the language of boosterism in order to attract
immigrants to California and encourage her existing populations to pursue specialized
agricultural ventures beyond wheat cultivation. By moving away from wheat cultivation and
mining, newcomers could help put the state on the path to prosperity. In particular, they
demanded “governmental encouragement” that would fund investigations and experiments with
new plants and methods best suited to Western terrains.
59
Colonel J.B. Crockett lamented the
fact that the region’s early fixation with mining had left California without any locally-produced
manufactured goods and, more importantly, agricultural products. According to Crockett, this
inhibited the earning capabilities of Californians.
60
The diversification of crops away from the
single-crop production of wheat or barley would allow Californians to stop importing fruit,
vegetables, and other products from distant markets.
61

The Agricultural Society looked to specialized horticulture—especially viticulture—as
California’s ticket to unleashing its potential wealth. Many believed that the newly
commercialized wine industry was “destined, in no time, to become the leading pursuit of

59
“Report to Governor H.H. Haight,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Years 1868 and 1869,” 13.

60
“Colonel J. B. Crockett’s Address,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Third Annual
Fair, 1856, 27-28.

61
“The Grape,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year
1859, 297.

88
California enterprise.”
62
With the proper investments and a steady supply of labor, California’s
wine industry could be developed so as to be first among all wine-producing states and to
become a staple export.
63
Capital invested in winegrowing would offer much higher returns than
that put into mining and would offer employment to “occupy millions of people in the cultivation
of the vine.”
64
The Agricultural Society reassured those who found grape-cultivation appealing
but were intimidated by winemaking daunting, promising that they could “find a ready cash
market for his grapes by hauling them to the wine makers,” with less trouble and expense than
that associated with grain cultivation.
65
Unlike the oversaturated wheat market, winegrowers
faced little competition both at home and in markets abroad. Indeed, the viticultural faction
within the Agricultural Society even went so far as to claim that the profits on wine shipped
abroad more than counterbalanced shipping costs. Given that winegrowers did not regularly ship
their goods east until the late 1860s, this was likely untrue.
One way to convince potential growers to take up viticulture was to offer examples of
“pioneer” winegrowers who managed successful vineyards and wineries. During the 1850s, the
Agricultural Society’s publications especially focused on established growers whose labors were
helping to civilize California. Ironically, these established EuroAmerican and European
viticulturists often had put down roots in California during the Mexican period and were mostly
clustered in Los Angeles. For example, William Wolfskill, an American immigrant to Los

62
“The Grape,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year
1859, 297.

63
“Report of the Visiting Committee,” in Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial
Exhibition, 1856, 15.

64
“The Grape,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year
1859, 298.

65
Ibid, 298.

89
Angeles, had begun fermenting Mission wine for the market by the late 1830s. His vineyard—
heralded as a model institution—produced table grapes, wine, and brandy from nearly forty-
thousand vines. The Agricultural Society’s 1856 Visiting Committee commended Wolfskill for
his “pure red wine.” They also praised the Sansevain Brothers—nephews of Jean Louis
Vignes—for building several new wine cellars and for maintaining high levels of production
without compromising the purity of their award-winning unadulterated wines. By 1858, the
Sansevain establishment epitomized “enterprise, science, and skill enriched by large experience
and noble philanthropy.”
66
Likewise, Benjamin Davis Wilson received commendations for
maintaining a thriving ten year-old vineyard of sixteen thousand vines, with plans to expand
production to a “superior article of champagne wine.”
67
Mathew Keller, an Irish immigrant who
had settled in Mexican California in the 1840s, also showed off his vineyard for the visiting
committee. Among wine boosters, the accomplishments of these viticulturists proved without a
doubt that grape cultivation was naturally suited to California’s native soils and climate. The
Agricultural Society praised these growers for their work and offered them up as model
viticulturists, but they also ignored the fact that the wealth and experience of this group was
rooted in the Mexican era. By doing so, the Agricultural society had appropriated the history of
the Spanish-Mexican wine industry and sanitized it for its EuroAmerican audience.
By highlighting this cohort of winegrowers as model American cultivators, wine boosters
essentially ignored how this early generation of vintners differed from those who arrived after
1848. Wolfskill and Vignes had assimilated into Mexican-Californio culture, and did not
challenge the Californio status quo but instead embraced it. Wolfskill had married Doña

66
“Report of the Visiting Committee,” in Transactions of the California Agricultural Society
During the Year 1858, 286.

67
“Report of the Visiting Committee,” in Third Annual Fair, 1856, 21.

90
Magdalena Lugo, the daughter of a prominent Californio family from Santa Barbara. As a
Catholic, Vignes had become a prominent resident of Los Angeles and was even by his Spanish-
language name, Don Luis Vignes, or Don Luis del Aliso after the tree that distinguished his
property.
68
Likewise, Benjamin Davis Wilson was known as Don Benito Wilson and Mathew
Keller as Mateo Keller. The Agricultural Society’s visiting committees ignored most Californio
winegrowers, those of Mexican or Spanish descent who predated the American period. One
exception was Don Manuel Requeña, whose landholdings in the center of Los Angeles included
eight acres “under excellent cultivation.” From oranges to almonds, to his vineyard of
approximately five thousand vines, the committee was especially impressed by the
improvements and advancement around Requeña’s farm, demonstrating what “taste and culture
can do upon a small scale, in the heart of a city.”
69
Requeña, described as a “Castilian,” was
distinguished from his Californio peers by his “well-cultivated mind, and a high order of
intelligence.”
70
New generations of growers were ready to move beyond these methods and
adopt the latest technologies and imported grape varietals that distanced them from the outdated
tools and plants utilized by winegrowers in Spanish and Mexican California. The newly minted
horticulturalists of the Agricultural Society sought to distinguish themselves from California’s
Catholic past and move the region into the modern American present. The Transactions of the
Agricultural Society praised growers like Requeña, but they also emphasized education and

68
Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 246-249.

69
“Report of the Visiting Committee,” in Third Annual Fair, 1856, 16.

70
“Report of the Visiting Committee,” in Transactions of the California Agricultural Society
During the Year 1858, 286.

91
modern horticultural methods. In doing so, the Agricultural society began to hint at modernity
and progress as a marker of racial distinction.
As California’s farmers increasingly turned away from wheat cultivation to specialized
horticulture, they industrialized agriculture as a capitalist venture. This transition to “corporate
commercial agriculture” brought with it problems of modernity and industry, such as
transportation and infrastructural issues.
71
In doing so, their business decisions distinguished
them as capitalist industrialists concerned with markets, technology, and capital. By the mid-
1850s, viticulturists had succeeded in producing large amounts of wine, but they lacked markets.
In Southern California alone, the viticultural community claimed to have nearly one million
vines within a sixty-mile radius of Los Angeles in 1856. Faced with the problem of marketing
and selling their products, individual winegrowers turned to trade organizations to help create a
demand for their homegrown wines. They were also concerned with building infrastructure by
which to transport goods, both within and beyond the state. This was especially problematic for
vineyardists in Los Angeles, who lacked reliable and inexpensive means by which to ship their
grapes to San Francisco, from which their wine either could be sold or transported to the Eastern
United States and other locations abroad. The Agricultural Society campaigned for government-
supported infrastructure. First, California desperately needed a railroad connecting Los Angeles’
horticulturists with markets in San Francisco’s urban consumers and international port. Second,
the state needed a transcontinental railroad linking the West with the Eastern seaboard. Not only
would this greatly facilitate and cheapen the exportation of California’s goods, but it would also
make it easier for new immigrants to travel to the Western frontiers.

71
Ralph J. Roske, Everyman’s Eden: A History of California, (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1968), 395-396.

92
In order to expand the markets for California wines, the Board of Managers of the
Agricultural Society instructed vintners on how to improve the quality of the local vintage. By
1860, California had a seventy-year tradition of wine cultivation. Still, the managers suggested
that the region’s history of wine manufacturing was still “far too young” to have produced wines
of “sufficient age to have attained the highest excellence of which they are capable.” In order to
improve the caliber of homegrown wines, local wine-makers needed more time to “exhaust the
field of experiment in the choice of varieties of grapes, locality, or character of soil, or the varied
processes by which wines coming from our peculiar soils and made under the influence of our
peculiar climate are to ascent…in the scale of excellence.”
72
Viticulturists needed support for
research into grape varietals, soil, climate, and fermentation methods—essentially building a
solid foundation on which to construct a viable industrial wine empire. Without such assistance,
winegrowers would be unable to bring local wines up to par with European vintages and
establish a worldwide market for California wines.
Viticultural promoters used educational and booster publications to encourage growers to
move beyond Franciscan winegrowing methods, which they often relegated to the past or
denigrated as rudimentary and backwards. M.G. Gillette, a Democrat and State Assembly
representative from California’s 7
th
district, offered such views in an 1861 pamphlet he authored
for the Special Committee on the Culture of the Grape-Vine. The intended audience of this state-
funded publication included potential growers. Gillette adhered to a standard booster script that
sought to stimulate enthusiasm for this business and encourage cultivation in new areas, thereby
expanding agricultural settlement throughout California. Gillette acclaimed the “old Spanish
Fathers, pious missionaries who had effected a spiritual conquest over the miserable barbarians,

72
“Report of the Board of Managers,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society, During the Year 1860, 29-30.

93
introduced the grape, and taught its culture to the reduced natives.”
73
He commended the Spanish
Fathers for these early conquests of California’s indigenous populations and for the introduction
of agricultural arts. Gillette designated the missionaries as the state’s earliest patrons of
civilization, Christianity, and progress. He further credited the Franciscans for laying the
foundations for the success of American winemakers, noting that from the vines of the missions
and from those vineyards planted throughout Los Angeles, he and his comrades had produced
some of their best wines. For Gillette and his readers, the labor and conquests of the mission
priests was part of the past. In fact, Gillette commemorated the state’s first generation of
winegrowers because they were part of history. He described these as times long gone, and with
them, traditions that died with the arrival of gold seekers, when “the peaceful art of agriculture
was almost lost sight of” until ‘pioneering’ Americans and Europeans like Vignes, Wolfskill,
Keller, persevered to launch a modern era of viticulture.
74
Gillette hoped to teach fellow growers
how to move beyond the methods of Spanish winegrowers and build on the foundation laid by
the American and European growers of the 1830s and 1840s.
Gillette used the French wine industry as an example—albeit a qualified model—to
which California should aspire. Gillette was incredulous that the French had built a profitable
wine industry that profited on the export of “vast quantity of spurious liquors.”
75
He further
lamented the money that Californians sent to Europe in exchange for “unhealthy and poisonous”

73
M.G. Gillette, Report of Special Committee on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California:
Introduced by Mr. Morrison Under Resolution of Mr. Gillette, to Examine into, and Report
Upon, the Growth, Culture, and Improvement, of the Grape-Vine in California, (Sacramento:
Charles T. Botts, State Printer, 1861), 3.

74
Ibid, 3.

75
Ibid, 4.

94
adulterated French wines.
76
According to Gillette, California should have no difficulty turning a
healthy profit by selling wine that was not a fraudulent, adulterated product, but instead a pure
wine made from high caliber foreign grapes. He did not doubt the abilities of Californians to best
the French in wine production, even going so far as to boastfully predict, “What has taken the
French people centuries to attain, will be accomplished in a few lusters by our people.”
77

Ultimately, Gillette believed that growers should model the California wine industry after that in
France by producing wines made from foreign grapes and by exporting pure wines.
Gillette and his committee effectively lobbied the state legislature to support research,
education, and the distribution of plants and materials amongst viticulturists throughout the
region. The committee concluded its report by encouraging the governor to appoint a special
three-person commission, whose task would be to research the varietals and methods best suited
to viticulture in California. Gillette specifically requested that these commissioners collect
“useful and valuable grape-vines, cuttings, and seed for distribution among our people, and…to
report to the next regular Legislature upon the means best adapted to promote the improvement
and growth of the vine in California.”
78
The legislature responded quickly to the pressures of
Gillette and the State Agricultural Society, establishing a Commission to “promote the
improvement and Growth of the Grapevine in California.”
79
Governor John Dewey quickly
appointed a three-person committee, which included J.J. Warner of San Diego, Abraham Schell
of Stanislaus County, and Agoston Haraszthy of Sonoma. In April 1861, the Legislature

76
M.G. Gillette, 5.

77
Ibid, 7.

78
Ibid, 9-10.

79
Thomas Pinney, 275.

95
commissioned these men with the task of investigating the best means by which to advance the
wine industry in California. The Commissioners worked as volunteers and were to receive no
compensation for their work, though they did function as official representatives of the state of
California. Even without direct financial compensation, this report marked an important
milestone in which grape growers and winemakers collectively leveraged their influence to
secure government-sanctioned officials whose primary duties it was to research methods,
technology, and plants for the advancement of their private industry.
With this coup, the Agricultural Society led the push for further government support for
scientific research and the professionalization of farming, among other means of furthering
agricultural industry. In May 1861 as the United States was gearing up for Civil War, Haraszthy
embarked on a fact-finding tour of European wine districts. Though the state legislature did not
fund this fact-finding excursion, it does not diminish its importance as a state-sanctioned mission
completed in Haraszthy’s official capacity as a State Commissioner on the Improvement and
Growth of the Grape-Vine in California. Haraszthy articulated two important civilizing goals.
First, he hoped to court immigrants to California from Europe, particularly agriculturists who
were not yet aware of the region’s agricultural potential. Second, he planned to learn about
European winegrowing methods and production technologies. Last, Haraszthy hoped to observe
differences between grape varietals so as to import the European vines best suited to improving
the state’s wine-producing capabilities. He worked at cultivating a market for California wines in
Europe. Haraszthy also believed that supporting agriculture was important not only for
improving upon the California’s frontier, advancing education, and increasing its financial
wealth, but also for increasing immigration. Haraszthy acknowledged that the price of labor in
California was high, but maintained that these costs were “more than counterbalanced by the

96
greater value of land and the enormous taxes on these productions in Europe. The development
of these branches of industry would not only add to the wealth of the State, but it would also lead
to a large immigration from Europe.”
80
Haraszthy also used his findings to argue in favor of
government-sponsored research and in support of the establishment of a college of agriculture. In
keeping with European governments who appropriated “large sums every year…for the
encouragement of these most important branches of their wealth.”
81
Thus, Haraszthy was tasked
with the job of developing wine industry by improving upon California’s population and its
natural environment.
Once in Europe, Haraszthy explored many of the continent’s wine regions, collecting
vines and gathering information on grape growing and winemaking on behalf of the state.
California, he boldly proclaimed, had the natural potential to produce as “noble and generous a
wine as any in Europe.”
82
The state’s vineyards offered higher productivity per acre and more
favorable weather conditions than European vineyards, Haraszthy argued. California’s
burgeoning wine industry promised to “add to the wealth of the State [and] also lead to a large
immigration from Europe.”
83
Haraszthy was well aware that both eastern Americans and
Europeans denigrated the western frontier as an uncivilized and feral country. In order to change
these prevalent attitudes about the west, Haraszthy believed in the importance of actively
advertising California’s promising agricultural potential, including its vinicultural possibilitis.
With the goal of attracting desirable capitalists from Europe who were as yet unaware of

80
“California Commission on the Culture of the Grape-Vine” in Report of Commissioners on the
Culture of the Grape-Vine in California, (Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1861), 7.

81
Ibid 7.

82
Ibid, 6.

83
Ibid, 7.

97
California’s rich resource, he extolled the promise of the state’s natural terrain. Indeed,
Haraszthy recounted Europeans’ “excited surprise that a State so young and so isolated, should
have wealth of agriculture and horticulture as I proved, and this surprise among Europeans is not
so wonderful, as California was there known principally for its gold. Even our eastern brethren
were astonished when I showed from our reports the extraordinary productiveness of our soil and
the salubrity of our climate.”
84
As the proprietor of the Buena Vista Vineyard in Sonoma—one
of the state’s largest vineyards—Haraszthy had an avid personal interest in promoting California
wine outside the state.
Figure 3 1864 depiction of Haraszthy's Buena Vista Ranch in Sonoma, California.
85

Scholars have greatly inflated the impact of Haraszthy’s trip in changing the course of the
industry in California and in actually introducing new European varietals from Europe.
86

84
Report of Commissioners on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California, 8-9.

85
Reports of the Board of Trustees and Officers of the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society, (San
Francisco: Alta California Job Office, 1864), 3.

98
Evidence demonstrates that important wine varietals, like Zinfandel, were already present in
California before Haraszthy’s European journey.
87
However, Haraszthy’s talents as a hyperbolic
booster were important in shaping the course of the California wine industry. The publicity that
colored this journey was an important advertisement of the California wine industry in both
Europe and the east. Haraszthy set an important precedent by using his position as a state-
sanctioned public official to advance his private business and that of his industry at large.
Hybridization and the Science of Winegrowing
In order to promote winegrowing as a profitable trade, self-proclaimed grape experts
outlined optimal conditions for raising healthy vines. Viticulturalists agreed on the importance of
planting in soil free from impurities and obstructions, but they diverged on what constituted ideal
vineyard soils. John S. Hittel described Sonoma’s clay and sandy loam as inadequate for wheat
farming but optimal for growing grapes. He also suggested that the magnesium limestone in
Sonoma’s bedrock was “particularly favorable to the growth of the grape.” In Napa, Hittel found
a soil composed primarily of gravel, hence ideal for grapes.
88
George Husmann, a viticultural
expert from Missouri who later worked with the College of Agriculture, declared California
richer in “first class grape lands than all of Europe put together” and cautioned his audience
against planting in “rich, level bottom lands” or in “tenacious clay or adobe soils.”
⁠89
William
Daniels, whose fine grape crop garnered the first prize at the 1863 Agricultural Fair, suggested

86
Thomas Pinney, 277-283.

87
Ibid, 277-278.

88
John S. Hittel, The Resources of California Comprising Agriculture, Mining, Geography,
Climate, Commerce, etc, and the Past and Future Development of the State, (San Francisco, A.
Roman & Company, 1863), 158.

89
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California: A Practical Manual for the
Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker, (San Francisco: Payot, Upham, & Co., Publishers, 1888), 131.

99
that a rich gravelly loam was best suited for vineyard culture, as its dryness prevented stagnant
water from pooling around the roots.
90
The runner-up to Daniels, Dr. J. Strengtzel, concurred; he
noted the importance of finding a soil that would retain moisture to nourish the vine without
inhibiting drainage and causing mold.
91
All of these experts agreed that pure, strong soil was
indispensable for nurturing excellent grapes. Soil uninhibited by stones would allow grapevines
the freedom to take root and flourish. In their natural state, the state’s diverse soils offered
promising terrain for vineyards. The missing link was reliable information teaching novice
growers how to pick from such a wealth of diverse soils.
The most important decision a grower faced was to select a grape varietal—a choice that
ultimately came down to the question of Vitis vinifera or the “native” Mission vine.
92

During
the first two decades of American rule in California, nationalism infused debates comparing the
Mission grape to Vitis Vinifera. Viticulturists initially raved about the resilience of the Mission
grape. Novice growers followed suit with the established vineyards of the Missions and
Californio vineyardists throughout the 1850s and ‘60s. Published grape culture guides and
reports, distributed by the California State Agricultural Society, claimed that the Mission grape
seemed “peculiarly adapted to this climate” as it was a “strong grower,” that might, through

90
William Daniels, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 157.

91
“Dr. J. Strentzel, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 162.

92
For EuroAmericans the Mission, or California grape, was an indigenous plant. In actuality,
Franciscan missionaries had imported this grape from Spain via Mexico in the eighteenth
century.

100
grafting, improve “the more feeble foreign” varietals of grapes.
93
Still, the Agricultural Society
felt there was not yet sufficient information comparing foreign and native vines to merit the
uprooting of Mission vineyards. Gillette, a state assemblyman from California’s 7
th
district, often
wrote articles for the Agricultural Society. hoped that California growers could halt the
importation of European wines by improving their own winemaking abilities at all stages of the
process, from the selection of soil and vines through fermentation and bottling. Though Gillette
acknowledged the superior flavor of European grapes, he proposed further investigation of native
grapes in California, “We must not, while we are seeking the rich and valuable vines of the older
portions of the civilized world, neglect the search and domestication of such of the wild grapes
of California, as a beneficent Providence has given us.”
⁠94

For Gillette, it was imprudent to cultivate alien vines without first coaxing California’s
natural gifts to their full potential. Writing for Overland Monthly, J.S. Silver worried that foreign
vines might not be resistant to arid western climates as was the Mission grape. In light of
criticism over the flaws of Mission wines, Silver acknowledged that California wines did indeed
have a different flavor than what Americans were accustomed. According to Silver, Easterners
who complained that Mission wines were “too fruity” and “too spirituous and too unlike the
European” had simply never encountered such a pure product. Newcomers to California were
struck by the unique flavor Mission wines not because they were of poor quality, but because the
wines were thought to be purer than the overly adulterated wines made by the Vitis Vinifera

93
“The Grape” and “Report on Native Wines,” Transaction of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Year 1859, 298.

94
Gillette, M.G. Report of Special Committee on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California:
Introduced by Mr. Morrison Under Resolution of Mr. Gillette, to Examine into, and Report
Upon, the Growth, Culture, and Improvement, of the Grape-Vine in California. Sacramento:
Charles T. Botts, State Printer, 1861, 7.

101
grape outside of California.
95
Though growers were ambivalent about the flavor of Mission
grapes, they were as yet unprepared to forfeit the California grape for Vitis vinifera without first
attempting to improve and refine the native grape, either through grafting or crossbreeding. By
improving the Mission vine growers ultimately hoped to transform these grapes into productive
and hardy American plants whose juices both improved Mission wines of the past and surpassed
European wines of the present.
However, EuroAmerican vintners began expressing reservations about the feral nature of
native vines. These qualms extended beyond to the history behind the native vines, a history that
included unsavory Spanish missionaries and Mexican-Catholic Californios. Growers faced the
task of planting American roots in an industry so firmly rooted in foreign elements. Further,
quick profits were critical in the post-1848 transformation of winemaking into a modern
industry. Winemakers focused on improving their product to appeal to broader markets and thus
improve the profitability of winegrowing. Since viticultural experts wanted growers to produce
large quantities of first-rate wine for export, they stressed the importance of selecting strong,
high-yielding varietals that stood up to diseases and pests. Though the “native” California grape
displayed other traits of value, fruit-growing authorities clearly derided its value in producing
valuable wine. These experts drew upon capitalist arguments to extol the importance of profits
and thereby justify the transition to foreign vines. Vitis Vinifera grapes promised to secure profits
for a winemaker and while advancing the “civilizing” value of his wine. Though Mission grapes
were “rich in sugar when fully ripe” and furnished a product with high alcohol content, these

95
“Vineyards of California,” Silver, J.S. Overland Monthly, 1, no. 3, (September 1868): 307-
309.

102
wines offered “little flavor or bouquet.”
96
Because the value of a wine depended on color,
consistency, and the integrity of the grape, vintners soon began to distrust the purity and
consistency of native California grape vines, eventually turning to European vines to ensure that
they produced wine of integrity and quality. John Hittel, who found no fault with native soils or
local climates, believed the Mission grape to be a poor investment. Native grapes would garner a
mere six to eight pounds at market in San Francisco; at such a price, Mission cuttings would not
even pay for the expense of their cultivation. Meanwhile, foreign grapes sold for twenty-five to
thirty-seven cents per pound, and their cuttings commanded forty to one-hundred and fifty
dollars per thousand.
⁠97
John Hittel warned that “the superiority of the foreign grapes” would
make the old grape stock obsolete, perhaps just like the Missions themselves. For him, the flavor
of the produce—a key factor lacking in the Mission grape—was of paramount importance. He
argued, the “lack of fruitiness is the great misfortune of the wine made from the Californian
grape,” an “evil” rectified by fermenting only foreign grapes.
98
By importing European plants,
Hittel was certain vineyardists could correct the “inferior” character of denizen plants.
One potential solution to the problem of native grape stock was to assimilate foreign
vines to California’s environment through controlled plant breeding with the Mission vine. In
order to acclimate alien plants and prevent against degeneration, controlled reproduction required
that viticulturists learn the best methods of planting. In their treatise written for California grape
growers, James Black and William Simmons recommended that winegrowers graft Mission
vines to “the more feeble foreign sorts.” Growers should graft the hardy native California grape

96
J. Knaught, “Wine Making and Fining” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Years 1870 and 1871, 500.

97
John S. Hittel, 195

98
Ibid, 195.

103
to varietals that possessed “those qualities which are wanting in our own” and which contained
less sugar and more acidic flavors, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, and “Riessling and
Kleinberger” grapes.
99
By interbreeding native grapes with imported varietals, growers sought to
improve native plants, essentially through miscegenation. Carefully controlled cross-breeding
would allow growers to successfully acclimate foreign vines to the local environment while
hopefully retaining the superior characteristics of European wine grapes.
Metaphors for civilization, cultivation, and miscegenation infused viticultural rhetoric and
distinguished fruit-growers as patrons of California’s society and culture. These concerns about
improving grape vines carried over to debates over how to plant a vineyard; for growers, the best
methods achieved high yields, hardy vines, and grapes of excellent quality. Though sowing seeds
was the most basic method for planting a vineyard, its benefit allowed for relatively simple
hybridization. John Warder, a medical doctor and avid horticulturist from Ohio had edited a
French viticultural guidebook for vineyardists across the United States.
100
Though Warder
acknowledged that vineyard culture had yet to reach the levels it had in France, he firmly
believed that by educating American growers about the intricacies and science of winegrowing,
their capabilities as “sovereign workmen” would enable them to take winegrowing to new
levels.
101
Warder offered examples of viticulturalists from across the country who had “made
systematic attempts to improve the native grape, by fertilizing with the pollen of choice foreign

99
“The Grape” and “Report on Native Wines,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Year 1859, 298, 303.

100
In the mid-19
th
century, Ohio and Missouri were both important winegrowing regions for the
United States.

101
A. Du Breuil, and John. A. Warder, ed, Translated by E. and C. Parker, Vineyard Culture
Improved and Cheapened With Notes and Adaptations to American Culture, (Ohio: Robert
Clarke and Co., 1867), vii.

104
varietals.” Warder acknowledged that planting by seedling was inefficient, but nonetheless
encouraged its use. By hybridizing foreign seeds with those of local varietals, growers could
prevent against “the tendency to run back to the wild characters,” which was “not so great with
our vines as with those of the species Vitis Vinifera of Europe.”
⁠102
This new generation of
EuroAmerican growers used plant reproduction to further manipulate native vines and
domesticate California away from her former state. Meanwhile, John Warder argued that plant
variations generally improved across generations, “These diversities are sometimes so
remarkable…particularly as they relate to color, as in the instance above cited, where black was
changed to white—a remarkable change.” Using metaphors for miscegenation, Warder
applauded the transition from black to white between plant generations as a promising
improvement and refinement amongst the vines. He identified an opportunity for the grape
grower to control the evolution of his grapevine by identifying the “pedigree of the seeds” to
prevent “mixed parentage.”
⁠103
By “judiciously” crossing seedlings, Warder suggested that
growers could avoid “degeneration” to produce “a variation from the original, normal type.”
Still, this grape expert avoided offering a blanket endorsement for crossbreeding, particularly in
regards to the propagation of buds. In the case of buds the grower could not control the parental
origins of the offspring, generating a “constant liability for them to have had a mixed
parentage.”
⁠104
Cross-parenting offered a means of improving wild, unruly vines, but he warned
against imprudent miscegenation. Though viniculturists had the potential to civilize the people of
the frontier, Warder seemed to warn against ill-advised racial mixing.

102
A. Du Breuil, and John. A. Warder, 66.

103
Ibid, 91.

104
Ibid, 91.

105
EuroAmerican planters disciplined grapevines in order to alter California’s uncultivated
terrain and directly reorder nature. Grape growers meticulously trained vines to grow in
directional rows and conform to arbors. John Warder commended Americans’ progress in the
department of plant discipline, declaring, “The Yankee is again ahead in his calculations.” He
celebrated the techniques used by his peers to carefully regulate grapes, such as “the wider
planting he [the grape culturist] has adopted.”
⁠105
While these techniques gave them power over
the landscape, winegrowers also believed that plant training directly influenced the quality and
productivity of their plants and wine, which in turn determined their profits. William Daniels
discussed the importance of managing the vines and “training them along rows,” as well as the
importance of “pruning and training” the vines, regardless of variety.
106
Dr. J. Strentzel reassured
those growers who were concerned about over-pruning or “checking the natural growth of
plants” and disrupting the “balance of power “ between the fruit and the roots. He argued,
“judicious pruning” was “indispensable to the production of fine fruit.” He further maintained
that there was no loss in the “balance of power” because the root was “governed by the growth of
the branches, and by curtailing the superfluous wood,” a grower could “obtain an extra supply of
nourishment for the fruit or for new wood…”
107
This was a learning process in which growers in
California looked to the eastern United States and Europe for models for controlling grape
vine—and by default, reordering California’s feral landscapes. Disciplining grape vines afforded
viniculturists the opportunity to civilize nature and turn a profit.

105
A. Du Breuil, and John. A. Warder, 108.

106
William Daniels, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 159.

107
“Dr. J. Strentzel, “Essay on the Culture of the Vine,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Year 1863, 165-166.

106
The Fruits of Hyperbole: Boosterism and Winegrowing
Proponents of viticulture and winemaking used periodicals to advertise California’s
imagined natural advantages in the West and to encourage enterprising immigrants to take up
viticulture and put the land to good use. Boosters composed optimistic articles and letters to
newspaper editors to publicize the environmental riches enjoyed by vineyardists. California
Farmer served as an outlet for farmers in general and for promoting the merits of different
agricultural trades. Early on, however, the editors of California Farmer paid special attention to
the wine industry.
108
Vineyardists relied on California Farmer to garner support for their
products and to attract newcomers to their ranks. In one such letter to the editors of California
Farmer, Thomas J. White heaped praise upon the efforts of his neighboring growers in Los
Angeles. He described the Sansevain Brothers, a team of “truly enterprising and most excellent
gentlemen” who had succeeded their Uncle, Don Louis Vignes, in managing his vineyard in Los
Angeles.
109
The Sansevain Brothers, White declared, were model cultivators and winemakers.
Their vineyard exemplified a “high state of cultivation” in contrast to other tracts of land, which
lay in a neglected state of dilapidation. Their acumen for making fine wines offered a model for
aspiring winegrowers as well. White also praised Don Benito Wilson’s skill in producing
effervescent sparkling wines at his vineyard at San Gabriel. Others shared exaggerated
predictions that wine production would reach eight million gallons by 1872, especially since
grape vines were far more resistant to drought than wheat and other grains.
110

108
Thomas Pinney, 368.

109
Th. J. White, “Los Angeles Vineyards,” California Farmer, October 5, 1855, 107.

110
“Foot-Prints of Progress West of the Rocky Mountains Wine and Vineyards,” California Mail
Bag, July 1871.

107
Viniculturalists also promoted their trade outside of California with the specific goal of
enticing white American immigrants from the Eastern United States to racially whiten and
civilize California. They often relied on cultured rhetoric, possibly to validate their claims for
their overwhelmingly Christian readership. Thomas J. White also sought to increase the appeal
of Los Angeles for potential settlers from the Eastern United States and Europe who could
racially whiten California while expanding the wine industry. He proclaimed, “there is no
portion of the world in all probability that produces grapes in so great an abundance” and where
the crops “never fail.” White even went so far as to describe the climate and soils of Los Angeles
as “the Italy of California” in order to provide imagery that readers could understand.
111 ⁠ Agoston
Haraszthy was an early wine booster who wrote about his experiences at his Sonoma-based
vineyard, Buena Vista, in order to educate the masses on how to improve wine production and
encourage others to take up winegrowing. In order to attract “desirable” white migrants, Agoston
Haraszthy encouraged his vinicultural peers to take fact-finding trips to Europe. By sending
agents representing California to Europe, Haraszthy believed they “would come in contact with
all classes of persons, questions would be eagerly asked, and opportunities be thus afforded to
publish the advantages California possesses.”
112
Not only could travel teach viniculturalists new
techniques, but it also offered the reciprocal benefit of attracting new residents. Haraszthy’s 1858
Report on Grapes and Wine of California also sought to educate new growers. Described as
“first native Californian treatise on the subject,” Haraszthy was actually a recent immigrant to

111
Th. J. White, “Los Angeles Vineyards,” 107.

112
Agoston Haraszthy, California Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Report of the
Commissioners on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California, (Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery
State Printer, 1861), 8.

108
California who had only just arrived in the region in late 1849.
113
A Hungarian immigrant who
claimed a dubious noble heritage, Haraszthy had already left his mark on Wisconsin, San Diego,
and San Francisco. Possibly to rebuild the reputation he sullied in San Francisco and start anew,
Haraszthy had, by 1857, abandoned his business interests in the city again pursue winegrowing,
a venture he first experimented with in Wisconsin.
114
This time, the climate of his new home in
rural Sonoma County favored him. At best, Haraszthy’s writings served as educational treatises,
but his enthusiast publications were more often replete with boosterism and hyperbole. Ever
concerned with expanding California’s wine business, Haraszthy often exaggerated or
oversimplified the process of winegrowing in order to further the growth of the business.
Haraszthy’s first treatise was neither remarkable nor extraordinary in its content, but it
was nonetheless important. It was the first pamphlet on California wine written by an immigrant
grower with local experience, and not one from Ohio or Missouri, to obtain national
circulation.
115
Haraszthy began by offering a brief history of viticulture in California, discussing
Franciscan missionaries as pioneer winemakers who relied on Indians and antiquated methods to
produce their wines solely from the Mission grape. Next, Haraszthy offered a superficial
summary of climate, soil, planting and pruning, and costs associated with planting a vineyard.
However, he offered no information on where he got his statistics, either from his own Buena
Vista Vineyard or elsewhere. He also simplified the process of winegrowing, presumably to
make it an attractive venture for both potential horticulturists and investors. Haraszthy’s Report

113
Thomas Pinney, 275.

114
In 1857, Haraszthy was charged with fraud in his management of the U.S. mint. Though he
was eventually acquitted of these charges in 1861, he left the city and purchased a vineyard in
Sonoma. Thomas Pinney, 273.

115
Thomas Pinney, 275.

109
read like an advertisement to attract more grape growers, largely underestimating the start-up
costs and difficulties associated with vineyard care, especially when compared to its
contemporary agricultural manuals. For example, he claimed that California’s “oldest inhabitants
have no recollection of a failure in the crops of grapes.”
116
Though Haraszthy’s Report proved
somewhat unremarkable, it did establish Haraszthy as an early advocate of the California wine
industry who sought promote the business and transform the wine industry into a prominent and
financially lucrative business.
In an 1858 letter to O.C. Wheeler, Corresponding Secretary of the Agricultural Society,
Haraszthy again encouraged non-experts to take up viticulture. Even if one was daunted by the
science involved in the manufacture of wine, he could always sell his grape crop to willing
vintners on the open market in San Francisco. Haraszthy himself reported selling his grapes at a
higher rate than he could command for wine. He dismissed the “misconception that it was
expensive to build a cellar,” citing the low wages that were standard in Sonoma.
117
Given
California’s “favored localities in soil and climate,” Haraszthy was certain that if winegrowers
planted only favorable foreign varietals, California could soon produce “as noble wines as in any
part of Europe.”
118
Though Haraszthy’s appeals to potential new immigrants seemed
counterintuitive in that it would increase economic competition among wine industrialists, he
saw expansion of the wine industry as a positive thing. These new winegrowers could help
expand the industry and bring more attention to it. Newcomers from European and Eastern wine

116
Agoston Haraszthy, “Report on Grapes and Wine of California,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858, 313.

117
“Farm of Colonel A. Haraszthy,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society
During the Year 1858, (Sacramento: John O’Meara, State Printer, 1859), 242.

118
Ibid, 242.

110
regions, such as Missouri, could also contribute expertise and skills to California’s budding wine
industry. Finally, Haraszthy celebrated the arrival of White immigrants from the United States
and Europe, insinuating that population changes such as these would be positive for the state.
Mediterranean of the Pacific
Like many other nineteenth-century newcomers to California, winegrowers attempted to
refine the state by emphasizing similarities with the regions of Europe they perceived to models
of culture and civilization. Comparisons between California and the South of France, Italy,
Greece, and Spain abounded. The Spanish analogy especially held fast given California’s roots
in the Spanish Empire.
119
Boosters manufactured a regional Mediterranean identity as a
metaphor for “the emerging Pacific civilization.”
120
They did this to calm fears that American
culture maintained a tenuous hold on California. Later in the nineteenth century, this proclivity
would influence gardens and architecture in cities across the state, but in the 1850s and 1860s,
discussions of a Mediterranean California expressed civilization through nature and agricultural
cultivation. Boosters praised local climates and landscapes that vied “in beauty and salubrity
with the classic skies and balmy breezes of Italy, ‘neath whose gentle influences …the vine
flourishes throughout our land….”
121
These comparisons allowed EuroAmericans to
acknowledge the state’s Spanish Catholic past, while satisfying a need for order, history, and
unique regional design that maintained a contradictory “sense of fresh beginning and fertile

119
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (Oxford University Press,
1973), 9, 390.

120
Ibid, 374.

121
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1861, (Sacramento:
Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1862), 155.

111
possibility.”
122
From the region’s undesirable Spanish Catholic history, elites used the
Mediterranean analogy to construct a new California: an idyllic, historic, and stable civilization.
By describing California as the Mediterranean of the West, boosters hoped to educate
both locals and outsiders about the horticultural potential of the region. One could look beyond
California and, indeed, the United States, to similar climates for education and inspiration—
especially since the Pacific coast was so very different from eastern terrains with which many
immigrants were accustomed. Wine boosters also offered examples of prosperity in the hopes of
making California seem more established and civilized. The fact that the grape vine thrived in
California seemed “obviously symbolic of civilization” and proved to EuroAmericans that
“California was not an unrelieved wilderness.”
123
As such, California was no longer a daunting
foreign place but could become one’s “home, Proud Mistress of the Pacific” where “the rosy-
cheeked god, Bacchus, revels in thy vine-clad hills.”
⁠124
The Officers of the State Agricultural
Society often emphasized the similarities between California and Italy to offer agricultural
education for crops like olives, grapes, and wine.
⁠125
The Agricultural Society cited “intelligent,
well-informed Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards” in declaring that there was no
European country “better adapted to the cultivation of the vine and the manufacture of wine and
brandy” than California.
126
The region’s low rainfall and rich soils would surely produce wine as
good as that grown in France, Madeira, or along the Rhine. Further, the widespread consumption

122
Kevin Starr, 407, 403.

123
Ibid, 371.

124
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1861, 155.

125
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1857, 111.

126
Ibid, 111.

112
of wine could help decrease intemperance amongst Westerners, as it had been claimed to be the
case in France where tradition exalted, “More wine, more work, more wine, more sobriety.”
⁠127

Winegrowers could even expand their production beyond the vineyard to grow the peripheral
products needed to produce wine, such as oak for barrels and cork for bottles. Because cork
flourished in Spain, it was assumed that it would easily acclimate to the climate in California and
decrease the importation of European cork. By cultivating Mediterranean crops, especially
grapes and the peripheral goods most important to wine production, horticulturists could raise
their profits while simultaneously reforming California.
At the same time they aspired to forge a Mediterranean identity in California, local
winemakers derided European viticultural methods. This contradictory rhetoric would be a theme
among California winegrowers for decades to come as they struggled to legitimize their products
in the wake of negative stereotypes about Western wines. These paradoxical attitudes extended
to imported plants and goods, exposing another glaring contradiction in their civilizing
campaign. Wines fermented from Vitis vinifera were undeniably European, and the transition to
imported grapes had been heralded a vast improvement over the Mission grape. Further, the
ostensibly “American” product that flowed from California’s wineries necessitated the use of
French bottles, Spanish cork, and German cork covers before going to market.
128
Despite the
growth of local wine industries, Californians continued to import millions of gallons of wine
from abroad every year, at the same time boosters professed natural advantages in
winegrowing.
129
When wine boosters promoted their wine as a pure product of California, they

127
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1857, 111.

128
Frona Eunice Wait, Wine and Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine Drinking,
Facsimile Edition. (1889; Reprint, Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1973), 22.

113
disregarded the fact that their best wines were made using foreign grape stock. Though
viniculturalists sought to refine California, they could not do so without literally importing
European goods to advance the process.
Vinicultural experts generally recognized the dominance of Vitis vinifera varietals and relied
on these foreign vines to ferment wines, but they declared American growers to be far more
superior and skilled in the vineyard and winery.
130
California’s winegrowers often derided
continental winemakers’ agricultural technique, business acumen, and wines. Boosters described
the American people as hardworking, decent laborers, thus distancing themselves from
uncivilized Spanish and Mexican Catholic winemakers and well-intentioned Europeans. In an
1864 article, Atlantic Monthly acknowledged the Spanish roots of winemaking in California.
However, the magazine credited “American enterprise…with developing the wonderful capacity
which had so long slumbered in the bosom of this most favored land.” The magazine enticed its
readers westward, extolling California’s “climate [that] is all that could possibly be desired,--as
during the growth and ripening of the grapes they are never exposed to storms of rain or hail,
which often destroy the entire crop in many parts of Europe.”
⁠131
John Warder applauded the
“American workman” whose “intelligent labor” made him an independent, “capital sovereign,
who always prefers to direct his own efforts, and will often improve upon the teachings of his
professor.
132
Here, Warder disdained Europeans who labored in the fields as mere “subjects”
lacking freedom and innovation. Wine production also promised to help Californians achieve

129
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society for the Year 1860, 330.

130
Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, Vol. VII, 1860-1890, (San Francisco, The
History Company Publishers, 1890), 47.

131
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864: 601.

132
John. A. Warder, iv-vii.

114
self-sufficiency and ingenuity in improving old-world winemaking techniques. Atlantic Monthly
envisioned a future in which wine would become so common a beverage as “to break one more
of the links which bind us unwilling slaves to foreign lands.”
⁠133
Together, these attitudes
underscored the tensions that characterized the American management of the commercial wine
industry. Vintners and vineyardists understood their own labor, knowledge and techniques to be
superior to those of Europeans, while at the same time they sought to fashion a Mediterranean
identity for California that negated fears that the region remained backwards and racial.
Conclusion
By the late 1860s, three distinct wine growing districts had emerged in California. The
state had seemed to achieve status as “the land of the vine” as the leaders of the State
Agricultural Society had predicted years earlier. The name of California, particularly Los
Angeles, would be “as famous for wine and for the grape as that of California for gold.”
134
The
oldest and most developed was Los Angeles, the nexus of viticulture in California.

Vintners in
Los Angeles produced Port, Angelica, and Muscat, while continuing to cultivate the Mission
Grape. Winegrowing also flourished along the North Coast and in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Along the North Coast, the diverse soils of the Sonoma and Napa valleys helped foreign grape
vines flourish more readily than in Los Angeles. The close proximity of Sonoma and Napa to the
markets and ports of San Francisco gave vintners in this region another advantage over their
peers in Los Angeles. Further north, a cohort of viticulturists thrived in the foothills of the Sierra
Nevada. The climate and the red, granitic soils of the foothills of the motherlode produced
flavorful, high caliber wines. By 1866, El Dorado County had produced 200,000 gallons of wine,

133
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864: 600.

134
Transactions of the California Agricultural Society for 1860, 330.

115
nearly matching Sonoma’s approximately 235,000-gallon output for the year.
135
Still, these
regional growers struggled to overcome their distance from San Francisco, so much so that by
the 1870s, wine production in the foothills had dropped off behind that in Los Angeles and
Sonoma.
Despite the commercial growth of wine production, viticultural supporters across the
state still found themselves occupied with concerns over California’s status as a modern
American place. Campaigns to expand the wine industry echoed earlier booster campaigns that
publicized the natural advantages that viticulturists enjoyed and that encouraged growers to
educate themselves using modern methods. Viticulturists argued that in order to make
winegrowing “one of the most extensive and profitable industries of the State,” they simply had
to teach new growers effective technique to prevent the sale of “adulterated or spurious” wines
and to protect the reputations of pure California wines.
136
Though the wine industry still lacked
the support of a formal agricultural college and well-trained horticultural experts, boosters
predicted a promising future for the wine business. With a ready market, high profits, and ideal
environmental conditions, winegrowing seemed to be the perfect industry to transform new
immigrants into cultivators and capitalist industrialists.
Still, Brace’s negativity about California did not seem to be completely unfounded.
California’s transformation away from its Spanish-Mexican roots seemed incomplete, despite the
optimism of winegrowers and boosters. Winegrowers had established a budding commercial
industry—far expanded from its time during the Mexican period. Yet, the industry had yet to

135
Herbert Boyton Leggett, The Early History of Wine Production in California, (San Francisco:
Wine Institute, 1941), 82, 93.

136
“Wine,” in Transaction of the California Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and
1867, 36.

116
completely uproot the industry from its the Spanish-Mexican past. It remained for new
immigrants—both enterprising viticultural entrepreneurs and horticultural scientists to the new
University of California—to complete this transformation and assert American conquest.

Chapter 3: Nation Building, Modernity, and the American Industrialization of
Winemaking
In 1853, John Frohling and Charles Kohler were but two of the thousands of new
immigrants to San Francisco. Trained as musicians in their native Germany, they met in
California when they began working as musicians and helped found the Verandah Concert
Society.
1
In September while enjoying a lunchtime walk to the Cliff House, the men snacked on
some grapes with John Beutler, another fellow musician. According to legend, they were so
struck by the flavor and beauty of the grapes that at that moment, they concocted a plan to “hang
up the fiddle and the bow” and move to Los Angeles to begin making wine.
2
They had no prior
experience in agriculture or in winemaking. Despite this ignorance, their firm, Kohler &
Frohling, would become hugely successful. Contemporaries praised Kohler & Frohling as
pioneer winemakers whose hard work and determination were helping to transform winemaking
into one of the most important industries in California.
3
Indeed, an 1864 article Atlantic Monthly
credited California’s newest winemakers, including Kohler & Frohling, for transforming the
wine industry from its provincial beginnings under Spanish and Mexican management. The
magazine declared, “it remained for American enterprise, aided by European experience, to

1
Thomas Pinney, The Makers of American Wine: A Record of Two Hundred Years. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 58-59.

2
According to Charles Kohler’s records, John Beutler, a fellow musician, accompanied him and
John Frohling that day. Beutler hailed from a winegrowing region in Germany and it was he who
actually noted that California grapes showed promise as wine grapes and suggested they start a
vineyard. Beutler originally partnered with Kohler and Frohling but had to withdraw from the
business to travel east with his sick wife. “An Account of the Wine Business in California, from
Materials Furnished by Charles Kohler,” MSS C-D 111, Bancroft Library: Berkeley, CA.
Hereafter BL. “Charles Kohler” manuscript, MSS C-D 264, 12-13, BL. Quoted in Thomas
Pinney, The Makers of American Wine: A Record of Two Hundred Years, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2012), 58.

3
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864, 604.

118
develop the wonderful capacity which had so long slumbered in the bosom of this most favored
land.
4
Growers like Kohler and Frohling modeled the industriousness necessary to improve
California towards American standards of modernity and productivity.
Between 1850 and 1870, the wine industry underwent an economic transformation that
transformed it into a conduit of citizenship and nationalism in California. As winegrowers
increasingly relied on state aid and public resources to expand their industry, they helped define
the parameters of national belonging in California around the notion of an agricultural citizen.
First, the establishment of the University of California in the late 1860s created a College of
Agriculture to support scientific research and modern innovation. Second, trade groups like the
California State Agricultural Society harnessed the collective energy of growers in order to
create new markets, expand production, and educate vineyardists about new methods. They
hoped this would help modernize the industry beyond the rudimentary methods of Franciscan
missionaries. Viticulturists also employed the resources of public institutions for infrastructural
projects and tax exemptions. Though they were not always successful in obtaining funds from
the legislature, the political appeals of vineyardists established an important precedent for future
generations of growers, blurring the lines between the public and private spheres and furthering
the conquest of California. German winegrowers like Kohler and Frohling embodied the ideal
agricultural citizen as someone who owned vast tracts of land, used cutting-edge technology, and
employed hired laborers to do all vineyard work. Ultimately, vineyardists and winemakers
became nation builders who helped define the parameters of citizenship around notions of
science, modernity, and land-ownership.
Kohler & Frohling and the German Colony at Anaheim

4
“California as a Vineyard,” 601.

119
After their fateful conversation outside of the Cliff House in San Francisco, Kohler and
Frohling began laying the groundwork for their new enterprise. Kohler and Frohling soon
embodied many of the characteristics of the model agricultural citizen that the Agricultural
Society desired. First, they purchased land in Los Angeles, the epicenter of vineyard culture.
Their vineyard, purchased for twelve thousand dollars in 1854, was already planted with over
three thousand bearing Mission vines.
5
They divided management of the business. John Frohling
remained in Los Angeles to oversee the vineyard and wine production while Charles Kohler
returned to San Francisco to take charge of sales. By day, he sold wine from a basement
storehouse on Merchant Street; by night, Kohler played his violin to earn money to keep the firm
afloat. Though they had barely cleared enough to finally give up their musical employment, the
wines of Kohler & Frohling earned first prize at the 1858 state fair.
6
Their cellar included a
diverse array of wines, including white wines, brandies, and even fortified sweet wines like
angelica, port, and sherry.
7

As their small enterprise grew in the late 1850s, Kohler and Frohling looked to expand
their business. First, they augmented their own crop yield by purchasing grapes from other
prominent Los Angeles growers, including William Wolfskill, Mateo Keller, and Leonard J.
Rose of Sunny Slope in San Gabriel.
8
This allowed them to increase the production of wine
without the further investment in land or increased vineyard maintenance. Kohler remedied the

5
“An Account of the Wine Business in California, From Materials Furnished by Charles
Kohler,” MSS C-D 111, BL.

6
Vincent P. Carosso, The California Wine Industry: A Study of the Formative Years, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1951), 31. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 255.

7
Vincent P. Carosso, 33.

8
“California as a Vineyard,” 604.

120
chronic shortage of glass bottles that he and other winemakers faced by engaging in a form of
vertical expansion. The firm entered into partnership with another firm, Taylor and Company, to
found Pacific Glass Works in October of 1862. Previously, Kohler & Frohling had imported
empty glass bottles from out-of-state, incurring heavy transportation costs that increased the
price of one bottle of wine by eleven to twelve cents.
9
Though their ownership stake was small,
this investment in the glassworks allowed Kohler & Frohling to drastically decrease their
manufacturing costs. Finally, the firm began exporting its wines to New York Markets in 1862.
10

Though they faced competition from other American winemakers in Ohio, Missouri, and New
York, Kohler & Frohling found eastern markets receptive. Between 1864 and 1868, the firm
established New York and Chicago offices to directly market its wines in eastern cities as well as
in Germany and Denmark, among other European countries.
11
Finally, in 1865 Kohler decided to
expand his company’s vineyards to the Sonoma. Ultimately, this wine house was among the first
to begin the transition to the northern coast.

9
Vincent P. Carosso, 36.

10
Though John Frohling died suddenly in 1863, the firm retained his name.

11
Vincent P. Carosso, 35. “An Account of the Wine Business in California, From Materials
Furnished by Charles Kohler,” MSS C-D 111, BL.

121

Figure 4 Kohler & Frohling Wine Label, undated. Courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of
American History.
12

Kohler and Frohling relied on modern winemaking methods that diverged sharply from
those used by Mexican and Spanish vintners. Though both men were German immigrants, their
status as citizens was confirmed by their use of modern technology and their large landholdings
across the Los Angeles region. As early as 1858, their winery garnered prizes at fairs hosted by
the California Horticultural Society and the Agricultural Society.
13
Six years later, a national
article in Atlantic Monthly singled out Kohler & Frohling as one of California’s premier wine
houses. It especially noted the firm’s use of machinery to press the grapes. Their mechanization
allowed the company to purchase the grape crops of numerous Los Angeles vineyardists and
process them into wine. Despite these mechanical novelties, Kohler & Frohling still relied on
Indians to harvest and gather the grapes, as well as to operate the wine press. Though they had

12
Warshaw Collection of Business Americana #60, Wine Series, Box 2, Folder 16, Archives
Center, Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

13
“Native Wines,” Los Angeles Star, October 23, 1858.

122
removed Indian feet from the grape crush, they still required Indian labor to complete the
winemaking process. Atlantic Monthly described this as “a novel and interesting sight to see
them [Indians] filing up to the press, each one bearing on his head about fifty pounds of the
delicious fruit, which is soon to be reduced to an unseemly mass, and yield up its purple life-
blood for the benefit of man.”
14
These German winemakers differentiated themselves from their
Franciscan predecessors by putting machinery between Indian bodies and the grapes. Though the
continued presence of Indians might negate the modernity of the firm, contemporaries of Kohler
& Frohling help up the winery as a model for innovation and clean, efficient wine production.
The business needs of Charles Kohler and John Frohling led the way for the colonization
of Anaheim southeast of Los Angeles. As demand for their wines increased, Kohler and Frohling
enlisted the help of George Hansen to establish a winegrowing colony in Los Angeles. Frohling
and Kohler had a personal interest in supporting an agricultural colony. By 1855 when they
approached George Hansen with this idea, Kohler and Frohling’s wine firm was doing so well
that its owners hoped to expand, perhaps without the trouble of planting new vineyards
themselves. They hoped a vineyard settlement could increase the supply of grapes available for
them to purchase while simultaneously transforming the “empty spaces of Los Angles
County.”
15
Hansen, an Austrian immigrant, was a well-known surveyor who helped map the city
of Los Angeles in the early 1850s. By 1857 Frohling, Kohler, and Hansen had laid the
groundwork for the planned agricultural community.
Hansen sought to recruit German immigrants from San Francisco who were willing to
become vineyardists. Eventually, fifty willing colonists gathered to form the Los Angeles

14
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864, 603-604.

15
Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007), 285.

123
Vineyard Company. The Society mostly included mechanics, ex-49ers who “were not even
eminently successful in their callings..[and] were not getting rich in San Francisco, where most
of them lived.”
16
Other immigrants were fleeing the German Revolution of 1848.
17
In total, these
thirty-two investors included “several carpenters, a gunsmith, an engraver, three watchmakers,
four blacksmiths, a brewer, a teacher, a shoe-maker, a miller, several merchants, a book-binder, a
poet, four or five musicians, a hatter, some teamsters, a hotel-keeper, and others.”
18
Not one of
them was a farmer by trade, and only one member of the cooperative —Theodore Reiser—had
any experience with brewing and winemaking.
19
A cooperative offered an affordable solution by
which they could escape the city and pursue an agrarian life. The Vineyard Society set the price
of each share at $250, to be paid in installments.
20
By consolidating their resources, the members
of the Los Angeles Vineyard Society (a joint-stock winegrowing cooperative) were able to buy a
ready-made vineyard of twenty acres. These families were “ready enough to better their fortunes,
but to whom it would have been impossible to buy for cash a ready-made farm of even twenty
acres.”
21
Finally, the Los Angeles Vineyard Society was formally incorporated on February 24

16
Charles Nordhoff, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence: A Book for Travelers and
Settlers, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1873), 175.

18
The Los Angeles Vineyard Society began with less than thirty investors, but this number grew
to over fifty by 1859 when the first colonists left San Francisco for Anaheim. Charles Nordhoff,
1873, 175.

19
Dorothea Jean Paule, “The German Settlement at Anaheim,” (Master’s Thesis, University of
Southern California, 1952), 10.

20
Leo J. Friis, Campo Aleman: The First Ten Years of Anaheim, (Santa Ana: Friis-Pioneer
Press, 1983),17. Though the price per share began at $250, the high cost of labor and materials
eventually raised the price to $1200. Minutes of the Los Angeles Vineyard Society.

21
Ibid, 175.

124
1857 in San Francisco.
22
The transformation of these former urban dwellers into landowners and
viticulturists modeled the emergence of agricultural citizenship in rural Los Angeles County.
This settlement proved to be an ethnically homogenous community, largely segregated
from Los Angeles both in terms of culture and in terms of distance. Indeed, the physical
separation of the colony from both Los Angeles and from the Californio settlements in Santa
Ana (where the Yorba family lived) indicated its distinction as a non-Mexican, non-Spanish
settlement. Though these immigrants remained culturally German, their town and vineyard
enterprise was defined by its modernity and differentiation from its Mexican-Californio
neighbors. The board of the Vineyard Society hired Hansen as their chief overseer and
superintendent. Hansen’s first order of business was to select a suitable plot of land with water
rights whereby they could plant grapevines and build homes for the Los Angeles Vineyard
Society. Given his expertise as a surveyor, he was likely very familiar with lands in Los Angeles
and its surrounding areas.
23
After a long search around Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley,
Hansen and Frohling located a promising land tract owned by Juan Pacifico Ontiveros and his
wife, Martina Ontiveros. This tract of land that was originally part of the San Juan Cajon de
Santa Ana land grant, an original Spanish land grant first owned by Don Bernardo Yorba, cattle
rancher and brother of Tomas Yorba, and later sold to Don Pacifico Ontiveras. Though near the
Santa Ana River, the Ontiveros’ land, Rancho San Juan y Cajon de Santa Ana, did not border the
river or even have legally defined water rights. To remedy this, the Vineyard Society
orchestrated a sale by which Juan Pacífico Ontiveros purchased a strip of land from his neighbor,

22
Leo J. Friis, 15.

23
Mildred Yorba MacArthur, Anaheim: The Mother Colony, (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie
Press, 1959), 4.

125
Bernardo Yorba, for a mere two hundred dollars on September 1, 1857.
24
Though it is not clear
whether or not Yorba was privy to Ontiveros’s plan to sell this land and transfer water rights to
the Anaheim colonists, it is interesting to consider this land transfer within the context of
American encroachment on Californios’ property rights in the decades following the Mexican
War.
25
This small plot would allow the Vineyard Society to channel water from the Santa Ana
River to the parcel of land that the Vineyard Society hoped to purchase. Hansen and Frohling
completed the purchase of the Ontiveros’ property on September 12, 1857 on behalf of the Los
Angeles Vineyard Society, thereby acquiring not only part of the original land grant, but also the
tract deeded to Juan Pacifico Ontiveros by Yorba eleven days before for a mere ten dollars
extra.
26
The Los Angeles Vineyard Society finally had a home of nearly 1200 acres complete
with “the privilege of using as much of the water from the Santa Ana River as appertains to their
said rancho for the purpose of irrigating.”
27
By procuring a suitable tract of land with water
rights, Hansen enabled these German shareholders to plow forward in their colonization project.
Though the colonists were ostensibly vineyardists, they hired workers to complete the
actual hard labor of building their settlement and planting their vineyards. For the colonists,
landownership and not viticultural labor was what helped defined them as agricultural citizens.
The Los Angeles Vineyard Society was incorporated in 1857 but its shareholders did not take

24
Los Angeles Vineyard Society, Deeds to the Los Angeles Vineyard Society, (Anaheim:
Southern Californian, 1874), 1-3.

25
See Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and
Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest Gender and Power in California, 1770s to
1800s, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

26
L.A. Vineyard Society purchased the land for $2/acre. Dorothea J. Paul, 20.

27
Ibid, 4.

126
possession of their land until 1859. In the meantime, they contracted Hansen to oversee
construction of the town while the shareholders continued to live and work in San Francisco and
avoid many of the discomforts of pioneer life. Hansen first subdivided the land into smaller
twenty-acre lots, which laborers plowed and planted with thousands of grape vines. In total,
Hansen employed 88 men, 10 women, 84 horses, 7 plows, 17 wagons to prepare the land for
planting and building.
28
He also set a crew of laborers to enclose the entire property with willow
fences, physically separating it from its neighboring ranches. Labor crews also surrounded the
town with ditches and planted cactus around the periphery to prevent marauding cattle from
disturbing the grape vines.
29
This transformed the uncultivated semi-arid desert into carefully
ordered irrigated plots. Four sturdy wooden gates limited access to the colony and could even be
locked at night to protect against unwanted intruders.
30
These physical barriers offered a tangible
symbol of the colony’s formal separation from the Mexican-Californio economy of cattle
ranching and hide trade. Later generations of Anaheim residents celebrated the agricultural
pursuits of these colonists. Indeed, a booster pamphlet from the 1880s sought to attract new
immigrants by celebrating Anaheim’s role in wresting Southern California from Californios,
“The domain of the cattle king was restricted more and more every year…”
31
The Vineyard
Society ostensibly built these fences, ditches, and cactus barriers to prevent cattle from
disturbing their fruit crops. Still, these physical barriers had greater symbolic meaning.

28
Los Angeles Star, January 30, 1858, Quoted in Mary Alice Grimshaw, “The History of Orange
County, 1769-1889,” (Master’s Thesis, University of Southern California, 1937), 73.

29
Mildred Yorba MacArthur, 30.

30
Ibid, 23-24.

31
Anaheim Immigration Association, Anaheim, Southern California, Its History, Climate, Soil
and Advantages for Home Seekers and Settlers, (Anaheim, California, Anaheim Gazette Job
Print, 1885), 3.

127
By spatially separating their property from the surrounding territories, the Anaheim
shareholders physically divorced themselves from their neighbors and distinguished their
agricultural pursuits as different from the work of their neighbors. These new vineyards were
carefully subdivided, planted, and irrigated away from their previous use as semi-arid cattle
grounds. Given the aridity of the land in and around Anaheim, water rights and systems of
irrigation were key to the success of the vineyards. The colonists soon discovered that the most
efficient way to transport water to the vineyards was to bring it from the river to the grapevines
via a complex system of ditches. The colony’s reliance on a modern irrigation system afforded
Anaheim some freedom from drought concerns. For example, the drought of 1864-65 severely
impacted the lands surrounding the colony. Anaheim alone remained green on account of its
“fine irrigation system,” causing cattle to invade the area “by the thousands,” forcing
Anaheimers to defend their grapevines by placing guards outside the community’s fenced
enclosure.
32
Water was of such importance that Hansen oriented the town’s streets in accordance
with the flow of water to facilitate its transport across town.
33
The complex ditch system that
provided a steady flow to the vineyards was also symbolic of Anaheim’s modern structure. Its
water system underscored its status as an agricultural colony, distinct from its neighboring
Californio cattle ranches. Ironically, the Anaheim colonists were not the first residents in their
region to use irrigation. Californio rancheros, including the Yorba family, had relied on irrigation
systems for years.
As winemakers, these Germans adopted standards of modernity and cleanliness that
helped define the parameters of whiteness for the region. Indeed, this German modernity that

32
Harris Newmark, 329

33
Hallock F. Raup, The German Colonization of Anaheim, California, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1932), 130.

128
distinguished the colonists from its Mexican-Californio neighbors was key for the
Americanization of the region. The Anaheim colonists adopted new technologies that further
divorced the winemaking process from its Spanish-Mexican roots. Anaheim winemakers
employed Frohling’s system of pressing the grapes. The colonists argued that this modern system
offered more uniformity in production than the traditional Spanish-Mexican practice of crushing
the grapes by having Indian workers walk on them. Frohling’s tread-wine press system
functioned by separating the grapes from the stem, after which they were churned the hopper, a
large sieve, to remove the stems and other impurities. Afterwards, the grapes were run through a
mill “consisting of two grooved iron cylinders, so gauged as to run as closely together without
mashing the seeds.” The San Francisco Daily Bulletin described this method as “quicker, less
laborious, and far more decent than the old way of ‘treading out’ the grapes.” Further, it
classified Frohling’s method as the most efficient method currently available. The article praised
the treat-wine press system for its cleanliness, “Every night all the presses and appliances used
about them are washed out thoroughly to prevent acidity. Everything that comes in contact with
the grape juice from the time the grape is bruised till it reaches the cask, is kept as pure as
abundance of water and hard scrubbing can make it.”
34
Frohling’s technology restructured the
time-honored winemaking techniques employed by Spanish missionaries. This system provided
yet another arena by which the residents of Campo Aleman could distinguish themselves from
the both the Spanish, Mexican, and indigenous denizens of California, as well as from other
immigrant groups. Frohling’s machinery helped classify these German winemakers as model
workers who relied on modern, efficient methods that rendered their products more pure than
those of other California winemakers. They established such a reputation that one twentieth-

34
San Francisco Daily Bulletin, October 27, 1859, quoted in Leo J. Friis, 53

129
century Anaheim resident remarked, “After reading Frohling’s cleanly methods, no wonder
descendants of Anaheim pioneers shuddered with disgust when asked in Indians treaded out the
grapes for their grandfathers.”
35

Figure 5 This undated photograph of a grape crusher & stemmer exemplifies some of the new technology that
EuroAmericans used to replace Spanish-Mexican winemaking methods. Courtesy of the California State
Library, Sacramento, California.
36

Despite their inexperience as winemakers, Anaheim’s vineyardists proved to be fairly
adept winegrowers. Contemporaries underscored the hard work and progressive technology
employed by Anaheimers to produce their wines. One booster publication praised the colonists,
“These Germans were not wanting in the enterprise and industry which characterizes that class of
our citizens.”
37
Local newspapers, boosters, and historians writing later in the 1880s and 1890s
praised the original Anaheim colonists for their work as plucky pioneers, essentially ignoring the

35
Leo J. Friis, 53.
36
“Grape Crusher and Stemmer,” undated image, #2364, Wines and Wine-Making Photograph
Collection, California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.

37
Anaheim: Its People and is Products, (New York: John F. Carr & Co, 1869), 3.

130
fact that the physical labor involved in colonizing the land was completed by Indians, Mexican,
and Chinese workers. In actuality, these German colonists did very little physical labor with their
own hands to cultivate the land. Instead, they functioned more as a class of landowners and
overseers in charge of overseeing the crews of Indians and Chinese workers who labored in the
vineyards. Under Hansen’s supervision during the first two years of the colony experiment,
Indian workers planted eight thousand grape vines on each twenty-acre lot in the colony, paving
the way for a small first fruit harvest in 1860 first crop. By 1861, Anaheimers produced seventy-
five thousand gallons of wine for the market, a yield that steadily increased each year as more
vines reached maturation.
38
In 1868, approximately ten years after Hansen’s hired workers had
planted the vines, the crop yielded six hundred thousand gallons of wine. And by 1869, a total of
1.5 million vines dotted the Anaheim landscape, with nine hundred thousand already producing
fruit. While newspapers and boosters praised the modern enterprise of the Anaheim colonists,
these successes belied the fact that the decidedly backwards populations of Indians and Chinese
workers were largely responsible for these crops. Ultimately, their presence contradicted the
Americanization rhetoric of the Anaheim colony.
Anaheim winegrowers needed access to water for transportation was necessary in order
to sell the wine. For Anaheim, this meant transporting the wine from its inland location to the
closest port, whereby it could be shipped to San Francisco.
39
In order to shorten the rugged

38
Leo J. Friis, 29.

39
Similar to Chicago, San Francisco’s strategic location was vital to the development of its
surrounding rural areas, even as far south as Los Angeles. Not only did San Francisco provide
capital for investment in the California’s agricultural hinterlands—as made obvious by the
origins of the Los Angeles Vineyard Society—but it also made the far west accessible by linking
it to eastern markets via the Pacific Ocean and overland by train after 1869. San Francisco served
as a gateway city, or “the entrance and exit linking some large reason with the rest of the world.”

131
thirty-five mile journey to San Pedro (the colony’s nearest port), in 1864, the residents
constructed a shallow water port twelve miles south of the colony; they named it Anaheim
Landing and they built a stable level road to ease the transport of goods.
40
Not only did this
signify Anaheim’s importance as a significant shipping center in Southern California, it also
shortened and cheapened the transport of wine from Anaheim to San Francisco. From this bay,
wines could easily be shipped to the eastern seaboard via water, or to Chicago via train after
1876 when the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Anaheim.
41
Thus, Anaheim’s premier export—
wine—could now reach national markets.
The concentration of Germans in Anaheim represented an island of EuroAmerican
settlement in a region whose population in the 1850s primarily consisted of Indians and
Mexican-Californios. In German, the colony’s name, Anaheim, identified the settlement by its
home near the Santa Ana River.
42
Thus, its identity lay in defining it relative to Mexican-
Californios. As recent immigrants, these German colonists had not yet become Anglo
Americans. However, their status as landowners and vineyardists denoted EuroAmerican
whiteness, particularly in contrast to the Chinese and Indian laborers in Anaheim. Though the
German colony’s existence as a modern winegrowing community contributed to the slow process
of racial and cultural change in Southern California, its continued reliance on Indian and Chinese
workers challenged its claims of modernity. The Vineyard Society relied on Indian, Mexican,
and Chinese labor to plant its grapevines and construct its town buildings. During the colony’s

Walter Cronan, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, (New York: W.W, Norton &
Company, 1991), 47-48.

40
Dorothea Paule, 53. Anaheim Landing is in present day Seal Beach.

41
Mary Alice Grimshaw, 186.

42
Anaheim: Its People and is Products, 3.

132
initial years, George Hansen depended on hired laborers, including “Indians and Californians.”
43

In particular, the Vineyard Society hired Yaqui Indians from Arizona and Northern Mexico who
had fled the borderlands in an effort to escape the violence and deportation campaigns waged
against them by the Mexican government.
44
Like their fellow vineyardists in Los Angeles,
Anaheim growers continued to rely on Indian and Chinese workers once Hansen left them to
manage their land. Initially, the Germans hired Yaquis Indians from Mexico instead of local
indigenous groups. The Yaquis were preferred over the California Indians, who were dismissed
for being inefficient workers who “were slow and had to be watched constantly.”
45
Charles
Kroger described the Yaquis as “good workers and could be trusted when well treated.”
46

Unfortunately, the Yaquis disappeared suddenly in 1860; later, the colonists learned that the
Yaquis had been summoned home for war against the Mexican government. By 1860, Henry D.
Barrows noted the great progress the colonists had made in such a short period of time, due
largely in part to the hired workmen, a diverse group of “Mexicans (Sonorians, Chileans, etc.)
and Indians…engaged in transplanting, irrigating, plowing, sowing, etc” for a lump sum labor
expense of $300 per week.”
47
And though most of Hansen’s hired workers were men, the Daily
Alta California noted that “Some of the Mexicans and Indians have their wives and squaws with
them;” this married group of “steady workmen” were distinguished from their unmarried peers,

43
Charles Nordhoff, 175.

44
Nicole Marie Guidotti-Hernández discusses the violence against Yaqui Indians along the US-
Mexico border in Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

45
Lucile E. Dicksen, “The Founding and Early History of Anaheim, California, Annual
Publications, Historical society of Southern California, XI, 1919: 30.

46
Ibid, 30.

47
Henry D. Barrows, Sacramento Daily Union, March 19, 1959, quoted in Leo J. Friis, 38-39.

133
an uncontrollable “wild set.”
48
Anaheim’s Indian and Mexican workers lived primarily outside
the gates of the colony. As such, they were physically defined as outsiders to the German
community. Though these workers were connected to the land by their labor—indeed, the
German colonists could not maintain the vineyards or ferment wine without these work crews—
these communities were, by default, outsiders to Anaheim. Further, the continued presence of
Indians was a constant reminder of the region’s Spanish-Mexican past that challenged attempts
to bring forth a new, American California.
Anaheim’s local identity as a German colony, or Campo Aleman, ignored its Chinatown,
whose residents who were a vital part of the colony from its inception. Almost immediately after
purchasing its land, the Vineyard Society hired a group of Chinese workers in San Francisco.
Some reports state that thirty Chinese men travelled south and settled in the town to work in
Anaheim for twenty-dollars per month, including board and lodging.
49
Other reports claim that
Chinese residents received town lots. According to the colonists, the Chinese “proved to be good
farmers, were industrious, sober, clean, peaceful and in every way a welcome contrast to the
Indians.”
50
In 1870, Anaheim residents again imported a supply of laborers, arranging for the
transport of seven-hundred Chinese workers to help with the harvest, and many remained in the
community.
51
In his writings about vineyard culture in California, Nordhoff noted the integral
role of the Chinese in the winemaking across the state, including Southern California, where

48
Daily Alta California, January 3, 1858, Quoted in Leo J. Friis, 32-33.

49
Minutes of the Los Angeles Vineyard Society, September 20, 1857, Los Angeles Vineyard
Society Vertical File, Anaheim Public Library.

50
Lucile Dickson, 31.

51
Mildred Yorba MacArthur, 30.

134
“Chinese laborers are employed in all parts of the business. They quickly learn to prune and take
care of the vines, and their labor is indispensable…I have seen them pruning the vines, and they
are used in all the operations of the vine producer.”
52
In Anaheim, the Chinese formed their own
sub-colony of homes and businesses within the town similar to Chinatowns that segregated the
Chinese in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, Napa, and other California cities.
53
From its
earliest inception, Anaheim housed a varied population, as evidenced by the diversity of laborers
the Hansen and future growers hired. Still, the towns’ German residents maintained strict
divisions between ethnic groups, in particular between European residents and the Chinese.
Anaheim’s German residents successfully transformed arid cattle grounds into a carefully
ordered, irrigated, and manicured vineyard. They disrupted the previously cattle-centric economy
of Mexican California in favor of a land-based market system based on regenerative wealth. In
doing so, Anaheimers helped change the landscape of California. They substituted traditional
Spanish methods with efficient and modern grape-crushing machines that distanced the Indian
body from winemaking process. Though it remained overtly “foreign,” Campo Aleman had itself
come to embody notions of American citizenship, most notably land-ownership, modernity, and
industry. Still, the colony’s continued reliance on racialized laborers served as a constant
physical reminder of the state’s recent history as a Spanish-Mexican place and raised the
question as to whether or not California could truly blossom as modern American place.
Beyond the Vines: Government Support and Educational Reforms
Early supporters of a public university for California looked beyond the practical
elements of an agricultural education to the societal benefits that would follow. A public

52
Charles Nordhoff, 219-220.

53
Mildred Yorba MacArthur, 30.

135
institution of higher education could offer an avenue for achieving cultural transformation and
EuroAmerican triumph over Mexican-Californio society. Further, a land-grant college would put
California on an equal playing field with other more established western states organizing public
universities.
As early as 1849, the delegates of California’s first constitutional convention asked
Congress for lands to be set aside for the university, and in 1853, Congress granted California
46,000 acres of public lands to sell, and the proceeds to be used for “seminary of learning.”
54
In
1856, Colonel J.B. Crocket lamented the dearth of fine arts and literature amongst Americans in
general, but especially in the West. Without the arts, Californians could not succeed in the
“cultivation of refined and elevated sentiment, and in the development of those genial influences
which tend so much to soften the asperities of business and lend a charm to social intercourse.”
55

Colonel Crocket staunchly supported a College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts as a way of
improving the public mind, elevating Californians’ tastes, establishing social connections
amongst the population, and even purifying the morals of the public at large. A year later, again
before the audience at the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural Society, Henry Eno encouraged
California’s legislature to follow the example set by Michigan and Wisconsin, whose state
governments had recently endowed colleges for “the instruction of her youth in the science and

54
Patricia A. Pelfrey, A Brief History of the University of California, Second Edition, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 6.

55
Address of Col. J. B. Crockett, Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition,
Held at San Jose, October 7
th
to 10
th
, 1856, (San Francisco, California Farmers Office, 1856),
32.

136
practice of agriculture.”
56
Eno noted that agricultural cultivation was a relatively new pursuit in
the West, and as such, was still in its experimental stages. Given that instructional literature on
agriculture, horticulture, and husbandry mostly came from experts in the Eastern States or
England who had little knowledge about California, Eno explained that a local Agricultural
College might produce local authorities who could provide scientific knowledge and instruction
about local climate patterns, plant varietals, soils, irrigation methods, and geology. A public
agricultural college would disseminate scientific knowledge to improve and modernize
California away from its undesirable Mexican-Spanish past. Despite this early momentum, it
would be nearly fifteen years before a public university opened its doors in California.
The Agricultural Society interpreted a college of agriculture as a way to create a class of
farmer citizens. In 1862, the idea of such an agricultural college came closer to reality when the
Morrill Act provided public land grants to states to establish a college focused on agricultural,
mining, and mechanics.
57
Though many Californians agreed that the state needed a State
University, there were debates over what sort of educational institution it should be—an
agricultural and mining college or a university offering a classical education. A large faction
within the Agricultural Society preferred technical training. In a report prepared for the Society’s
annual meeting in 1862, Isaac Newton, State Commissioner of Agriculture, outlined the ideal
parameters of a state agricultural institution. First, the university should have experimental
gardens, orchards, vineyards, and fields. Second, the college’s professors and students should
distribute seeds and cuttings and provide reports about their farming experiments for the public.

56
Annual Address by Henry Eno,” Official Report of the California State Agricultural Society’s
Fourth Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition, 1857, (San Francisco, O’Meara &
Painter, 1858), 109.

57
Patricia A. Pelfrey, 6-7.

137
In addition to teaching practical skills, university professors could communicate with their peers
across the United States, thus systematizing agriculture across the country. Newton diverged
from many other cultivators, arguing that California’s university should teach classical languages
and mathematics, in addition to technical training. He maintained that a liberal agricultural
education would protect American values and prevent farmers from regressing towards
“European division of labor and its narrow views.” Indeed, classical subjects could help elevate
the American farmer and artisan to their “greatest elevation” as American citizens.
58
Newton
expressed concerns about class divisions between mechanics and farmers and civil and military
workers. The Agricultural Society’s 1866 Report to Governor Haight affirmed Newton’s
arguments. A government-supported institution of higher education symbolized civilization and
“democratic tendencies,” or California’s arrival as a true American state. Further, the report
claimed that if a university were “properly nourished and cultivated by itself so as to retain its
native and distinct strength and purity,” it would protect California from the dangers and
“degrading influences” of monarchism.
59
By offering practical and intellectual training at its
university, California could avoid social strife and class divisions and build a more harmonious,
democratic, American society.
Public debates struggled to define the primary role of the University of California as a
place of practical learning or as an institution of classical learning. Between 1866 and 1868, the
legislature dabbled in formally incorporating a state University until March of 1868, when
Governor Haight signed an act creating the University of California. This followed the near-

58
Isaac Newton, “Agricultural Colleges,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Year 1863, (Sacramento: O.M. Clayes, 1864), 197.

59
“Report to his Excellency, H.H. Haight,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, (Sacramento, D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1868), 5-6.

138
bankruptcy of California College, which offered its resources, property, and facilities for the new
state university.
60
What emerged was not a college of agriculture and mining, as the Morrill Act
had stipulated, but a “complete university” that would teach humanities and classics in addition
to agriculture, mining, and mechanics.
61
As a result, many remained dissatisfied with the turn of
events. Ezra S. Carr, Professor of Agriculture at the new University of California, was a vocal
critic of the school. He questioned the utility of a classical education for farmers and mechanics
and compared public institutions across the West to the University of California, complaining
that the legislature had ignored the purpose of the Morrill Act—ostensibly to educate the
industrial and rural classes. Carr underscored the value of an agricultural education as the
“foundation of all other culture, of State and national prosperity.”
62
Carr was further concerned
with his perception of increased urbanism amongst America’s young people. A formal
agricultural education could help prepare young men and women for rural occupations and make
cultivation more attractive. He further described specialized horticulture as an elevated form of
art and civilization. Though he could not eliminate the College of Letters from the University of
California, Carr offered a solution. He asked that the Legislature offer funds to establish an
experimental station at the University, and this request was accommodated. Ultimately, Carr’s
dissatisfaction with the structure of the new university rested on his conviction that this
educational institution should cultivate farmer citizens.
Tax Breaks

60
Patricia A. Pelfrey, 7.

61
In 1866, the California State Legislature had incorporated an Agricultural, Mining, and
Mechanic Arts College. This Act was repealed in 1868 following the donation from College of
California. Patricia A. Pelfrey, 7.

62
“Address by Ezra S. Carr,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During
the Years 1870 and 1871, (Sacramento: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1872), 93.

139
Government aid also benefited vintners in the form of tax breaks for private wine
businesses. The first major tax help occurred in 1859 when viticultural supporters achieved a
significant legislative coup that exempted new growers from taxation for five years. This
milestone symbolized the increasing power of collective viticulturists in influencing state law to
benefit their private business interests. The language of the law stipulated that “No Tax, of any
nature whatsoever…[be] assessed or collected from the owners, managers, or agents of newly
planted vines or olives, on account of the same, until the vine shall have obtained the age of four
years, and the olive seven years…”
63
Because newly planted grapevines required a five-year
period of maturation before producing a crop, this legislation provided an important financial
cushion for new planters. “Provided, that this Act shall not be so construed as to exempt such
vines and olives from such assessment and taxes as it may be hereafter be deemed necessary for
the purpose of irrigation.
In 1868, the Committee on the Culture Grape appealed to the state legislature for help in
amending the federal tax code to better favor viticultural businesses. The Committee hoped to
encourage more individuals to take up viticulture and “enter with spirit into the development of
this leading interest.” In order to expand the state’s viticultural interests, the Committee
maintained that the legislature needed to protect the vineyardists from the “lynx-eyed Tax
Collector” ready to “seize and confiscate” still, machinery, crops, land, and houses.
64
The
Committee worried about the implications of a federal tax code that treated winegrowers the

63
“An Act to provide for the better encouragement of the culture of the Vine and the Olive,”
Statutes of California Passed at the Tenth Session of the Legislature, CXCIX:Section 1,
(Sacramento: John O’Meara State Printer, 1859).

64
“Culture of the Grape: Report and Memorial Presented to the Senate of California at its
Eighteenth Session, by the Committee on Culture of the Grape,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1868 and 1869,” (Sacramento: D.W.
Gelwicks, State Printer, 1870), 270.

140
same as brewers, thus unfairly leveraging taxes on the former. The Committee demanded that the
state legislature to appeal to Congress for an amendment of the tax code that better favored
winemakers. In protecting the financial interests of the wine industry, the Legislature would
indirectly protect the general well being of the State. It would relieve an unfair burden from
winegrowers, true patrons of civilization whose distilling practices were “merely incidental to his
vocation as a horticulturist.”
65
Despite the noble nature of viticulture, vintners were still
subjected to the same regulations of grain and malt distillers whose business had nothing to do
with agriculture or horticulture and was solely restricted to the distilling of liquor. [Expand
discussion of 1868 Federal Tax concerns: Need more information from State Library, June 2011.
Know that they were successful as this tax was revoked: “A late ruling of the Commissioner of
Internal Revenue, to the effect that sparkling wines made from native grapes, or from wines
produced from such, are not subject to taxation, while all such wines made from foreign grown
grapes or from foreign wines, is subject to taxation under the internal revenue laws, is most
favorable to the wine interests of our State.”
66
As did the College of Agriculture, these tax breaks
represented yet another example of government intervention to improve financial prospects of
this industry.
An American Empire along the Pacific
The Transactions of the Agricultural Society identified agriculture—particularly
specialized horticulture—as important instruments of conquest, manifest destiny, and empire.
Though vineyardists and winegrowers focused on land improvements and economic expansion,

65
“Culture of the Grape: Report and Memorial Presented to the Senate of California at its
Eighteenth Session, by the Committee on Culture of the Grape,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1868 and 1869, 270.

66
“California Wines and Grapes,” Report to the State Board of Agriculture for 1870,
(Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, 1871), 8.

141
they seemed cognizant of their role in shaping vineyardists as citizens. Growers never restricted
their labor to their fields but looked beyond with ambition to improve California. From its
earliest years onward, the members of the Agricultural Society made civilization, citizenship,
and empire part of their mission. On a practical level, they interpreted their annual agricultural
fairs as educational institutions for the people, and as an annual gathering that promised to guide
its participants towards a “higher civilization and more perfect state of existence.”
67
At his
annual address before the 1857 Annual meeting of the State Agricultural Society, Henry Eno
underscored the connections “between the great interests of agriculture and the highest degree of
civilization and refinement, and also the perpetuity of our free institutions…”
68
Likewise,
another grower encouraged his fellow growers to continue “on with your noble labors; cease not,
until California’s valley’s and mountains shall teem with that abundant civilization…Strive on
until the homeless and oppress of other lands shall urged by you, flee their oppression and
want…and here…become Freedom’s children.”
69
These evolved as recurring themes during the
Society’s annual meetings; further, the organization’s sense of mission and purpose became
more refined and specialized so that by 1870, its members had identified themselves as
Christians with a calling to civilize and improve the state.
Nationalism was also instrumental to the imperialistic rhetoric of the California
Agricultural Society. From the viewpoint of the Society, California’s natural resources, under

67
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, 69-
70.

68
“Opening Address to the California State Agricultural Society, September 1857,” Official
Report of the California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and
Industrial Exhibition, (San Francisco: O’Meara & Painter, Book and Job Printers, 1858), 106.

69
Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1861, (Sacramento:
Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1862), 151.

142
proper stewardship and development, would offer value not only to California, but also the
United States as a nation.
70
For the Society, agriculture offered the “truest and most reliable
source of national wealth” while fostering patriotism amongst its peoples.
71
California’s new
horticulturists were especially concerned with using cultivation as a means of protecting and
promoting American Citizenship. As early as 1856, the Agricultural Society declared that
California’s many “improved farmer[s]” would be transformed into “citizens quite as much
improved.”
72
Thus, the ideal citizen was largely defined by his vocation as a cultivator.
Agricultural cultivation was what was allowing the “conservators and improvers” of California
to construct the “great Empire State of the Pacific Coast.”
73
On the fifth anniversary of the
Agricultural Society, Samuel B. Bell of Alameda commemorated the success of growers in
partitioning “the empire” from her rival, presumably Mexico, to attract scores of new
immigrants. This rapidly expanding population, he maintained, continued to fuel the conquest of
California.
74
Viticulture was an important component of this campaign. One anonymous essayist
for the Agricultural Society assured winegrowers that their efforts in the vineyards were helping
to sow the “germ of civilization…the apparent center of an empire…of wealth, commerce,
refinement, and a vigorous and cultivated growth…in a state of health and permanent

70
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867,
507.

71
Annual Address Given by Joseph W. Winans, Esq. Sept. 12 1866, in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, 79-80.

72
Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition, Held at San Jose, October 7
th
to
10
th
, 1856, 23.

73
Transactions of the California Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, 69.

74
“Annual Address given by Hon. Samuel B. Bell of Alameda,” in Transactions of California
State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858, (C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1859), 55-57.

143
advancement.”
75
Similarly, an 1866 address by Joseph W. Winans underscored the relationship
between Christianity and civilization. For him, California was “no less the offspring of political
necessity than of divine appointment…when the poet said, “Westward the star of empire takes its
way,” his words were no less a delineation of the past than a prediction of the future…it glided
on to pour its latest splendor down upon America with a pervading glory that kept ever spreading
on across the continent until it fell on California, the empire of the West, the land where grows
the olive and the vine…”
76

These campaigns for citizenship and civilization were colored by gendered arguments in
which EuroAmerican women were identified as important soldiers of refinement and morality.
Women were seen as religious and moral stewards of society and of the land. As early as 1857,
William Garrard, president of the Agricultural Society, charged EuroAmerican women with the
patriotic duty of promoting American values by cultivating the natural landscape. He further
made them responsible for shaping the morality and character of California’s society. Garrard
looked to the “ladies…to bring to the Pacific that class of population that ties us to the soil and
renders home endearing…Cultivate in the rising generation a regard for the old-fashioned
homespun virtues—virtues that have become characteristic of the American people…Emulate
the example of the mothers of the olden time, in cultivating a love of the soil, a love of home,
and individuality of character, a state pride, and California will yet fulfill the fondest anticipation

75
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1860, (Sacramento:
C.T. Botts State Printer, 1861), 335.

76
Annual Address Given by Joseph W. Winans, Esq. Sept. 12 1866, in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, 88.

144
of her most sanguine admirers.”
77
Garrard designated migrant women from the eastern states as
civilizers, responsible for improving the moral tone of the state. Essentially, Garrard
distinguished California’s newest women residents as soldiers in the cultural, social, and
environmental conquest of the state. For Carr of the University of California, women’s education
was crucial. Because women occupied the important role of nurturing and supporting farmers,
they could not be excluded from receiving a formal education and practical training. Carr argued
that women must be educated to prepare them for their roles as the wives of farmers. He
declared, “from whatever or other walk of life we may exclude woman, she is as indispensible to
the last as she was to the first farmer.”
78
Similar to campaigns promoting the idea of Republican
Motherhood in the early years of the republic, Carr argued that the education of women was
indispensible for advancing civilization in California. In reminiscing about the years in which
mining occupied Californians, a member of the Agriculture Society lamented the absence of
women, ascribing the shortage of women to the backwards and amoral society that emerged
during these years, “Without her, man rapidly retrograded; and with her, he has rapidly resumed
his place. Before her advent to this land, vice and immorality, until then so prevalent, speedily
fled the land, or sheltered itself in hidden haunts.”
79
The speaker failed to acknowledge the
presence of indigenous populations and Catholic Mexican-California women present during the
gold rush period. Not only did he ignore the mere presence of these populations, he further

77
“Opening Address to the California State Agricultural Society by the President, William
Garrard,” in Official Report of the California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth Annual Fair,
Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition, 1857, 105.

78
Ibid, 99.

79
“Annual Address,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the
Year 1860, (Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery, State Printer, 1862), 150.

145
relegated them as subpar relative to EuroAmerican women and rejected women of color as
agents of stability, morality, and reform.
Beyond making EuroAmerican women responsible for the state’s moral development, the
leaders of the agricultural society identified their wives, daughters, and mothers as important
partners in improving California’s farms, orchards, and vineyards. Though the Society’s leaders
acknowledged women’s labor, they often did so in a condescending way that diminished the
significance of their work. Instead, women active in agriculture were encouraged to provide
moral support and ornamental arts in their respective vineyards, orchards, and fields. For
example, the Society’s opening ceremony of the 1860 Agricultural Fair recognized its “lady
contributors” whose “smiles” and “willing aid” were helping to transform the region’s “virgin
soil” sure to bring the “golden State speedily to its high destiny—that of becoming the fairest
land and most desirable place for a home.”
80
Paradoxically, the members of the Agricultural
Society did not believe women counted as laborers. Rather, their function lay in supporting their
male heads of household in families’ agricultural pursuits. An 1866 population analysis prepared
by H.D. Dunn for the California Commissioner of Agriculture estimated the state’s population to
be four hundred to five hundred thousand persons. Dunn then subtracted Chinese railroad
workers and miners, as well as San Francisco’s urban dwellers, leaving a population of two
hundred ten thousand individuals to farm. Dunn deducted women and children, arguing that
there were not even one hundred thousand adult men left to work as agriculturists, presumably
EuroAmerican men. Though the Agricultural Society constantly elevated women as the true
torches of civilization, Dunn—a representative of the Agricultural Society—dismissed the
practical contributions of women on fields, orchards, and vineyards throughout the state.

80
“Opening Address,” Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year
1860, 299, 304.

146
Writing in the shadow of sectionalism, the leaders of the California Agricultural Society
were concerned with the status of the union and with protecting their labors and investments
from the interruptions of war. At the beginning of the War, the Agricultural Society’s rejoiced in
the fact that the “Divine Providence” allowed California’s populations to peacefully bask in the
region’s “bounteous gifts of Nature and of Art” far from “mightiest horrors and alarms” of the
Civil War.
81
Governor Leland Stanford exulted in the fact that Western farmers were not
occupied in battlefields, but instead were “preparing for a harvest that is to feed millions of their
countrymen, and other millions of lands.”
82
For Stanford, the fact that California remained
outside the boundaries of direct conflict and was still entrenched in the noble task of agriculture
was cause for celebration. By the end of the war, California’s agriculturists had much to
celebrate in the reunification of the nation and the westward advancement of the railroad. Joseph
W. Winans delighted in the fact that soldiers could finally trade their cannons for ploughs and
their swords for scythes. He not only expressed relief that cultivation could again become a
pursuit for individuals across the United States, but was overjoyed that “peace hath shed her
radiant smile upon a nation once rent by faction and internal strife, but happily restored to its
integrity with not one State dissevered nor one star destroyed.”
83
For Winans, the celebration not
only included the return of thousands of soldiers to uninterrupted agricultural pursuits, but the
protection of the Union. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, cultivators again celebrated
their good fortune, “let us rejoice that we are a united people, with united interests, and that no

81
“Annual Address,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the
Year 1861, (Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1862), 154.

82
Address of Governor Leland Stanford, Transactions of the California Agricultural Society
During Years 1864 and 1865 (Sacramento: O.M. Clayes, State Printer, 1866), 47.

83
“Annual Address Given by Joseph W. Winans, Esq. Sept. 12 1866,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1866 and 1867, 77-78.

147
such desolation can overwhelm our fair land, or reverse the advancing hand on the dial that
indicates our growth in Christian civilization.”
84
War was an undesirable interruption for
stewards of the land and a threat to national health and unity.
The end of the Civil War signaled the need to transform soldiers into citizen
agriculturists. At the same time, the opening of the South as a new competitor for free labor
made the leaders of the California Agricultural Society anxious. They viewed the South as
competition and as a threat to California’s potential, “if nothing else can awake California to her
interests and duties, the fact that such an extensive and active increase in the competition for the
labor and capital of the world has thus sprung into existence, and that that competition threatens
to deplete still more her own population, should induce her to put forth earnest and active efforts
to retain the laurels with which her nature has endowed her, but which it is threatened to snatch
from her crown.”
85
At the same time, the Agricultural Society did not want to recruit former
southern slaves to California whose presence could threaten the nation-building project promoted
by growers. With this alarmist attitude, the Society once again clamored for funding from the
Legislature to publish books and pamphlets “filled with authoritative and reliable information as
to our climate, soil, mines, productions, manufactories, commercial location, and other
advantages” to be distributed throughout Europe and the Atlantic States to attract a very specific
kind of immigrant to California. The Society called for improved communication and
transportation infrastructures to make it easier for it to distribute these materials and to simplify
the journey for newcomers. They appealed to “capitalists, landowners, railroad and steamboat

84
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1870-1871, 308-
309.

85
“Bureau of Immigration,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During
the Years 1864 and 1865, 61.

148
companies, and the owners of clipper ships” who might find “direction for energy and profitable
enterprise.”
86
The Agricultural Society had a sense of extreme urgency for California to beat the
South, and maintain and even improve its status relative to other States.
Dr. John F. Morse, a historian based in Sacramento, similarly pickup up on themes of
nationalism and empire in his 1865 Address before the Society.
87
Morse emphasized agriculture
as a way to strengthen the nation and work towards reunification. Morse reminisced about the
Society’s first Agricultural Fair, held in 1852. As it had thirteen years hence, the Society
remained committed to the notion that agriculture had the power to “cultivate, to receive and
appreciate collateral aid, its fascinating and gigantic relations to the development and support of
national and individual interests….We then regarded agriculture as the essential foundation of
prosperity and good government…[and] the most perfect criterion by which to estimate the
probable tenure of the nation—the honesty, the virtue, and contentment of the people.”
88

According to Morse, not much had changed since the early 1850s; “the husbandry of America”
remained the “tried and sublimated source of patriotism, of wealth, of life and hope to a liberty-
loving Government.”
89
Thus, support of agriculture remained the surest path to prosperity and
good judgment. Morse’s nationalistic rhetoric is significant given that the Lee had only just
surrendered at Appomattox five months before.

86
Bureau of Immigration, in Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the
Years 1864 and 1865, 61.

87
Morse is often considered Sacramento’s first historian. He published the narrative history of
the Gold Rush in 1853. www.library.ca.gov/goldrush/sec08.html. Accessed 10/1/2011.

88
“Annual Address Delivered before the State Agricultural Society,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1864 and 1865, 174.

89
Ibid, 174.

149
Morse made a point to share his own historical interpretation of the region’s past,
emphasizing how much Americans had improved on Spanish-Mexican culture in such a short
period. Citing articles from the California Starr, including a San Francisco city census taken by
the newspaper in 1847, Morse painted an interesting picture of life in California eighteen years
prior. According to the Starr, the city’s population in 1847 totaled 459, with “375 Whites, 20
Indians, 39 Sandwich Islanders, and 9 negroes…the entire Mexican or Spanish population was
thirty-two.”
90
The author of this article then concluded that with the “enterprise of so hardy and
intelligent a race of pioneers, it can scarcely be otherwise” that San Francisco “is destined to
become the great emporium of the North Pacific Coast.”
91
Morse celebrated the superiority and
progress that pioneers had made in transforming San Francisco in scarcely 18 years,
improvements that far surpassed what the Spanish Empire had been able to accomplish in two
hundred years of occupation of the Americas—even with all the advantages, wealth, resources,
and power at its disposal during this period. American citizens—with their “expansive power
resistless energy”—had managed to do more with far less, surpassing the abilities of Kings,
Viceroys, Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. Indeed, Morse lamented the fact that in the 258
years of Spanish control, the empire left California with the mere “accumulation of old adobe
walls…the bleached bones of a few thousands of domesticated Indians as the only remaining
indications of the success attained for a season…as a signs of a national lethargy that has slept
away its own possessions.”
92
Mexican authorities likewise faired no better at establishing

90
“Annual Address Delivered before the State Agricultural Society,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1864 and 1865, 178.

91
Ibid, 178.

92
Ibid, 182.

150
permanent settlement and achieving development, despite its superior natural advantages and
political resources.
After denigrating the capabilities of Spain and Mexico to build a lasting civilization in
California, Morse drew the parameters of American citizenship around ideas of race and land-
ownership. According to Morse, Americans deserved control over California because they had
accomplished more to improve upon the state’s natural resources in eighteen years than had the
Spanish in over three hundred years. Morse encouraged Americans to extend citizenship to
immigrants from Europe and to use “the influence of our Government” and the “stimulus of free
and enlightened institutions” to transform these foreigners into daring, patriotic, free, and
independent American citizens.
93
Morse further maintained that land ownership and agricultural
development were integral building blocks of national wealth and empire. Only agriculture could
ensure the “progress, the power, and endurance of the Federal Union as well as the creation of
national wealth.
94

Themes of nationalism and boosterism filtered down to agricultural societies at the local
level as well. E. S. Holden, President of the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Society, addressed
the members of his local agricultural society and stressed the importance of development and
civilization in the context of nationalism. He celebrated the diverse cultivation in the San Joaquin
Valley, agricultural production which, he maintain, raised ‘a consciousness of contributing the
maintenance of the true dignity of labor; to the elevation of the working man, and to the
improvement of the industrious arts—a consciousness of exerting a wide-speaking and far-

93
“Annual Address Delivered before the State Agricultural Society,” in Transactions of the
California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1864 and 1865, 184.

94
Ibid, 184.

151
reaching influence for good on human progress and civilization?”
95
Given the context of the
newly ended Civil War, Holden argued that the realm of agriculture offered a sure way to put
political differences apart and allow for productivity to the benefit of Americans, regardless of
whether they resided in the South, East, North, or West. According to Holden, California had
risen out of her undomesticated beginnings to begin building a civilization in the West; still, he
argued, there was room for improvement. He maintained, “Eighteen years ago California was but
a wild, uncultivated wilderness, inhabited only by Indians, the wild beasts, and a few scores of
white men.”
96
At that time, California lacked steamboats, railroads, and other technologies and
infrastructures that a new population of Americans had imported to improve the State. Still,
Holden called for more development. And given the region’s vast natural advantages, Holden
maintained greatness was California’s for the taking. He adopted booster-like rhetoric to
celebrate California’s natural riches and encourage more people to take up agriculture to expand
national prosperity from the west. Like other agricultural boosters before him, Holden called for
the education of outsiders about California’s rich natural advantages, including her temperate
climate, rich soils, diverse landscapes, mountains and valleys, and coasts. California’s produce,
including figs, lemons, oranges, olives, almonds, and multiple varieties of grapes, bespoke a
Mediterranean climate of “native luxuriance and perfection” and invoked European culture.
Holden listed the agricultural products that he believed might offer California the surest
way of improving its situation. Along with grains, stock, fruit trees, and wool, grape cultivation
and wine manufacture were of growing importance to the economic well-being of the State.
Holden argued that European vineyards were “fast decaying from old age and exhaustion of soil,

95
Annual Opening Address, Delivered by Dr. E.S. Holden, in Transactions of the California
State Agricultural Society During the Years 1864 and 1865, 214.

96
Ibid, 215.

152
and, as a natural consequence, the heretofore fabulous amount of grapes and wine produced in
the old countries, must be transferred to other sections of the world.” According to Dr. Holden,
this offered California an opportunity to supply markets throughout the world that might be
lacking, and even go so far as to supply them with wines equal to the best wines exported from
Europe.
97
Additionally, Dr. Holden called for further education of modern agricultural
techniques and the importation of the latest agricultural implements. And given the state’s arid
climate and limited rainfall, he called for improvements in irrigation. If other “semi-barbarous”
countries in the Americas, namely Mexico, Peru, and Chile could implement functioning
irrigation systems, then so could California.
98
Finally, Dr. Holden called for improvements in
railroad infrastructures, the “great physical agents of progress and civilization,” in order to
ensure that the state’s agricultural products could indeed be exported to outsiders.
99
Given the
state’s high rates of talent, refinement, and learnedness, Holden argued, the state should have no
difficulties in achieving as high levels of civilization as found in other enlightened places, or
even surpassing them.
The Science of Modern Winemaking
Wine industry boosters encouraged the widespread use of science to modernize and
further civilize production beyond the vineyard to the wine cellar. Experts called for reformation
campaigns to improve upon Spanish-Mexican methods for crushing and fermenting grapes. This
served to distance the state’s newest winemakers from its Mission forbearers and demonstrate
their superiority over the Franciscans. Early on, Agoston Haraszthy found fault with the

97
Annual Opening Address, Delivered by Dr. E.S. Holden, in Transactions of the California
State Agricultural Society During the Years 1864 and 1865, 217.

98
Ibid, 219.

99
Ibid, 220.

153
winemaking methods of the missionaries that continued amongst some of his contemporaries.
During the grape crush growers, some winemakers continued to employ human feet to crush the
grapes, a task usually relegated to “a big Indian” who then “put the whole mess in raw ox-hides,
made sack fashion, for want of barrels” for fermentation.
100
Though Haraszthy relied on “the
oldest inhabitants” to proclaim that there had never been a failure in the crop of grapes in
California, he discouraged new growers from applying the methods of the Franciscans. Instead,
he encouraged growers to modernize and mechanize winemaking, using machinery whenever
possible to save on labor. For example, mechanized grape presses should replace Indians in
crushing and pressing the wine. According to Haraszthy, among others, these new methods were
indicative of modernity, technological advancement, and hygiene and should universally replace
Spanish-Mexican winemaking traditions. Ultimately, this emphasis on modern technology was
part of the wine industry’s project towards Americanization that firmly relegated mission
winemakers to the past.
In his “Essay on Winemaking,” S.W. Halsee (a Los Angeles nursery owner active in the
Agricultural Society) noted the skill and care necessary to produce first-rate fruit and wine. He
called for vineyardists to advance their “knowledge, experience, and systematic operation” to
cultivate a thriving vineyard. Halsee encouraged wine manufacturers to adopt sophisticated
chemical knowledge and scientific precision to perfect the fermentation process.
101
Halsee
adamantly declared that winegrowing was a deliberate procedure requiring vintners to balance
practical experience with scientific knowledge and finesse. By following a carefully prescribed

100
Agoston Haraszthy, “Report on Grapes and Wine of California,” in Transactions of
California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858, (C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1859),
312.

101
S.W. Halsee, “Essay on Winemaking,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth
Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition 1857, 185-186.

154
path of modern production, Halsee confidently declared that California was “destined to be a
great wine-producing country” with “many fortunes made and lost in manufacturing” wine.”
⁠102
Three years later, the Board of Managers for the State Agricultural Society again called for
improvement in the wine industry. They noted the dubious quality of California wines which
were not yet of “sufficient age to have attained the highest excellence of which they are
capable.” California’s winemakers, the Board maintained, had not yet had sufficient time or
experience in experimenting with choice varietals, soils, climates, or in the diverse processes of
winemaking. Still, the Board argued that California had the right foundation on which to build a
successful wine industry. With the right tools, the ideal balance of experimentation and skill, and
the “world for a market,” it was only a matter of time before California achieved triumphant
success.
103
Charles F. Reed, President of the California Agricultural Society for 1870, again
called for the standardization of fermentation techniques amongst wine manufacturers. For Reed,
the greatest hindrance in advancing California’s wine industry lay in the lack of uniformity in
selecting grapes and treating wines. Because of this, wine dealers had taken to mixing and
doctoring wines to produce a corrupt product, much to the dismay of Reed and the Agricultural
Society. If the state’s community of wine growers and wine makers had only collaborated to
protect the reputation of California wines from its earliest days onward, Reed conjectured, the
state would not be in its current predicament, and the value of local wines would be doubled. In
order to avoid further injury Reed called for improvement not amongst unscrupulous wine
dealers but amongst wine makers themselves. If winemakers could similarly sort similar grapes

102
S.W. Halsee, “Essay on Winemaking,” in California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth
Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial Exhibition 1857, 186.

103
“Wine: Report of the Board of Managers,” in Transactions of California State Agricultural
Society During the Year 1860, 30.

155
together in fermentation, they could then “submit them to such a uniform treatment as science
and good judgment might dictate.”
104
Reed offered this as a solution for improving the quality of
wine, and also as a lucrative business opportunity for capitalists looking for a secure investment.
International advancements in biochemistry gave vintners a deeper understanding of
winemaking. Before the late eighteenth century, it was understood that winemaking relied on the
fermentation, or the transformation of sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide in grape must.
However, understandings about fermentation ended there. Indeed, it was largely interpreted as a
“mysterious magical power, more spiritual than material.”
105
This standard held fast until the
late eighteenth century when Antoine Lavoisier, a noted French chemist, unearthed some of the
chemical changes caused by fermentation and detected the presence of yeasts during the process.
Still, a missing link lay in the role of yeasts in the chemical transformations that occurred during
fermentation.
This changed in the 1850s and 1860s when Louis Pasteur’s research on fermentation and
food preservation revolutionized winemaking. Pasteur’s experimentations had a two-fold effect
on wine production. First, his research demonstrated that fermentation was not a mechanical
change, but a physiological chemical one that occurred on a cellular level in the yeasts of
fermenting liquids.
106
Pasteur’s discovery revealed that different yeasts yielded different
outcomes and that the kind of yeast one used was important in determining the flavor of the
finished product. Thus, winemakers began to have greater control over the winemaking process

104
“Opening Address by Charles F. Reed, President,” in Transactions of the California State
Agricultural Society During the Years 1870 and 1871, 77.

105
Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, 353.

106
Ibid, 353. Pasteur had not unveiled how yeasts made this change. The idea that enzymes in
yeast cells triggered fermentation would be established by the 1890s.

156
by paying closer attention to yeast selection.
107
Likewise, pasteurization, the scientist’s most well
known breakthrough, established that raising the temperature of a liquid to 140 degrees
Fahrenheit would kill any remaining yeasts and stop fermentation. Pasteur’s publications
explained how winemakers could deter the growth of germs during fermentation; by simply
heating wine within a closed cask or vessel, “invisible vegetable growths in wines” could be
prevented while preserving the flavor of the wines.
108
Because it enabled vintners to prevent the
growth of mold in wine, Pasteur’s research had significant business ramifications by extending
the life of wines and facilitating the shipping process, making the exportation of wine across long
distances a safer gamble for wine dealers. Finally, Pasteur taught vintners that wine could be
ripened and improved more quickly through slow and gradual aeration. The dissemination of
scientific information and communication between winegrowers and scientists in Europe and the
United States modernized winemaking in California, further divorcing it from its status under the
Spanish and Mexican rule. These cutting-edge technologies allowed vintners to ferment an
improved, safer product that could be shipped more readily and had a better flavor, all of which
were hallmarks of capitalist agriculture. Thus, these scientific advancements had within one
generation “literally transformed the powers of the winemaker to control what he was doing.”
109

In light of these scientific advancements, wine industry leaders called for further
improvements, perhaps to surpass European science and skill. In the absence of reliable local
scientific research, vine growers relied on newspapers to disseminate information, to regulate the
nomenclature of grapes, and to standardize methods in the vineyards. For example, one grape

107
Wine yeast is generically referred to as Saccharomyces ellipsoideus, but there are many
different varieties. Thus, the type of yeast used in fermentation influences the flavor of the wine.

108
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society for the Years 1866 and 1867, 331.

109
Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, 354.

157
grower from Sonoma expressed concern that a destructive disease of the vine had travelled from
Europe to California, causing grapes to shrivel on the vine. The editors of California Farmer
reassured the concerned vineyardist that there had not yet been any indication that this plague
was widespread. Still, they encouraged other horticulturists to remain vigilant, particularly when
purchasing grapes from unknown sellers. Another vineyardist expressed frustration with the
confusion over the differences between varietals of the Muscat grape. To solve this problem, the
London Horticultural Society had conducted a controlled greenhouse experiment to definitely
distinguish between the “common” Muscat, the white Muscat, and the Muscat of Alexandria,
among others.
110
He called for local experimentation like that conducted by the London
Horticultural Society. This would allow growers in California to fully understand the properties
of individual grape varietals and judiciously apply winegrowing techniques and mix wines in a
way that best enhanced the natural properties of the grapes. Ultimately, an important part of the
statewide campaign to improve the wine industry necessitated that growers share information
amongst themselves in order to have a firm grasp on the natural properties of their grapes.
Indeed, the refinement of nature relied on knowledge and informal agricultural education.
Modernity Achieved? California Wines at the 1867 Paris Exhibition
California wines made their formal debut on the European stage at the 1867 Paris
Exhibition with disastrous results that directly negated the publicity campaigns of Pacific wine
boosters and reflected the opinions of Charles Loring Brace. Despite the prideful claims of
California wine boosters that their wines had reached a level of quality on par with European
vintages, the American wines were not well received by European judges. These wines—
including a sampling from New York, Missouri, and other winegrowing regions of the United

110
“Muscat Grapes,” California Farmer, December 16, 1864, 162.

158
States—were part of a group of thirty-three wines representing the Untied States at the
Exhibition, and were compared with official entries from European wine regions, as well as from
Brazil and Australia. The representatives of the Special Committee on the Grape Vine quickly
rationalized this poor showing. They immediately dispelled rumors about the injurious handling
of the bottles or the potential that the wine may have been heated or overly fermented. Instead,
they blamed the French judges. Instead, they pointed out that California was able to submit a
very limited sample of wines for the judgment, thus limiting their ability to properly showcase
California’s diverse wines. Second, the report claimed that the competition was unfairly biased,
as there were no jurors from the United States and as the contest took place in Europe and not at
home.
The Committee immediately sought government support to rectify the “unfair” oversight
of American wines. By appealing to Congress for support, the Committee hoped that it might be
able to redeem the reputation of California wines—or, perhaps, to simply establish a positive
reputation for its frontier wines based on something more substantial than booster literature and
advertisement campaigns. The Committee moved to immediately conduct its own judgment,
comparing U.S. grown wines with continental wines. The United States Commission at the
Exhibition also appointed a special Committee to examine these wines and report back to
Congress on its findings. By looking to Congress, California winemakers (represented by this
Committee appointed by its State Legislature and the Agricultural Society) sought legitimacy
that would validate the merit of their products.
The report was characterized by tension and contradictions in weighing viticulture in the
United States against that in France. On the one hand, the committee acknowledged the
shortcomings of California winemakers and admitted that his peers still had progress to make.

159
The Committee argued that American winegrowers did not yet know what constituted good
wine. They placed some of the blame on the French for this shortcoming, suggesting that the
country exported its worst wines to the United States. These adulterated, impure wines of poor
quality, mislabeled to “sell at enormous profits to unsuspecting foreigners,” made it impossible
for American palettes to recognize good wines.
111
So long as Americans learned how to
recognize and appreciate the flavors of a fine wine, the committee maintained that California’s
viticultural community did not need an education from the French on the mechanics of
winegrowing.
Though the committee admitted that American vintners needed to learn to appreciate the
flavors and constitution of fine wine, they contradicted themselves by degrading the quality of
French wines and the practices of its viticulturists. According to the delegation from California,
Americans needed to be “better acquainted…with the higher grades of foreign wines….[and] of
the character and quality of good wines than they have of cultivation and manufacturing, for
really, as the preparation of the soil, planting, cultivating, pruning, and training the vines,
gathering, selecting, and pressing the fruit, fermenting and keeping the wine…our experienced
vignerons have but little to learn of European rivals.”
112
It would not, however, be useful for
Americans to tour French vineyards and wine cellars in order to learn how to grow grapes, crush,
ferment them, bottle, and cellar the wines. Indeed, they maintained that American vineyards and
cellars compared well to those in France. European winemakers believed it better to crush the
grapes by trampling with the feet instead of using a mill or a press to avoid the mill crushing the
seed. However, this method was unsatisfactory and backwards. The Committee proclaimed,

111
Transactions of the California Agricultural Society During the Years 1866-1867, 358.

112
Ibid, 359.

160
“probably no American will every adopt the plan of crushing with naked feet, either clean or
unclean but will either rely on the crushing given in he stemming process, or use a mill…”
113

Though hygiene was an issue, the committee members were concerned with lack of modern
technology. They failed to understand why the French would crush the work using human feet
when modern machines could the work just as well, if not better. Moreover, the fact that
American vintners relied on modern machinery indicated their status as enlightened and
scientific farmers. With some patience, time, and education, the Committee was certain that
Americans could attain production on par with that in France. While French winemakers might
be able to get away with using the antiquated method of manually crushing the grapes with
human feet, the tenuous status of California made this impossible for EuroAmerican
winemakers. They stood on precipice of modernity, whiteness, and American industry, and they
feared that any missteps might cause them to fall backwards towards California’s racialized
Spanish-Mexican past.
Conclusion
The debut of California wines at the 1867 Paris Exhibition occurred nearly twenty years
after the conquest of California and the American expansion of the wine industry. In two
decades, the industry had changed dramatically. On the one hand, winegrowers had managed to
assert their status as citizen cultivators. Indeed, German immigrant winegrowers used the wine
industry to assert their right to citizenship and whiteness. The vast landholdings of firms like
Kohler & Frohling and the Anaheim colonists distinguished them from landless, racialized
vineyard workers. They were no longer dependent on the antiquated methods of Franciscan
missionaries. Instead, these winegrowers relied on scientific knowledge produced by experts at

113
Transactions of the California Agricultural Society During the Years 1866-1867, 362.

161
the University of California’s College of Agriculture and disseminated by the State Agricultural
Society. Vineyardists learned about new technologies that mechanized the winemaking
processed and distanced unclean Indian bodies from the grapes. Still, the debacle in France
raised the question of whether the modernizing project of EuroAmerican growers was legitimate
or a failure. Indeed, this incident seemed to challenge the modernity and progress of these wine
industrialists, suggesting that they were still hindered by the Spanish-Mexican origins of their
business.

Chapter 4: Fermenting “Agricultural Citizenship:” Immigration and Race-Making in
California’s Vineyards, 1860-1900
1

In the early 1860s, Leonard J. Rose was one of many newcomers seeking his fortune in
California. A native German, Rose immigrated to New Orleans as a child in 1835. With his
family, he migrated west to Illinois shortly thereafter. He came of age in Illinois and there
amassed a small fortune as a merchant. Tempted by the promise of greater wealth in the West, he
liquidated his assets in 1858 and migrated to California. Rose purchased land in the San Gabriel
Valley, immediately east of Los Angeles, and began a new career as a winegrower. He soon
established himself as a vineyardist, horse breeder, and citrus grower. According to Rose and his
contemporaries his Sunny Slope vineyard embodied modernity and American enterprise. By the
1880s his winery was producing four hundred thousand gallons of wine and one hundred
thousand gallons of brandy annually.
2

At Sunny Slope, Rose harnessed the economic mobility that California offered. His
success embodied the region’s promise to reach its full potential as a productive American place.
L.J. Rose’s property stood in stark contrast to the Mexicanness of its surroundings, particularly
the town of San Gabriel. Writing for Harper’s Monthly in 1882, journalist William Henry Bishop
offered a tour of Southern California to the magazine’s national audience. One highlight was his
visit to the San Gabriel Valley. Bishop praised Rose’s efforts at Sunny Slope but found fault with
the neighboring town of San Gabriel. The village seemed “piquantly foreign” with its adobe

1
E.J. Wickson used agricultural citizenship in his book, California Fruits and How to Grow
Them, 7
th
ed. (San Francisco: Pacific Rural Press, 1914), 351. Historian Douglas Cazaux
Sackman discusses Wickson’s notion of Agricultural Citizenship in Orange Empire: California
and the Fruits of Eden, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 27, and in “A Garden of
Worldly Delights,” in Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles,
William Deverell and Greg Hise, editors, (University of Pittsburg Press, 2006), 251.

2
L. J Rose, Jr., L. J. Rose of Sunny Slope, 1827-1899: California Pioneer, fruit Grower, Wine
Maker, Horse Breeder (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1959).

163
houses and Spanish-language signs. The town’s residents were mostly day-laborers working on
nearby estates, including Sunny Slope. Although Rose’s property modeled American enterprise,
its surroundings remained largely undeveloped and foreign in Bishop’s eyes, and presumably
those of eastern Americans. Bishop painted a florid picture of Mexican vineyard workers,
emphasizing their foreignness,
The work of the year now was the pruning of the vines….Faustino, Gaetano,
Incarnacion, and the rest of their picturesque companions appear to good
advantage in this work. Their swarthy faces are framed in slouching sombreros.
They wear red and blue shirts and handkerchiefs about their necks. They move
forward in line, each with a pruning-knife in his hand, and a small saw at his belt
for the tougher knots. The bright spots of color stand out upon the russet of the
vineyard; the pruning-knives flash as they turn to the sun.
3

Bishop described these vineyard laborers as though they were a fluid part of the natural
environment. They seemed inseparable from the picturesque landscape. He emphasized his belief
that these Mexican laborers had “much native Indian blood,” which, he suggested, explained
their subpar living quarters of “half wigwams patched up out of rubbish.” He underscored the
foreign difference of these workers, from their physical appearances to their work and living
habits.
Bishop next turned to Chinese vineyard workers, who seemed equally foreign. The
Chinese had been active in the wine industry since the 1850s in both Anaheim and Sonoma.
When the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 left thousands of Chinese laborers
unemployed, many transitioned to California’s vineyards where they replaced Indians. Despite
their obvious foreignness in his eyes, Bishop did not propose eliminating the Chinese because
they were, “for the most part, capable, industrious, honest, and neat. One divests one’s self

3
W.H. Bishop, “Southern California III,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1882, 56.

164
rapidly of any prejudice against them with which he may have started.”
4
In relation to Mexicans,
Bishop found the Chinese to show more resourcefulness and skill.
5

Figure 6 This illustration of Chinese vineyard workers accompanied Bishop's article.
6

Bishop’s juxtaposition of Sunny Slope and San Gabriel underscored the racial and
civilizing contradictions inherent in vineyard life. Winegrowers like L.J. Rose relied on laborers
who seemed inherently different from the American audiences for whom Bishop was writing. At
the same time, these workers were integral to wine agribusiness, enabling grape industrialists to
transform California’s native terrains for economic gain. Many vineyard workers—particularly
those of Mexican descent—had deep roots in California, making it very difficult to erase them
from the state’s past or present, even if Bishop might liken them to Indians perhaps to suggest
that they too might disappear.

4
W.H. Bishop, “Southern California II,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1882,
868.

5
W.H. Bishop, “Southern California III,” 48.

6
Ibid, 54.

165
Bishop implicitly questioned whether Rose’s surroundings might inhibit modernity and
civilization at Sunny Slope. Could these “foreign,” non-white workers could ever truly be
removed from California if they were such an essential part of the natural environment? Could
California ever fully and seamlessly blend into the American landscape given the continued
presence of Chinese and Mexican populations? And if these populations could not be removed or
extracted from California’s native terrains, what was their place in the state’s emerging body
politic? Bishop justaposed Sunny Slope and San Gabriel as miles apart in terms of race and
modernity, but the boundaries between the two remained nebulous and porous given the fact that
Sunny Slope could not survive without the labor provided by San Gabriel, and the town’s
laborers presumably could not survive without the wages they earned at Sunny Slope. The two
settlements had a seemingly symbiotic relationship in which the identity of one relied on the
existence of the other.

Figure 7 Depiction of the "Mongolian and Mexican" in San Gabriel.
7

7
W.H. Bishop, “Southern California III,” 56.

166
Wine industrialists helped reconfigure racial hierarchies and social belonging in
California. Their work in defining agricultural citizenship had two effects. First, this new
agricultural citizen identity excluded Mexican-Californios from positions of wealth and power.
Landownership (which had also determined racial status in Spanish and Mexican California) and
notions of modernity and progress helped define agricultural citizenship. As Mexican-
Californios slowly lost their property and fell behind the agricultural cultivation of their
immigrant neighbors, they were gradually excluded beyond the boundaries of agricultural
citizenship and whiteness.
Second, viticulture helped redefine California’s ruling class from Mexican-Californio to
Anglo-Californian.
8
Essentially, agricultural citizenship helped fashion a new class of elites. L.J.
Rose’s personal ascension to a position of wealth and influence demonstrated how he used
viticulture as a foundation on which to achieve his own evolution from a EuroAmerican
immigrant to an Anglo-Californian. His position as an agricultural citizen—as a large-scale
landowner, as a modern businessman, and as a winegrower who professed allegiance to
modernity and progress—reveal how viticulture provided the tools by which Anglo-Californians
could reinterpret and redefine what it meant to belong in California, and, indeed, be Californian.

8
Historians have long studied how the Mexican-Californio class lost its status. Beginning with
Leonard Pitt’s The Decline of the Californios, scholars have pointed a multitude of reasons why
the Californios lost their land and influence, not limited to a prejudiced legal system, racist laws,
and language biases. More recent interpretations of Californio identity and conquest include
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Faultlines, (University of California Press, 2009), Ramón A. Gutiérrez
and Richard J. Orsi, Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998). Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonies,
(University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in
California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Miroslava Chávez-
García, Negotiating Conquest Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1800s (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2004).

167
Thus, for California’s viticulturists, conquest entailed not only territorial expansion and cultural
change, but also redefining native belonging in California.
Growers like L.J. Rose achieved agricultural citizenship largely because California
fulfilled the promise of the Far West to provide new immigrants economic mobility through
landownership. Rose’s story of migration and upward mobility demonstrated how newcomers
could use the land to achieve agricultural citizenship in California. The fact that this Anglo-
Californian identity depended on economic mobility made it highly unstable, largely because it
was dependent on so many factors out of growers’ control—including climate, the cost and
availability of labor, land prices, and market rates for grape crops and wine. Despite the claims
of wine boosters, so much variability rendered economic success (or even just economic
stability) unstable for winegrowers.
Wine industrialists were active participants in California’s immigration debates between
the late 1860s and 1900. They enthusiastically offered their trade to attract “desirable”
immigrants to California from the eastern states and Europe. These newcomers, they promised,
help improve the state through their enterprise and racial whiteness. Ironically, vineyardists and
winemakers invited new immigrants to become competitors who might diminish the profit
margins of established vineyardists and winemakers. They were so concerned with disrupting
California’s Spanish-Mexican culture that potential profit loss seemed a small price to pay for
racial improvement.
At the same time vineyardists and winemakers promised to help whiten California
through immigration, winegrowers’ labor needs highlighted the contradictions between public
discourse and reality in immigration debates. Faced with labor shortages after the 1860s when
disease ravaged Indian populations, vineyard owners searched for a steady supply of laborers.

168
Though some winegrowers claimed that an increased migration of EuroAmericans would
increase the availability of white laborers available for hire in the vineyards, in practice, the
majority of vineyardists replaced Indian laborers with low-wage Chinese and Mexican workers.
The prevalence of Chinese and Mexicans in the vineyards challenged wine industrialists’ claims
that they were helping to racial improve California. These contradictions became evident to the
public by the 1870s. With the advent of Chinese exclusion, winegrowers found themselves under
public scrutiny as their labor needs directly conflicted the rising tide of nativism. Given the
importance of cheap labor to agricultural citizenship, EuroAmericans depended on Chinese and
Mexican laborers to assert their status as whites. As such, they racialized vineyard workers as
non-citizens. As wine industrialists refashioned a permanent underclass of laborers, they
threatened American ideals of free labor.
Agricultural Citizenship at Sunny Slope
Leonard J. Rose exemplified the type of agricultural citizen that blossomed in California.
In addition to his vineyard and winery, Rose maintained large citrus orchards and gained
popularity as a thoroughbred horse breeder. He served as an assemblyman in the state senate in
1887 and was active in wine trade organizations. Rose and his sons also traveled extensively to
lobby for government support for viticulture and to promote California wines throughout the
United States. Like his Californio predecessors, Rose had amassed a large amount of land. As
such, the vast operations at Sunny Slope also depended on Mexican, Indians, and Chinese
laborers, even in the wake of growing Chinese exclusion in the 1870s. Leonard J. Rose’s
personal story and business experiences as recounted by his son, Leonard J. Rose, Jr.,
demonstrated the intersection of race, environmental change, and economic expansion to assert
agricultural citizenship. Further, the changing racial makeup of Rose’s labor force between the

169
1860s and 1890s reflected the broader trajectory of race and labor in the wine industry across
California.
In the early 1860s, as Rose got settled in the San Gabriel Valley, he initially hired a crew
of “ten or fifteen Mexican peons and domesticated Indians” to transform Sunny Slope. With the
help of his hired laborers, Rose planted sixty acres with grapes in the spring of 1861 and
produced his first vintage from this planting in 1864. In describing the workforce at Sunny
Slope, his son offered little distinction between Mexicans and Indians, describing them as
follows,
Indians had much course hair and it was invariably straight. Their complexions
were more uniformly dark and their cheek bones were more prominent than those
of the Mexicans. Where as some of the Mexicans were fair, occasionally a throw
back to the Castilian among them, had blue eyes and curly auburn hair. The
Indians having long since lost their racial instincts of savagery were peaceful.
9

Though Rose’s son described these Mexicans as physically different from the Indians, the two
groups seemed culturally homogenous. Though both groups were “bibulously inclined,” they
seldom drank excessively outside of Saturday evening. Cultural attributes and behaviors factored
highly into the Rose family’s racialization of the work crews at Sunny Slope. Laborers lived in
one-room huts made of local brush. Their diets consisted of coffee, meat, beans, cheese, and
tortillas, which took the place of the bread and plates from which the Rose family dined. Leonard
J. Rose, Jr. noted that both Mexicans and Indians “fraternized readily” and intermarried, though
their marriages were of the common-law sort. He described them as hot-blooded, “Unafraid to
shed blood and fearless of mortal combat….quick to take recourse to the puñal (dagger) to settle

9
Leonard John Rose Papers, MSSHM 70724: Box 1, 25, Huntington Library, San Marino.
Hereafter LJR HL.

170
their differences.”
10
By likening Mexicans to Indians, he separated them from the land-owning,
noble class of Californios and created a Mexican identity rooted in wage labor and landlessness.
For the Rose family, the best characteristic of these laborers was their purported loyalty.
Rose’s memories of his father’s crews at Sunny Slope were akin to those of southern slave-
owning planters. He stereotyped his workers as “nomadic humble dwellers [who] were a care
free lot of good hearted souls, wonderfully amenable to kind treatment and trustworthy
competent laborers.”
11
In the eyes of the Rose family, their employees were childlike, good
hearted, and able bodied workers who lacked permanent homes and stability. Rose implied that
his family had assumed the altruistic and paternalistic duty of guiding these workers. These wage
laborers allowed Rose to enjoy more of a theoretical relationship to the land as opposed to a
practical role in improving the landscape. Rose’s presence at Sunny Slope as a landowner,
overseer, and agribusinessman helped him build an identity as an agricultural citizen, well
beyond that of farmer.
Rose altered the local landscape by clearing and fencing the land and planting it with
grape vines and orange trees. As told by his son, Mexican and Indian workers completed this
laborious process. At first glance, the landscape at Sunny Slope seemed dry and bleak. However,
its desert-like surface belied the rich, deep soil that lay beneath the cactus, sagebrush, chaparral
plants, and stubborn weeds that dotted the landscape. First, Mexican and Indian vineyard
workers cleared the land from its wild growth of desert undergrowth. These plants were
“grubbed out by the roots” and burned so that the soil could be plowed and evened. Next,
workers planted the vineyard. For his first planting, Rose likely purchased grape cuttings from a

10
LJR HL, 25.

11
LJR HL, 27.

171
neighbor; most growers in California planted their vineyards from cuttings as opposed to seeds.
12

As was the custom in and around Los Angeles, viticulturists would prune their vineyards in the
fall after the harvest. They would then gather the pruned vines into bundles of around one
hundred pruned bits, totally approximately thirty inches in length. The “butt ends” of these
bundles pruned vines were then placed in shallow trenches and covered with dirty to lay dormant
all winter.
13
In springtime, vineyardists dug a fresh hole in the moist earth into which he gently
placed the cutting before solidly stomping on the earth around the newly planted vine to remove
any pockets of air. Acre by acre, Rose’s vineyard laborers transformed the landscape of cacti and
sagebrush to one of lush, verdant vineyards.
Figure 8 Vineyard at Sunny Slope, ca. 1875-1880. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.
14

12
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California; a Practical Manual for the
Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker, (San Francisco: Payot, Upham & Co., 1888), 35.

13
Ibid, 35-36.

14
Carleton E. Watkins, “Winery at Sunny Slope,” Photograph, San Gabriel, and Environs, ca.
1875-1880, in Leonard J. Rose Family Photograph Collection, photCL 156, no. 19, Huntington
Library, San Marino.

172

At Sunny Slope, Rose distinguished himself by applying modern technologies to
Spanish-Mexican winegrowing. Rose was part of a cohort of EuroAmerican winegrowers who,
like the Franciscans before them, asserted their whiteness by relying on imported agricultural
knowledge from Europe and the eastern states and were active in trade groups. However, Rose
and his fellow growers sought to establish themselves as experts whose knowledge could
supplant the experience of Spanish-Mexican winegrowers in order to modernize California. He
was well known for his unique vineyard methods of dry irrigation. Unlike his predecessors, Rose
argued that vine irrigation was unnecessary, his reasoning being that the roots of grape vines
extended so deep that they were able to reach subterranean ground waters. Though his yields
were not as high as those of irrigated vineyards, the grapes grown on Sunny Slope were said to
have a deeper color and higher sugar content than those cultivated via conventional methods.
15

Leonard J. Rose, Jr. reminisced how his father had “pioneered and demonstrated to the
astonished natives that vine irrigation was not necessary…[his] grapes were much deeper in
color, and carried a far greater sugar content than those grown by irrigation, both qualities very
essential to the best results in wine making.” As had the Californios, Rose’s status as a
landowner helped define his white racial identity. However, Rose’s shift to new European and
American viticultural methods underscored the importance of modernization and agricultural
citizenship to the formation of a new Anglo-Californian identity.
Though Leonard J. Rose Jr. praised his father for pioneering new methods in vineyard
irrigation that improved upon the systems used by the Franciscans and the Californios, he
acknowledged that his father’s winemaking process was no different from that of his Spanish-

15
LJR, HL, HM 70724: Box 1.

173
Mexican predecessors. Thus, Rose’s progress towards modernity was nonlinear and even
contradictory at times. At Sunny Slope, the “manner of manufacture was of the same primitive
character then universally in vogue and also at the present time in some outlying districts in
European districts…three barefooted peons tramped upon them until all the grapes were crushed
and detached from the stems…” Though Leonard J. Rose continued to use this antiquated
method for the annual wine crush, his son was careful to note that “there was nothing deleterious
in the barefoot power process as the fermentation expelled the major portion of all foreign matter
and finally through the continued selling and repeated drawing off of the wine every visage of
impurity was eliminated.”
16
Though Rose emphasized the hygiene of his father’s operation
(which as key for establishing the winery as a progressive enterprise), the fact remained that
under Rose’s management, winemaking at Sunny Slope varied little from the way it had at
Mission San Gabriel a half a century prior. Indeed, the wine crush at Sunny Slope contradicted
Rose’s attempts to improve operations. As did his mission predecessors, photographs of Sunny
Slope demonstrate that at least a few of Rose’s vineyards relied on the “head-pruning” method.
Instead of training the grapes to grow along a support system of wires, posts, and trellises, head-
pruning allowed the grapes to grow into low bushes.
17
(Figures seven and eight demonstrate this
method.) This underscored the irony that he dismissed the vineyard planting and irrigation of the
Missionaries and Californios as backwards while simultaneously applying their winemaking
methods to his own production.

16
LJR, HL, HM 70726: Box 1, 3.

17
Thomas Pinney, “The Early Days in Southern California,” in The University of
California/Sotheby Book of California Wine, ed. Doris Muscatine, et al. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 2.

174

Figure 9 Undated Photograph of Sunny Slope Vineyard and Winery. Courtesy of California History
Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California
18

By the late 1860s, production levels at Sunny Slope were flourishing. Consequently, the
demand for a reliable supply of laborers increased beyond those Indians and Mexicans living at
the Rancheria near Sunny Slope. Rose, Jr. noted that the labor shortage was particularly urgent
for the winery because his father felt unhappy with the attention Mexicans paid to the delicate
winemaking process. To remedy this, L.J. Rose hired twelve Chinese workers who then moved
to Sunny Slope around 1871, amid conflicts involving the Chinese in Los Angeles. Rose
observed that the arrival of the “Chinos” caused a stir amongst the “native laborers,” but that the
two groups “soon fraternized and had a fine time trying to teach each other a few words of their
respective languages.” The arrival of the Chinese at Sunny Slope marked the creation of further
racial hierarchies at Sunny Slope.
Labor divisions fell along racial lines at Sunny Slope. Both “Chinamen and Mexicans”
worked in Rose’s vineyards, orange orchards, and horse stables. According to the farm’s

18
Los Angeles Co.: San Gabriel: Sunny Slope Winery, Watkins: 4813, Wines and Wine-Making
Photograph Collection, California History Room: California State Library, Sacramento, CA.

175
superintendent, the Chinese did the majority of the work and earned less money. At the same
time, the managers at Sunny Slope felt that Chinese workers lacked some skills that restricted
them from doing all of the work necessary on the farm. Chinese earned less than anyone else,
“The Chinese on Sunny Slope worked for a dollar and ten cents per day and one of their number
settled for all of them every three months. Laborers at the barn, the superintendent, and teamsters
worked by the month and drew their wages at their pleasure. The Mexicans worked for a dollar
and twenty-five cents per day and came to the front door of the house to draw their pay Saturday
nights after quitting time. This was quite an occasion with them, not alone because it was payday
and the eve of their Sunday holiday, but also it afforded them a few minutes visit with El Patrón,
as they all spoke of father.”
19
Thus, one’s race not only determined one’s wages, but also
determined the frequency by which one drew a paycheck. Further, racial status either permitted
or denied laborers to have personal contact with Rose himself.
The workers at Sunny Slope also enjoyed the wine they helped make, particularly on
Saturday nights after “all had drawn their pay, the greater number would go by the winery and
procure their botella (bottle) of vino (wine) of aguardiente (brandy) and take it home to the
Rancheria, and as late as midnight…we could hear them over a quarter of a mile away, singing
off the effects of their indulgences in their naturally high-pitched, shrill voices. Sunday morning
would find them bedecked in their best on the way to the mission to buy provisions, and Monday
would find all hands on deck in good condition.”
20
Again, Rose related Mexicans to stereotypes
depicting Indians as drunkards who lacked the morality and self-control to moderate their
alcohol consumption. Though Rose, Jr. did not clarify whether all workers were able to enjoy

19
Leonard J. Rose, Jr., 107.

20
Ibid, 107.

176
this fringe benefit, given the fact that only Mexican and white laborers were paid weekly and
collected their pay individually (as opposed to being paid by the group as were the Chinese), the
Chinese likely did not receive this bottle in addition to their pay. At Sunny Slope, race also
determined whether or not one could have access to the wine they helped produce.
Rose grew increasingly dependent on his crew of Chinese workers. According to his son,
the “Chinamen” proved “absolutely dependable and honest, rarely losing a day and seldom
quitting their jobs.” One particular positive quality for the Rose family was the fact that their
Chinese workers housed themselves in quarters that “one third their number of Caucasians would
rebel against.”
21
Indeed, their compliance and docility were especially valued at Sunny Slope.
Rose applauded how quickly his newly hired Chinese workers learned their new tasks. He even
went so far as to describe it as superior to Caucasian labor, “White labor which was used in the
horse barns was so undependable that two Chinamen were put to work there…they soon
developed…into fair caretakers.” Rose especially valued the compliance and trainability he
seemed to find in the Chinese at Sunny Slope. In comparing White laborers to the Chinese, Rose
essentially highlighted the characteristics that made the latter excellent workers but inelegible for
citizenship.
The Chinese were also less violent and argumentative than their Mexican counterparts.
Rose, Jr. noted that “they never quarreled among themselves or with others, but stuck together
and resisted, en masse formation any assault on one of their number…on rare occasions a
Mexican stuck one of them; in an instant every Chinaman in sight or within calling
distance…would be on top of the lone adversary. Clawing with might…” Still, Rose claimed that

21
Leonard J. Rose, Jr., 82.

177
they “were not naturally vicious” and that “their onslaughts did little damage.”
22
Rose, Jr.
acknowledged that the Chinese might be provoked into violence, he depicted them as a naturally
peaceful race. In doing so he racialized them as less dangerous than aggressive Mexicans, who
also got rousingly drunk every week. The Rose family took pride in Sunny Slope’s evolution into
a village with “a hundred or more Chinamen, thirty Mexicans, and twenty white men….If there
is aught to challenge the happy freedom and romantic grandeur of such a country estate, it is
beyond my conception to visualize it.”
23
Leonard J. Rose, Jr. painted a romanticized portrait of a
bustling country estate or plantation that relied almost exclusively on racialized laborers. Indeed,
the operations at Sunny Slope depended on regular, reliable access to a source of cheap, passive,
and subservient workers. Leonard J. Rose found this in Chinese workers.
By 1875, Sunny Slope had expanded tremendously. Rose’s new vineyard increased his
acreage of bearing vines to one thousand acres; between the vineyards, horse barns, and
orchards, this enterprise required a staff of more than one hundred laborers.
24
As Rose found
himself overextended by the management of his estate, be began exploring how to outsource
sales of wine and bring his product to eastern markets. He partnered with the Perkins, Stern, &
Company, whose firm first began distributing California wines in 1868 when they collaborated
with Kohler and Frohling. From their offices in Boston and New York, Perkins, Stern, &

22
Leonard J. Rose, Jr., 82.

23
In my investigations, Chinese agricultural workers are not readily present in the census
schedules for San Gabriel. Sucheng Chan suggests that the census excluded many seasonal
agricultural workers because the enumerators came around in May and early June, well before
the harvest. For more discussion about the difficulties in tracing the Chinese through nineteenth
century censuses, see Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California
Agriculture, 1860-1910, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 412-414.

24
Leonard J. Rose, 106.

178
Company distributed Sunny Slope wines nationwide. Rose also sent his sons all over the United
States and even into Mexico to market his materials. The Rose family’s complex trade networks
were part of a broader industry-wide trend to open sales offices in major cities across the United
States and further demonstrated how the wine industry helped to integrate the West into the
broader United States long before the rise of citrus exports. Rose’s vast trade networks
represented the steady modernization of the wine industry as a modern agribusiness. His was not
merely a family business that engaged in limited trade with a handful of traders (as had the
Yorba family in its business relationship with William Heath Davis) but a thriving modern
business with offices in Chicago, New York City, and New Orleans.
Rose was of a class of EuroAmerican growers and landowners who slowly supplanted the
Californio ruling class to establish themselves as Anglo-Californians. His son associated the
“doom” of the “Dons” with the American acquisition of California, which also brought progress
to California and changed the landscape. Looking back at his father’s glory years, Rose’s son
noted how numbers of Californios “crossed the meridian of their glory and their downward fall
to obscurity was tragic.”
25
Rose Jr. painted a romantic picture of the conquest of the Californios,
in which the arrival of “Americanos” marked the “twilight hour” of the “glorious existence” of
the “natives.” Thus, it was not so much a bloody, forced conquest but a gentle end to the period
of the “Dancing Dons and their charming Senoritas.” In his description of Californio life, Rose
rationalized the Californios’ loss of property by emphasizing their love for comfort and easy
living. He insinuated that it was their laziness and childlike simplicity that brought about their
inevitable fall.

25
LJR HL, 70732: Box 1, 71.

179
In many ways, Rose’s success as a cultivator defined him. He was, in every sense of the
phrase, an agricultural citizen. One wine booster would later describe Sunny Slope as a fine
country estate not unlike those found in England.
26
His class of agricultural citizens was distinct
from the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer. Rose fell more in line with antebellum
southern planters whose success depended on a subordinate class of wage laborers. Like southern
gentlemen farmers, Rose had a distant relationship to the land and was only connected to the
landscape through the intermediaries of his hired workers, particularly after the 1870s. Indeed,
his son recollected how “This [the planting] and all other labor on the ranch, except the extra
amount required for grape picking at vintage time, was done for the first few years by a dozen or
fifteen Mexicans and domesticated Indians.”
27
From the start, Rose relied on hired workers, and
not his family, to do much of the hard manual labor at Sunny Slope. Though three of his sons
live past infancy, by the time they were adolescents who could presumably be of use on the
ranch, Rose sent them to Los Angeles to be educated in private schools. Thus, Rose brought up
his sons to function as modern businessmen and not as farmers.
Rose’s economic position as a EuroAmerican landowner—albeit a heavily mortgaged
one—obviously distinguished him from Chinese, Mexican, and Indian workers. But, his status as
an elite Anglo-Californian also helped differentiate him from the Californios. His involvement in
politics and in agricultural trade groups, as well as his work as an exporter also gave him
credence in elite circles. Rose was able to achieve these positions because of his work as a
modern viticulturalist. It is this, ultimately, that distinguished his Anglo-Californian class from
the Californios. Rose quite literally grew his fortune on the vines at Sunny Slope, and it was this

26
Frona Eunice Wait, Wines and Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine-Drinking
(San Francisco: The Bancroft Co, 1889), 174.

27
L. J Rose, Jr., 54.

180
viticultural wealth that allowed him to become a statesman and build a mansion on Bunker Hill
in Los Angeles. Ultimately, Rose’s connection to the landscape and transformation of the land
using purportedly progressive viticultural methods is what allowed him to reinterpret whiteness
and power in a way that excluded the Californios.
Still, the Rose family’s experience demonstrates that the process of racialization towards
an Anglo-Californian identity was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. The
hybridization of Rose’s modern vineyard irrigation methods with the winery’s antiquated grape
crush underscores the murky progression towards modernity in rural California. Rose could pay
lip service to the scientific methods, modern technology, and viticultural education that his trade
groups promoted all the while looking the past—specifically, to the Missions themselves—to
make his wine. As a landowner and businessman with national connections, Rose could
differentiate himself from Chinese and Mexican workers, and even the Californios. Further,
Rose’s location in rural California allowed him to lay claim to the upward mobility promised by
the far West. Still, Rose’s transition from a German EuroAmerican to a member of Los
Angeles’s Anglo-Californian race depended on the racially ambiguous identities of the
Californios—and, more importantly, on the non-white racial identity of Mexicans and Chinese.
As Natalia Molina demonstrates, race is never constructed in isolation, but rather is constructed
from a “mutually constitutive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent
groups intersect.”
28
As such, Rose’s racial status depended on his relation to other groups. In this
case, it was the presence of these vineyard workers as racialized, premodern bodies that enabled
Rose to claim an Anglo-Californian identity for himself and his family. Because it depended on
so many variables, this racial identity was unstable. It could, potentially, be contested outside the

28
Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical
Power of Racial Scripts, (University of California Press, 2014), 3.

181
west. Further, the continued presence of the Chinese in the San Gabriel valley threatened to
inhibit modern progress and the sustainability of free labor in the post-Civil War west. Yes, Rose
had become an Anglo-Californian; but it was built on a shaky foundation of economic
overextension and debt.
Imperial Grapes: Immigration and Wine
Immigration concerned California’s EuroAmerican growers who wanted to attract more
newcomers like Rose to their industry. In December of 1869, Governor Henry H. Haight
addressed the California legislature on the subject of immigration. He encouraged lawmakers to
facilitate immigration from the eastern United States and Europe. For Governor Haight, the
California’s economic development rested on the state’s ability to attract new residents, namely
those who the governor deemed “not of races inferior in natural traits, pagan in religion, ignorant
of free institutions and incapable of sharing in them without putting the very existence of those
institutions in peril.” Haight clearly outlined the ideal immigrant as a white Christian who would
advance republican governance. The Governor attempted to define the parameters of civil
society in California when he emphasized that his constituents wanted “immigrants of kindred
races” whose racial status would permit them political privileges and who would enthusiastically
respond to the “obligations imposed upon citizens under a republican government.” For
Governor Haight, agriculture, race, and citizenship were intrinsically united. He especially
sought out farmers from Germany and other European nations who would improve the soil using
their knowledge of grape cultivation.
29
Twenty years after signing the Treaty of Guadalupe

29
“Governor of California, Hon. Henry H. Haight’s biennial message to the Legislature,
December 1869,” California Immigrant Union, All About California and the Inducements to
Settle There, (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1870,) 3, quoted in Douglas Cazaux
Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005), 27.

182
Hidalgo, EuroAmericans still confronted the presence of Mexican-Californios. One way to
remedy this problem and more rapidly assimilate California into the United States was to erase
Californio culture and people by attracting the right kind of immigrant—farmers from Europe
and the eastern United States with superior agricultural knowledge who would speed up the
process of Americanization.
California’s winegrowers had long been concerned with population growth to facilitate
land improvements. From its inception in the 1850s, the California State Agricultural Society
repeatedly entreated upon the Legislature to adopt measures to encourage “a larger immigration
from the Atlantic States and Europe….of the most the desirable classes of people.”
30
These
newcomers should include “vine growers and wine makers,” those who would “buy land and
become citizens and practical and prosperous farmers….”
31
Immigrants could help transplant the
Jeffersonian ideal of the small family farm to the west. If California’s new populations could
only keep farms small, there would be no need for hired farm laborers, thus keeping class
differences at bay and allowing for social mobility.
32
This mythic class of immigrants had many
other traits as well. They should embody the virtues of Protestant thrift to overcome the
“extravagance of life…born of the flush days” of the gold rush when “wealth came and vanished
like a dream.
33
The State Agricultural Society assumed the task of enticing newcomers to the
Pacific who might help plant the seeds of American republicanism and free labor. At the same

30
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1868 and 1869,”
(Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1870), 6-8.

31
Ibid, 9.

32
Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880, (Madison: The Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1963), 80.

33
Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society, 1870-71, (Sacramento: T.A. Springer
State Printer, 1872), 85.

183
time, the Agricultural Society seemed to ignore the fact that many of its officers and prominent
members were not Jeffersonian yeoman farmers, but large-scale growers (like L.J. Rose) whose
vast tracts of land made wage laborers a necessity and whose agricultural practices more closes
resembled southern planters. But, this rhetoric did not match the reality, which was reflected in
the large-scale farms that dotted California’s landscape. The idyllic notion of the “family farm”
proved to be a fallacy given the reality of land distribution in California.
Viticultural booster publications attempted to educate outsiders about the promise of
California vineyards in the hopes of attracting a “better” class of growers to vineyards and
wineries. The Catalogue of the Products of California was one such publication produced for
American Exposition at New Orleans in 1885. This booster pamphlet was intended to attract
potential growers to California. It featured experts such as Professor Eugene Hilgard, a noted
agricultural expert from the University of California, and Charles B. Turrill, a vineyardist and
officer for the California State Agricultural Society. Turrill reassured readers that California had
evolved beyond the rough and tumble years of the Gold Rush when different classes mixed
together and “virtue and vice lived together [and] sterling integrity and base deception were
brought face to face…”
34
California now resembled an empire bearing “all the elements of
success and gifted with boundless resources.”
35
Grape cultivation and wine production were
especially prevalent, according to Turrill. In California, he proclaimed, “a man may literally sit
under his own vine and fig tree, possessing his own home, surrounding by his children, attended

34
Southern Pacific Company, California at the American Exposition, (New Orleans: W.
Stansbury & Co., 1886), 10.

35
Ibid, 10.

184
by his wife, may know how blessed it is to live.”
36
Turrill painted a romantic picture of verdant,
bountiful western landscapes. In doing so, he seemed to reassure easterners—potential
immigrants of the “right” classes—that California was indeed a settled, civilized place where one
might pursue fruitful agricultural cultivation. This was the land of grapes—and not just the
ordinary grapes with which eastern Americans were familiar, but the best European vines
imported from the continent for the purpose of producing first rate wines, table grapes, and
raisins. This further emphasized Turrill’s point that the Pacific shores were no longer
uncultivated lands populate by a backwards population. Turrill assured his readers that the days
when the region was controlled by “foreign power” were in the past. The Mission fathers and
other Spanish who seemed content to pass the time in rest or in simple cattle raising had been
supplanted by “the American element,” which proved “too strong for the Spanish, and the
monopoly of stock was taken from one race and scattered among the newcomers.”
37
Turrill
reassured potential immigrants that any unsavory Spanish elements were part of California’s
past. The demise of Spanish missionaries was inevitable and a new race had taken over
California, transforming her rich terrains into productive agricultural fields.
For essayist Charles Dudley Warner the solution to California’s immigrant shortage lay
in correcting the state’s reliance on large-scale farms. In an 1891 article for Harpers Monthly,
Warner outlined the many challenges facing immigrants to California. First, there was little
government land left, and even less available with water rights. He critiqued the status quo in
which large tracts of land were occupied by a few owners. Any available land sold for high
prices. For example, unimproved raisin grape land with water rights sold for $250-$300 per acre

36
Southern Pacific Company, 10.

37
Southern Pacific Company, 12.

185
in Riverside. Warner challenged the claims of boosters who promised instant riches for citrus
and grape growers. To those who cultivated the soil, he promised a comfortable middle-class
living “in what might be called luxury elsewhere… far removed from poverty and much above
the condition of the majority of inhabitants of the foreign wine and fruit producing countries.”
38

For Warner, California offered the kind of upward mobility—rooted in agriculture and land
ownership—that was difficult to achieve outside the west.
Warner seemed to blame many of California’s problems on the large-scale of
landownership. In order to help attract white newcomers to the state, Warner proposed a few
ideas which could help Californians revert back to the ideal of a Jeffersonian farmer. First, he
encouraged large-scale landowners to subdivide their land to allow small families of
agriculturists to establish industrious farms and tidy homes. Warner reminded his readers that
there was “no exception to the rule that continual labor, thrift, and foresight” were essential to
earning a good living and becoming competent in horticulture.
39
Warner wanted the archetype of
an American middle-class family-farmer to become the norm in California. He attempted to
divorce agricultural cultivation from its foundation in large-scale property ownership, a tradition
dating back to Spanish and Mexican land grants. Warner seemed to find this skewed land
distribution to be a hurdle for the region’s Americanization towards a middle-class ideal.
Labor also concerned Warner, especially since Chinese expulsion threatened to contrict
California’s already limited supply of laborers. He acknowledged that Chinese labor had been a
necessity in California. But with California’s new policies to exclude Chinese immigration,
Dudley envisioned a need for a new class of laborers to replace seasonal Chinese workers. He

38
Charles Dudley Warner, “The Outlook in Southern California,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine, January 1891, 167.

39
Ibid, 173.

186
acknowledged that pay might be a problem in attracting European farm hands. Warner again
reverted back to the yeoman farmer, envisioning a new California in which the unified labor of
the family would make Chinese farmhands irrelevant. He described the labor requirements of
orchards and vineyards so light that “a smart intelligent boy” could be “almost as valuable a
worker in the field as a man.”
40
To support his argument that farms run by small nuclear families
was the ideal future of California, Warner told the story of a migrant family in San Diego. This
family had left New England to achieve better health and established themselves as tenants on a
farm in El Cajon. Through their industriousness, they purchased and managed a small vineyard
tract. Hard work and unified family labor was key to success. Similarly, he told the story of the
industrious German colonists who had transformed land along the Santa Ana River into a
thriving winegrowing cooperative in the 1850s. Dudley held up Anaheim as a model settlement
where the right class of immigrant embodied American industriousness. In praising the German
colonists, Dudley essentially ignored the fact that the success of this cooperative lay in its
consolidation of land, and not in its operation as a small family farm. Thus, small farms would be
manageable with the physical labor of a family unit itself.
While the Chinese might pose a threat to American values, foreigners from European
could help refine and improve the state. In California, winegrowers and their supporters had
markedly different attitudes towards European immigration than did eastern Americans. Unlike
Americans along the eastern seaboard, EuroAmericans in California celebrated Europeans,
whose labors were helping refine California’s vineyards through cleanliness and modernity.
Frona Wait, a San Francisco journalist and wine industry booster, celebrated the collaboration of
Chinese labor and European viticultural methods in the state’s vineyards. Her 1889 Wines and

40
Charles Dudley Warner, 175.

187
Vines describe the harvest as “a scene of intense activity…[where] the Asiatic laborer meets the
vine which hails from his own land, but is an unknown and unappreciated wild vine there….In
most cases the vines are planted seven feet apart each way, and are trained either by the St.
Macaire, Guyot or Cahintre systems so much in use of the Gironde and Burgundy vineyards.”
Wait went on to depict “a small army of Chinamen, garbed in their quaint many shirted costume”
who carefully harvested the grapes.
41
Wait juxtaposed Chinese labor against European systems
of plant training. Though the Chinese—a population deemed undesirable by Chinese exclusion—
had planted and harvest these grapes, their work was validated and sanitized because it was done
according to European standards of viticulture.
Likewise, an 1899 article in Harper’s depicted an idyllic vineyard scene that gave
importance to Europeans, “Through the trees we can see the hills, all vineyard-grown; the cellar
walls are festooned with English ivy, order are given in French or German, and we catch the
spirit of the time and place. The scene is foreign to almost all else that we have in America.”
42

The entire scene seemed exotic, from the plants, to the people, to the language. Still, this was not
necessarily a bad thing; rather than seem dangerous, the journalist painted a quaint picture of
European culture thriving in California’s countryside. In this same series where Bishop found
much to be desired by San Gabriel, he also wrote about the LeFranc vineyard in Santa Clara
County and celebrated the European foreignness of this vineyard. Many of the laborers at this
operation were French, from the Alsacian foreman to the French peasant maid working in the
yard. The LeFranc vineyard was “the pioneer in the way of making wine-growing a regular

41
Frona Eunice Wait, 19.

42
Edwards Roberts, “California Wine-Making,” Harper’s Weekly, March 1889, 198.

188
business venture.”
43
At LeFranc vineyard, one could feel “very much abroad in the scenes of this
new industry on American soil.” Further, this vineyard was a model of cleanliness and purity—
indicators of progress away from Spanish-Mexican culture. Though the winemakers at LeFranc
might be French, American consumers could be certain that the wine produced at the hands of
these European immigrants was pure, unadulterated wine. Though these winegrowers were
clearly distinguished from “real” Americans, they were not outsiders or undesirable immigrants.
These vineyard workers might not yet be Anglo or be able to fully claim an American identity
but because their labors were promoting American industry on American soil, they were to be
embraced. These conversations and debates about immigration represented the struggle to define
Anglo-Californian belonging by drawing the parameters of agricultural citizenship, industry,
and, ultimately, by what it was not.
Chinese in the Vineyards: Solution or Nuisance?
Before the 1860s, California Indians had provided low-wage labor in vineyards and
wineries throughout southern California. As disease destroyed these populations and their
numbers declined, vineyard owners faced labor shortages. In seeking workers to fill the gaps left
by Indians, growers sought an inexpensive, dependable, and pliable workforce. After 1860, grape
cultivators sought to locate a cheap, pliable and expendable work force to replace Indians. The
Chinese seemed to fit the bill. Winegrowers found Chinese appealing low-wage workers who
they stereotyped as particularly compliant. Growers thought Chinese growers exhibited “patient
docility and remarkable facility of imitation, mechanical exactitude and singular carefulness in

43
W.H. Bishop, “Southern California I,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1882, 721.

189
performing their tasks” as well as their “constant industry.”
44
Growers found it appealing to deal
only with the leader of a Chinese crew when negotiating wages and jobs, and not with an each
individual worker. This further distanced growers from the land itself. These work crews would
board themselves, freeing vineyard owners of the responsibility of providing food and shelter,
accommodations that EuroAmerican farmhands required. At the same time the perceived
compliance and subservience of the Chinese made them good workers, these qualities made them
unsuited for citizenship in California. Rather than be a contradiction, these two characteristics
seemed to inherently define agricultural laborers outside the realm of citizenship.
The unique market conditions and distribution of property in California made labor
shortages a problem for agriculturalists, including vineyard owners. When compared to farms in
the eastern and middle states, ranches, orchards, and vineyards in California had higher fixed
costs and lower rates of return on investments. In keeping with land distribution patterns under
Spanish and Mexican rule, land tracts in California were much larger than the average American
farm and land was distributed among a smaller group of landowners. Because these farms were
so large, they required disproportionate numbers of laborers. Profits also had a broader scope out
of the control of individual growers. Prices for agricultural goods like wine were not determined
by local trends of supply and demand but by national and world market. Commodity prices
determined profits and set maximum limits for wages. Meanwhile, the availability of a reliable
labor supply willing to work at these predetermined wages limited the volume that growers could
produce.
45
This delicate balance of wages, commodity prices, and cheap labor meant that a
grower’s profits remained largely out of his control. Thus, low-wage workers were economically

44
Department of Agriculture, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1870,
(Washington, 1871), 567, quoted in Ping Chiu, 70.

45
Ping Chiu, 69.

190
desirable in order to offset market and operational expenses, including unusually high taxes and
higher borrowing rates. Vineyardists also faced the additional cost of waiting five years for their
fruit to mature, whereas other growers might only have to wait one season. Still, the modern
progress of the wine industry was hampered by its economic dependence on non-white laborers
whose continued presence in the vineyards could threaten the Americanization of California.
Despite the ready availability of Chinese workers in the wake of labor shortages, many
vineyardists needed convincing. Agoston Haraszthy was a pioneer in hiring Chinese workers to
meet the labor shortages in California’s fields, orchards, and vineyards. As early as September of
1860, he addressed the crowds at the Sonoma County Agricultural Fair on this subject; his
speech was reproduced in the Daily Alta California, reaching readers across the state. Haraszthy
fervently believed that California could increase its wealth by exporting agricultural products the
eastern United States. This would make the state a viable competitor on national markets.
However, in order to achieve equal market competition, growers first had to lower their high
labor costs. For Haraszthy, these exorbitant labor costs were an “evil” that were stunted
California’s agricultural prosperity, even more so than trans-Atlantic freight costs. Haraszthy
believed that employing Chinese workers offered the simplest solution to both labor shortages
and the high wages commanded by EuroAmerican farm hands.
Haraszthy directly addressed the racial fears of his fellow EuroAmerican growers by
appealing to their desires for an efficient, cheap, and seemingly pliable labor force. He drew
from his own experiences hiring Chinese vineyard workers at Buena Vista in Sonoma to reassure
growers who worried about the farming capabilities of Chinese workers, “Do you believe that
Chinamen have no capacity to learn? On the contrary, the people of no country are so imitative

191
as they are. I speak from experience; I employ Chinamen and they work well.”
46
Though his
words seemed to be an attempt to raise the Chinese in the eyes of potential employers, Haraszthy
also brought them down by limiting their skills to those performed in rote. In short, the Chinese
were not, per Haraszthy’s description, creative or independent workers. He seemed to imply that
nature had given them limited capabilities, but not so limited to disqualify them from manual
vineyard labor. Haraszthy praised their skills working in all areas of his property—from the
haystacks, to the orchards, to the vineyards where Chinese crews planted, pruned, and harvested
the grapes and even made Buena Vista’s wines. Haraszthy declared that at that very moment, a
crew of twenty-six Chinese were “reclaiming swamp lands which would have been untouched
for many years, if compelled to be reclaimed by white labor at $30 per month.”
47
With lower
wage costs, growers would be able to compete on national markets, benefiting not only
individual growers but also the state at large.
Haraszthy encouraged his peers to consciously rid themselves of the prejudices that were
making them blind to their own financial interests.
48
At his own Buena Vista Vineyard,
Haraszthy had employed crews of Chinese workers since he purchased his winery in 1857. That
year, Haraszthy first hired Chinese crews to dig hundred feet of tunnels to construct wine
cellars.
49
Chinese workers also cleared land and planted over seventy thousand vines to expand
the existing vineyard.
50
For all this, Haraszthy claimed to pay bargain wages of only eight

46
“The Sonoma County Agricultural Fair,” Daily Alta California, 2 September 1860.

47
Ibid.

48
Ibid.

49
Agoston Haraszthy, The Father of California Wine, (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1979), 28.

50
Sucheng Chan, 242.

192
dollars a month plus board, compared to the thirty dollars in monthly wages that comparable
white workers would command. Haraszthy likely underestimated these low wages. Five years
later, Chinese crews were earning $1/day at Buena Vista.
51
It seems unlikely that wages would
have increased so quickly.
52
Given his hyperbolic nature, he probably exaggerated the true cost
of hiring Chinese workers in an effort to convince his fellow grape cultivators to hire them.
Chinese field hands offered a perfect balance between cost and skill for Haraszthy. He
characterized them as inexpensive to hire, easily trainable, and enterprising. Indeed, they
complemented the skills of White laborers, “Chinamen will perform the cheap and inferior labor;
the white men the better sorts, such as attending to machines, teaming, overseeing, raising cattle
and sheep, warehousing, etc.” By using race to determine wages and work assignments at Buena
Vista Winery, Haraszthy implicitly racialized his workers and created hierarchies based on
earnings and the prestige of different jobs. Haraszthy reassured his fellow growers that the
Chinese would never truly pose a threat to EuroAmericans. First, Haraszthy argued that such
racial divisions of labor would increase efficiency and production thus would benefit everyone in
the state. Harazsthy eased the concerns of EuroAmerican by promising that the Chinese would
not become their equals but instead would remain subordinates whose labors could only increase
wealth in California. Second, Haraszthy reassured his fellow growers that the Chinese would
never truly pose a threat to EuroAmericans because of the laws barring them from achieving the
rights of citizenship. In doing so, Haraszthy was essentially defining the Chinese outside
parameters of civil society and sketching the boundaries of racial hierarchies.

51
Vincent Carosso, The California Wine Industry: A Study of the Formative Years, (University
of California Press), 1951, 70-71.

52
William F. Heintz, “The Role of Chinese Labor in Viticulture and Wine Making in Nineteenth
Century California,” (Masters Thesis California State College, Sonoma, 1977), 23.

193
For Haraszthy, the economic benefits associated with Chinese vineyard workers
outweighed any racial and cultural angst that his peers might have. He ignored the contradictions
of his own modernizing campaigns in promoting the mass employment of Chinese workers in the
wine industry. Haraszthy argued that the widespread employment of Chinese workers would
allow growers to more quickly civilize the state. Haraszthy credited Chinese agricultural workers
for helping to cultivate California into “the garden of the world.” Haraszthy predicted that the
skills of the Chinese would be always be an asset for improving rural California, “I predict that at
no distant time, these people will lease your land, and cultivate such vegetables and nuts, as they
are accustomed to raise in their native country….They will look upon this country more as home
than they do now. By degrees they will adopt our habits and tastes—will at all times makes us
good servants, and as the law excludes them from citizenship, no matter how many come they
can have no dangerous influence on our domestic institutions.” Haraszthy was very concerned
with modernizing the wine industry. His speeches and writings worked to depict winegrowing as
a profitable business with a broad geographic reach. However, he contradicted his own
modernizing goals by the fact that he wanted to build a viticultural empire on the foundation of
Chinese labor—a group that could never, by his own estimation, become American citizens.
Haraszthy was not the only grower to hire Chinese workers, though he was among the
most vocal. Growers throughout the grape growing regions of southern California commonly
hired crews of Chinese pickers to harvest their crops. For example, the Anaheim cooperative
brought Chinese workers from San Francisco to work in its vineyards. Likewise, Los Angeles
vineyardists, Benjamin Davis Wilson, routinely hired Chinese workers for his vineyard and for
his household staff.
53

53
Benjamin Davis Wilson Papers, September 9, October 2, 1864, HL, Ping Chiu, 81.

194
Backlash: Chinese Exclusion and Vineyard Labor
By the 1870s, grape growers found that their labor needs were in direct conflict with
Californians who sought to prohibit Chinese immigration. Anti-Chinese sentiment swept
California especially hard during economic crises, including the years between 1876 and 1879.
54

In Los Angeles in the 1880s, local laws targeted the city’s Chinese residents and flagged them as
a dangerous threat to the region’s health.
55
As anti-Chinese sentiment gained popular momentum
throughout the West, both individual growers and trade organizations found themselves on the
defensive about their Chinese labor forces, particularly after Chinese Exclusion became federal
law in 1882.
Booster groups offered practical, systematic solutions to increasing the population of the
state and advancing agricultural industry. One such group, the California Immigrant Union,
framed immigration to California as an urgent issue for securing American expansion in the
west. Casper Thomas Hopkins, an insurance salesman in Oakland and president of the California
Immigrant Union, used American republican ideals to argue against Chinese immigration to the
United States. Writing on the heels of the Civil War, Hopkins decried the continuation of a
permanent class of degraded, unfree laborers, “If the idea prevalent in the South before the war is
to be revived, whereby a laboring class was to perform the drudgery of the nation, without its
having any voice in its legislation, then let us welcome the Chinaman to our shores.”
56
He found
such notions abhorrent and no better than those of southern Democrats. Hopkins feared that

54
Sucheng Chan, 370.

55
Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939,
(University of California Press, 2006), 12.

56
C.T. Hopkins, Common Sense Applied to the Immigrant Question, (San Francisco: Turnbull &
Smith, 1869), 20.

195
Chinese immigration to California represented a regression back to the Atlantic slave trade and
posed a serious threat to American ideals of free labor. Hopkins acknowledged the important
contributions of Chinese laborers who had performed their services “while denied nearly all the
privileges of citizens; laboring under a system resembling peonage, regarded as an inferior class,
and numbering only about one-tenth of the whole population. For Hopkins, the reliance on
Chinese agricultural workers posed a threat to ideals of free labor and were a hindrance to the
Americanization of the state.
Hopkins was not, however, suggesting that California grant its Chinese residents equal
rights. Rather, he argued that their rights should be dependant on their capabilities. Hopkins
believed that nature had limited the innate capabilities of the Chinese, which, he surmised, would
prohibit them from “aspire[ing] to anything like the Anglo-Saxon idea of liberty or progress.”
57

Thus, the backwards nature and intellectual deficiencies of the Chinese would make it impossible
to grant them the full rights of citizenship. Hopkins proposed that California halt Chinese
immigration and let the fate of those already living in California be determined by laissez faire.
Instead of populating California’s vast territories with workers who served only to cheapen
wages and threaten American republican values, Hopkins instead encouraged the state to attract
“men and women of those liberty-loving races whose descendents we are ourselves, and in
whose hands, and those of their children, can be safely entrusted the custody of American
institutions.”
58
For Hopkins, creating a homogenous population in California would help
preserve the United States’ system of “political liberty” in the West. These ideal populations

57
C.T. Hopkins, 20.

58
Ibid, 22.

196
included not only Americans from the eastern and middle states, but also Europeans coming
through Castle Gardens.
In an 1876 hearing held before a Senate Committee of the State of California,
EuroAmerican growers were called forth to offer opinions as to the viability and desirability of
the Chinese community in California. One expert worried that the continued presence of the
Chinese would have disastrous effects on the social and political conditions throughout the state.
In particular, he expressed concerns that an increase in Chinese immigration would “cheapen
labor to such a degree that white labor could not compete with them.”
59
Conversely, Abraham
Schell—a vineyardist from Stanislaus County—spoke to protect his supply of labor and,
presumably, his business. A resident of California since 1856, Schell claimed to have hired
diverse employees over the years, including French, Irish, Chinese, and Scandinavian workers.
Though Schell claimed to prefer White laborers, he found them in short supply and turned to
Chinese men instead. He declared without the Chinese, much of the work on his farms would be
left undone. Schell validated the racial fears of his fellow EuroAmericans and agreed with other
White Californians who mistrusted Chinese and found them unreliable witnesses in court.
Schell’s mistrust did not, however, extend to his laborers and, presumably, his profits. He
went so far as to declare, “if the Chinese element of labor was taken away from us it would be a
great detriment.”
60
Schell spoke only for himself and his peers in rural California,
acknowledging that he had little experience with the experiences of the Chinese in the city. He
also compared white laborers to Chinese workers, “in the country, there is no competition
between Chinamen and white men, but I find this difference: the Chinamen will stay and work,

59
The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration, (Sacramento: State Printing
Office, 1876), 21.

60
The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration, 84.

197
but the white man, as soon as he gets a few dollars, will leave and go elsewhere. Once in a while
I get a good white man, and he will work until he gets enough money to buy a farm for himself;
then I have to go and get more laborers.”
61
In terms of reliability, Schell’s Chinese workers
clearly won.
Schell rationalized his preference for Chinese pickers by pointing to his bottom line. For
him, operating a vineyard as not merely a vocation, but an agricultural business with a firm
bottom line. Though Schell declared that he preferred white workers for his farms, but that
laborers would not come to the country; because of this shortage of white laborers, Chinese hired
hands were a necessity to continue the state’s industrial and manufacturing pursuits. The
committee questioned Schell’s rationale, asking which “class of immigrants” Schell felt to be
more beneficial to California: those who came to earn money and then return home, or those who
settled permanently in the state and made it their home. Schell agreed with the committee that
immigrants who remained in California permanently were of course preferential, but he
countered the committee, “but you don’t get that in white men. I prefer white men in my place,
but I have come here and tried to get them, but I have failed. With white girls it is the same way.
They will not go to the country and do what work we want them to.”
62
When pressed as to
whether or not agriculturists hired Chinese workers because they were cheaper than white
workers, Schell avoided answering directly, “The white man’s work is worth more than the
Chinaman’s and he is better paid; but in the country we cannot depend upon him. I do not know
how it is in the city.”
63
Schell aligned himself with the racial fears of his EuroAmerican

61
The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration, 84.

62
Ibid, 84.

63
Ibid, 85.

198
neighbors. He validated their racial fears and did not attempt to defend Chinese workers’ status
as equal participants in California’s civil society. Schell’s valuation of Chinese Californians lay
solely in terms of economics. For him—and other winegrowers—low-wage Chinese workers
allowed him to maximize his profits and their docility and compliance ensureed the timely
planting and harvest of the grapes. Schell’s bottom line mattered more than racial fear, more than
racial improvement, more than expansion of American republican values. Though the wine
industry might pay lip service to racial improvement in California, the fact remained that
someone needed to pick the grapes and oversee the crush, and the Chinese seemed to fit the bill
at the right price.
Though Leland Stanford had long employed the Chinese on his railroad, his ventures in
winegrowing led him to employ Chinese vineyard workers. Stanford was primarily known for
his partnership in the Central Pacific Railroad, as governor of California in 1861, and for his role
in the United States Senate. His position of wealth and power makes for an interesting point of
analysis for the wine industry. During the fall of 1881 (four years before his election to the U.S.
Senate), Stanford purchased the Busquejo Ranch. This parcel, originally a Mexican land grant
given to Peter Lawson in 1843, had already been under viticultural cultivation by its previous
owner, Henry Gerke. There, Gerke grew Mission grapes and was well known for his Hock
wines. Immediately upon taking possession of this new land parcel, Stanford began pouring
money into land improvements. He cleared acres of trees and repurposed land that Gerke had
used for grain cultivation in order to expand the vineyard. It is important to note that Stanford
oversaw much of this work from afar. Like many other large-scale vineyardists, he himself was
not intimately involved with the daily operations of the vineyard but instead improved the land
via proxy, physically removing himself from the grit and grime of vineyard work.

199
As he added winegrower to his list of accomplishments, Stanford again turned to the
Chinese and faced backlash from his neighbors. He required a substantial workforce to care for
the 2,860,000 vines planted across the 3,575 acres that comprised Vina Ranch. To help manage
these vines, Stanford hired and transported three hundred Chinese laborers to his ranch.
64

Stanford and his vineyard managers relied on Chinese workers to accomplish this
transformation, much to the dissatisfaction of the local community in the surrounding towns. The
Chico Enterprise reported that seventy-five white men who had been earning a dollar a day plus
board to dig a ditch, had been fired and replaced by thirty-five Chinese who were earning a
dollar a day without board.
65
Newspaper discussions of the work at Stanford’s ranch noted that
the cuttings were planted “under the foremanship of four men, who managed an average of
eighty Chinese.”
66
Likewise, the February 13 1886 edition of the Weekly Butte Record declared,
“There is a report in circulation that the Chinamen on the Stanford ranch are required to pay the
white foreman who employs them three per-cent of their wages. If this is true, and there are 600
Chinamen employed on the ranch at $20 per month. A snug little income filched from Stanford
and the laboring class of California.”
67
Yet another newspaper decried the fact that a “large force
of Chinese is still employed upon the ranch.” Still, the newspaper seemed to reassure its readers
that it had “upon reliable authority that Senator Stanford will discharge the whole of his pig-tail
army by fruit picking time and give their places to white people, men, women and children. A

64
“Chinese Argonauts,” Bulletin of the Chinese Historical Society of America, Vol. VII, No. 4
(April 1972), 7.

65
Ernest P. Peninou, Leland Stanford’s Great Vina Ranch, 1881-1919, (San Francisco: Yolo
Hills Viticultural Society, 1991), 39.

66
Red Bluff Sentinel, March 25, 1882, quoted in Ernest P. Peninou, 40.

67
Weekly Butte Record, February 20, 1886, quoted in Ernest P. Peninou, 46.

200
similar report has gone forth a number of times before, seemingly for the object to deceive the
public, and it is greatly to be hoped that the heathen will have to shoulder their bamboo poles and
skeedaddle this time.”
68
Though Stanford’s manager at Vina Ranch depended on crews of
Chinese laborers to manage the estate, the presence of Chinese workers stirred anger and
resentment among the neighboring communities.
Given the nativist political context of Chinese Exclusion, the EuroAmericans in the areas
surrounding Stanford’s ranch reflected the extreme vitriol towards the Chinese. They directed
their racial anger and perhaps even class angst towards Stanford. Ultimately, Stanford carved a
new 1,200 acre vineyard out of the former Gerke Ranch, where he planted cuttings from L.J.
Rose’s vineyard in San Gabriel, considered “the best in the state” and included Charbonneau,
Burger, Zinfandel, Blau Elben, and Malroisie.
69
The newspapers declared that Stanford was
“developing into the largest viniculturists in California.”
70
As Stanford’s experience
demonstrates, by the 1880s the goals of viticulturists were no longer in harmony with
California’s broader society. The economic needs of growers stood in conflict with the racial
desires of California writ large, made especially evident by Chinese Exclusion. Though Stanford
planned to use the vineyard’s revenue to support the university he began building in Palo Alto in
1885, this contribution to California society was still not enough to pardon him for employing
Chinese workers.

68
Red Bluff Sentinel, May 5, 1886, quoted in Earnest P. Peninou, 46.

69
Red Bluff Sentinel, May 25, 1882, quoted in Ernest P. Peninou, 41.

70
Weekly Butte Record, August 5, 1882, quoted in Ernest P. Peninou, 41.

201

Figure 10 Chinese Workers in Vina Ranch Vineyard, Undated Photograph. Courtesy of Special Collections
and University Archives, Stanford University, California.
71

Racial angst about Chinese workers escalated and many other growers found themselves
in hot water. James de Barth Shorb, a vineyardist and prominent resident of the San Gabriel
Valley, also found himself under scrutiny for hiring Chinese crews. Shorb and his father-in-law,
Benjamin Davis Wilson had regularly employed Chinese workers in their vineyards since 1869.
Shorb found the Chinese to be “a more intelligent class of labor” relative to “the old mission
Indians or Sonorans from Mexico.”
72
They learned new tasks very quickly and could be trusted
to work independently after a short learning period. In June of 1886, the Los Angeles Trades and
Labor Council sent Shorb a form letter, presumably one of many sent to growers throughout the
region. The Trades and Labor Council was concerned with eliminating Chinese labor under the
auspices of the State Anti-Chinese Non-Partisan Association. They wrote, “Sir, It has come to

71
George Husmann Vina Ranch and Distillery Album, A3, Box 1, Special Collections and University
Archives, Stanford University, California.

72
Shorb to C.C. Spencer, 8 May 1870, Letterbooks, Shorb Papers, HL, quoted in Thomas
Pinney, A History of Wine in America From the Beginnings to Prohibition, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007), 298.

202
the notice of the Anti-Coolie Committee that you employ Chinamen and desiring your
cooperation in replacing them with white labor we send you this circular…The
Committee…would be pleased to have your co-operation in trying to rid our city and county of
the presence of the Mongolian. We believe the entire community would be benefited by this
change.”
73
Though it is unclear whether or not Shorb took heed of this notice and replaced his
Chinese employees, it seems unlikely given that his winegrowing enterprises, Lake Vineyard and
San Gabriel Vineyard, had significant labor needs. In 1892, Shorb may have still been hiring
Chinese workers. In December of that year he received a note from Loui Hok, presumably a
former employee of the San Gabriel Wine Company. Hok wrote, “It is winter time is up for
grape-vines pruning. Let me get a few China-men come, then prune to this grape-vines. Oh!
Look here, the grape-vines all grow up from Mr. Banner’s house every body. Loui”
74
Earlier that
year, Hok had also written Shorb’s wife, Maria de Jesus Wilson Shorb, asking her to hire his
brother, Yack, to work in her household.
75
Though the details of Loui Hok’s life or know how
the Shorbs responded to his requests remain unclear, he likely contacted Shorb because he was
out of work. Perhaps he found himself under increased public scrutiny under rising anti-Chinese
sentiments. Regardless, the Shorbs’ situation and relationships with subordinates like Hok
underscore the contradictions of the wine industry. Shorb’s success at Lake Vineyard and the
San Gabriel Winery relied on men like Hok. Though wine boosters might celebrate vineyardists
like Shorb and his father-in-law, Benjamin Davis Wilson, to demonstrate California’s evolution

73
James De Barth Shorb Collection, MSS Shorb Papers, Box 70, Folder 37, Huntington Library,
San Marino. Hereafter JDBC HL.

74
JDBC HL Box 89, Folder 20.

75
JDBC HL Box 89, Folder 21.

203
towards American enterprise, the fact remained that these successes were rooted in the labors of
non-White populations who wine boosters also claimed to be helping to remove from California.
Conclusion
On May 17, 1899, Leonard J. Rose ended his California fairytale. Facing massive debt
and bankruptcy, Rose took his own life by ingesting a fatal dose of morphine in the backyard of
his Bunker Hill mansion. Per his suicide note, his family found him there, still alive. Though
they rushed him to receive medical care, Rose died later that day.
76

Rose, Jr. lamented that his father did not confide in him his financial troubles. Though he
was somewhat aware that his business was undergoing some trouble and that he was in debt,
neither he nor the rest of the Rose family understood the enormity of the situation. Rose, Jr.
blamed his father’s decline on his sentimentality towards “the early days of the old dons.” He did
not identify his father as a modern businessman, but instead tried to rationalize his father’s poor
finances on his faithful adherence to the Californio dons’ “easy-going methods when friendships
were genuine. Rose, his son claimed, “could not cope with the point-of-flesh policy of the strictly
business newcomer.” In life, Rose’s membership in the Anglo-American class of conquerors
helped bring him success, first in his vineyards and later in his citrus orchards and thoroughbred
horse barns. His modern agricultural management and business principles brought him wealth
and acceptance into California politics and Los Angeles Anglo society. Despite these facts,
Rose’s son likened his father to the Californios and seemed to blame their cultural practices for
his father’s fall. He took comfort in the fact that his father’s tragic death “could not rob him of

76
“Debts were Heavy: L.J. Rose was Despondent and Killed Himself,” Los Angeles Times, May
18, 1899.

204
the joys of having lived through the most glorious period of the most gloriously romantic country
that the sun ever shone upon.”
77

Rose, Jr. failed to acknowledge that his father was never a Californio Don, but rather was
part of the class of Anglo-Californians who displaced them. Though Rose had made it to the
upper levels of Anglo society in Los Angeles, his position was so unstable partly because it was
dependent on many factors out his control. As a grower, he had limited control over climate, the
cost and availability of labor, the price of land, market rates for crops, and freight charges. And,
the sale of Rose’s crops were dependant on the highly volatile markets that saw the Panic of
1873, the boom and bust real estate of Southern California in the 1880s, and the global
depression of the 1890s. With so many factors out of growers’ hands and such a slim profit-
margins, their economic success (or simply economic stability) was so very tenuous. Since the
agricultural citizenship of California’s cultivators depended on economic success, their identity
was unstable and could, theoretically, go away at any point. As Rose’s suicide demonstrates, this
reality made the Anglo-Californians far less removed from the Californio dons than they might
have hoped. Indeed, Rose’s demise seemed to question how long California’s cultivators had
before they too would lose their status, wealth, and whiteness.

77
L. J Rose Jr., 219-220.

Chapter 5 “American Vintner’s Song”: Wine and the Civilization of the Masses, 1870-1920
In 1876, George G.W. Morgan, a San Francisco lyricist, composed “The Wines of Los
Angeles County,” in honor of the region’s bountiful wine industry. The first three verses of the
song praised the many different wines produced in Los Angeles County, including Sherry,
Angelica, Claret, Hock, and Muscat—wines so wonderful that they could not be compared to the
Iberian wines of “Castile” or “Oporto.” At the end of the song, Morgan evoked images of
California wine as an agent of temperance, “If men would use reason and drink in due
season/Nor be such mere slaves to their passion./ There would not be seen men drunk, dirty and
mean.” Morgan suggested that if Californians—and, presumably all Americans—would replace
ardent spirits with native wines, they could rid society of the evils of drunkenness. Morgan also
appealed to the health concerns of Californians by suggesting that “the pure wines of Los
Angeles vines” could improve their health and render them more industrious. These wines would
enable individuals to “be rugged in health, have plenty of wealth.” Morgan felt Californians
should be proud and grateful for all the bounties that these seemingly magical wines promised to
bestow on Californians. The lyrics painted a beautiful image of health, temperance, and wealth,
which were (quite literally) the fruit of the vine in California. By utilizing the advantages
bestowed on them by “Nature’s bounty,” vineyards fostered temperance, strong constitutions,
and industry for all those fortunate enough to enjoy local wines. California’s vineyardists and
winemakers were not merely farmers and manufacturers; they had assumed a broader duty in
defining social morality in California.
1

Morgan’s song, published by a San Francisco firm, was printed alongside a lithograph
depicting one of Kohler & Frohling’s many vineyards and wineries in Los Angeles. In the faded

1
George G.W. Morgan, “The Wines of Los Angeles County,” in California Sheet Music Covers
(San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1959). Originally published 1876.

206
background, various men harvested grapes from the vast vineyard. The forefront of the image
showed industrious Anglo men loading the grapes into wagons in preparation for their passage
through a wine press, where a lone laborer stood ready to manually pump the grape must into
huge barrels for fermentation. The image was surrounded by a lush grape arbor and wine bottles
with labels bearing the names of many of the wines produced by Kohler & Frohling, such as
Hock, Cucamonga wine, port, and red and white wines. The scene embodied the modernity,
health, and natural bounty that Morgan described in his song.

Figure 11 Lithograph printed alongside “The Wines of Los Angeles County.” Courtesy of The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
2

California’s winegrowers had long been cognizant of the perceived need to cultivate the
undomesticated frontier. As early as the 1850s, American wine industrialists espoused the ideals

2
George G.W. Morgan, “The Wines of Los Angeles County,” 1876.

207
of Manifest Destiny, by which they could complete the territorial, economic, and racial conquest
of California through viticulture and EuroAmerican immigration. By the 1880s, it became
evident that transforming the culture of California would be a crucial part of this conquest.
Vineyardists and wine boosters recast wine—and not just the agricultural act of grape
cultivation—as a civilizing agent that promised to refine California and the greater United States.
Between 1870 and 1920, California’s wine industrialists confronted a series of
environmental, economic, and political obstacles that shaped its cultural campaigns. First,
Anaheim Disease and Phylloxera decimated hundreds of thousands of grape vines across the
state, crippling vineyards in the Los Angeles region. Second, the overproduction of grapes
coupled with two national financial crises rendered the markets for grapes and wine highly
unstable. Finally, wine producers confronted the rise of temperance campaigns that sought to
transform the United States into a “dry” nation.
In the midst of this tumult, wine businessmen organized new trade groups to revive their
industry. Anaheim Disease and Phylloxera shifted the nexus of winegrowing from Los Angeles
County to grape-growing regions in the northern part of the state. These environment
catastrophes also forced winegrowers to transition from the Mission grape to diverse varietals of
Vitis vinifera from Europe. The California State Viticultural Commission and the California
Wine Association embodied the modern face of the wine industry. The new idealized public
image of the wine industry was no longer the mythical small, yeoman family farmer or
EuroAmerican pioneer to California, but a large-scale Anglo land-owner, like James De Barth
Shorb, who was a well-respected wine grower, or even Leland Stanford, who (despite his vast
resources) had difficulties producing well-regarded wines.

208
The wine industry also struggled to adapt to a changing society that questioned the
morality of wine. As the temperance movement accelerated towards national Prohibition in the
late nineteenth century, trade groups launched campaigns to connect California wines to the
refined societies of Europe. Wine industrialists and boosters publicized the beverage as a
cultivating agent that would civilize Americans. They maintained that wine would smooth out
the rough edges of California’s Anglo society as well as American society writ large. Wine
boosters also described wine as a healthful beverage that would improve the diets and overall
well-being of Americans. Most importantly, they argued that wine would promote temperance
across the United States. Winegrowers fell back on early nineteenth-century arguments that
described wine as a safe alternative to distilled spirits. Unlike whiskey or rum, wine was a mild
alcoholic beverage that could actually prevent drunkenness and the social ills that accompanied
it, such as unemployment, poverty, and family discord. By the turn of the twentieth century,
California’s viticulturists had reinterpreted wine as the vehicle by which European refinement
and American republicanism would be united on the western frontier. Though these efforts were
largely in response to the economic and environment problems that threatened the wine business,
they had cultural implications for conquest as well. These wine industry campaigns functioned as
part of the EuroAmerican effort to culturally refine California towards an American Protestant
ideal.
Vineyard Pestilence: Phylloxera, Anaheim Disease, and Market Upheaval
Since 1860, the German Colony at Anaheim had enjoyed success as one of Los Angeles
County’s winegrowing hubs.
3
After nearly fifteen years of increasingly bountiful grape crops and
wine yields, an environmental blow struck Anaheim’s vineyards in 1884. A mysterious vine

3
Anaheim was part of Los Angeles County until 1889 when the California State Legislature
created the County of Orange.

209
blight, quickly dubbed Anaheim Disease by outsiders because of its origins in the town, had
rapidly begun to destroy grapevines. Beginning with the grape leaves, this pest eventually
stunted the maturation of the fruit and killed the vine. Anaheim’s vineyardists initially brushed
off the enormity of the situation. Given the fact that the 1884 harvest had yielded approximately
1.25 million gallons of wine, many Anaheim vineyardists felt there was little reason to be
concerned.
4
The Anaheim Gazette minimized the significance of the diminished harvest of 1885,
“The vintage is in its last stages…it must be confessed that while some growers have cause for
satisfaction, others can not greatly felicitate themselves. Although this was an off year for
Mission grapes, there are many instances of large yields.”
5
A year later, the situation worsened
and became impossible to ignore. Anaheim growers were in desperate straits and consulted with
Professor Eugene Hilgard of the University of California. However, Hilgard’s team of
agricultural researchers proved unsuccessful in identifying the cause of the vine disease. In 1881,
the USDA sent one of its agents, Newton Pierce, to investigate the disease. Though Pierce failed
initially to determine the cause of the malady or find a cure for the vine disease, he did discover
its origin in the early 1890s. Anaheim Disease was eventually renamed Pierce’s Disease because
of his efforts.
6

4
Mildred Yorba MacArthur, Anaheim: The Mother Colony, (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie
Press, 1959), 29.

5
Anaheim Gazette, Oct. 24, 1885, quoted in Newton B. Pierce, The California Vine Disease: A
Preliminary Report of Investigations, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892), 60.

6
Victor W. Geraci, “Fermenting a Twenty-First Century California Wine Industry,” Agricultural
History 78, no. 4 (October 1, 2004), 445. Scientists later discovered that Anaheim disease,
renamed Pierce’s Disease, was the result of a bacterium spread by the glassy-winged sharp
shooter. See also Charles Sullivan, A Companion to California Wine: An Encyclopedia of Wine
and Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present (Berkeley, Calif: University of
California Press, 1998), 263.

210
Despite vineyardists’ best efforts to control the natural environment and reign in the pest,
they were unable to protect their vines, of which the Mission varietal was especially susceptible.

By 1891, nearly all of the town’s vines had been destroyed at an estimated loss of nearly two
million dollars for the entire viticultural region surrounding the Santa Ana River, where only
fourteen acres of vineland remained.
7
This forced Anaheim’s vineyardists to explore other
agricultural ventures.
8
From the colony’s beginning, George Hansen (one of the colony’s
founders) had planted limited amounts of other fruit-bearing plants, including citrus and olive
trees throughout Anaheim. Because the colonists had some experience with citrus, orange
orchards offered an attractive replacement for grape vines. A mere five years after Anaheim’s
vines first fell victim to Pierce’s Disease, Anaheim had begun its transition from viticulture to
citrus. By 1889, nearly one hundred carloads of oranges were shipped from Anaheim, whose
residents “hoped that oranges and walnuts would bring back the fortunes of Anaheim.”
9
Still, the
losses caused by Pierce’s Disease were staggering. Across Los Angeles County, the destruction
of vineyards totaled a loss of nearly ten million dollars.
10

While Anaheim vineyardists and their neighbors dealt with their own mysterious pest,
northern viticulturists confronted a well-known malady, Phylloxera. This vine pest was native to
the Americas. Many native grape varietals, particularly those indigenous to the eastern and
middle regions of the United States, were resistant to Phylloxera. However, European vines, Vitis

7
Hinkle Richard Paul, “There’s Nothing New About Pierce’s Disease,” Wines and Vines, May
1994, 33.

8
Newton B. Pierce, 15-16.

9
Hallock F. Raup, The German Colonization of Anaheim, California, (Berkeley: University of
California press, 1932). 137.

10
Hinkle Richard Paul, 33.

211
vinifera, were susceptible to the vine malady. In all likelihood, Phylloxera was carried to Europe
from the United States between 1858 and 1863. Although it is difficult to know exactly when
Phylloxera hit California, it was confirmed in the early 1870s in Sonoma.
11
By the 1870s,
California vineyardists in the northern wine regions of the state had transitioned from growing
Mission grapes to cultivating Vitis vinifera grapes. Because these were European vines, they
were incredibly vulnerable to the pest. Growers who had praised European vines and encouraged
others to follow suit found themselves in desperate straits. For example, Agoston Haraszthy’s
legacy, the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society in Sonoma, had many of its vineyards destroyed.
12

In Sonoma alone, vineyardists uprooted more than 400,000 vines between 1873 and 1879. The
malady also had a huge impact in Napa, Yolo, El Dorado, and Placer counties.
13

Outside of the agricultural scientists at the University of California, vineyardists and
winemakers dismissed the validity of Phylloxera reports. Hilgard was one of the first to take
notice of Phylloxera. In 1876, Hilgard approached the state legislature to ask for funding to help
enforcement and control measures that might prevent further infestation. He also encouraged
growers to experiment with disease-resistant vines. Unfortunately, nothing came of Hilgard’s
warnings, and he was dismissed as “alarmist.”
14
Indeed, vineyardists were slow to react to the
treatment plans prescribed by Board of State Viticultural Commissioners and Department of
Agricultural at the University of California. In the early 1870s, Phylloxera spread slowly and had
largely localized areas of infestation. The winged form of the insect had not yet become common

11
Vincent P Carosso, The California Wine Industry, 1830-1895: A Study of the Formative Years
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 110.

12
Ibid, 111.

13
Ibid, 111.

14
Ibid, 114.

212
but instead was transmitted on farm tools, wagons, and vine cuttings.
15
Finally, the rich soils of
California made it easier for healthy vines to stave off infection.
16

By the 1880s, Phylloxera emerged in its winged form. Coupled with soil exhaustion and
unusually dry seasons in 1882 and 1883, infestation was much quicker. As the demand for
California wine had increased in the wake of depressed wine production in France because of the
Phylloxera epidemic there, California wine growers finally found it to their advantage to address
the vine pest. For the next decade, agricultural scientists and vineyardists experimented with
different solutions to combat the pest. Vineyardists applied various insecticides. Others
attempted to replant their vineyards in sandy soils, which was expensive and bore poorly
flavored grapes. Flooding the vineyard almost always did away with Phylloxera, but it was
difficult to get enough water and this made the vines vulnerable to fungus. The only viable
solution was to find resistant vines and graft them to Vitis vinifera grape stock. Through much
trial and error both in France and in the United States, scientists identified a group of American
grapes that would successfully graft onto European vines without compromising flavor.
17
The
California State Agricultural Society, along with other trade groups, distributed educational
materials to teach vineyardists how to protect their grapes from Phylloxera. By 1890, Phylloxera
had reached the wine regions of Los Angeles County, but it did not have as negative an impact
there because the region’s vineyards had already been reduced by Anaheim disease. Still,
coupled together, Phylloxera and Anaheim Disease had permanent consequences for the wine

15
A.P. Hayne, “Phylloxera,” in Eugene Hilgard and Frederic Theodore Bioletti, Report of the
Viticultural Work During the Seasons 1883-4 and 1884-5, (J. J. Ayres, Superintendent State
Printing, 1896), 378.

16
Vincent P. Carosso, 113.

17
Ibid, 114-116.

213
industry in Los Angeles. Henceforth, the heart of viticulture shifted north to Napa and Sonoma
County, as well as outlying wine regions in the foothills and Central Valley.
As wine industrialists faced both major environmental crises coupled with an unstable
market for grapes in the late 1870s, they organized new trade groups to revive and modernize the
industry. The economic devastation caused by Phylloxera and Anaheim Disease highlighted the
need for greater industrial cohesion across the state. In the 1850s and 1860s, EuroAmerican
vineyardists had relied on the State Agricultural Society and the Commission on the Culture of
the Grape-Vine in California for education and for advocacy within state government. The
environmental crises of the 1870s and 1880s led winegrowers to demand more support from the
government as well as more cohesive organization to unite winegrowers across the state. During
the 1870s, the market for grapes and wine had become incredibly unstable. Over-planting and
speculation resulted in an oversupply of grapes, which depressed prices and caused a downturn
in the industry.
18
By the end of the decade, the markets were changing. The rise of Phylloxera in
France caused diminished wine exports, leaving gaps in the market of wine drinkers that
California winegrowers could potentially fill.
19
Moreover, the 1879 grape crop had been low and
supply of wine could not meet demand and prices rose.
20
Though whispers of Phylloxera—the
“unconquerable worm”—were beginning to spread across Sonoma and Napa, there suddenly

18
California Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Annual Report of the Board of State
Viticultural Commissioners for 1887, (Sacramento: J.D. Young, Superintendent State Printing,
1888), 7.

19
Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1: From the Beginnings to Prohibition,
(University of California Press, 2007), 342.

20
Frona Eunice Wait, Wines and Vines of California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine-Drinking
(San Francisco: Bancroft, 1889), 36.

214
seemed to be great potential for the viticultural industry to expand.
21
However, the industry
lacked official guidance; it needed a viticultural organization to unite growers across the state
and offer education, advocacy, and guidance.
In 1880, the State Legislature responded to the demands of winegrowers by organizing
the State Board of Viticultural Commissioners (SBVC). The Legislature divided the state into
seven viticultural districts, each of which was represented by a commissioner. Additionally, two
commissioners represented the state at large.
22
While some of the Commissioners were active
vineyardists and winemakers, others were involved in the industry more as boosters. The first job
of the Commission was to address the threat of Phylloxera. The Board surveyed infested areas
and translated French treatises on how to treat and rehabilitate vineyards infested with the pest.
23

Similar to the State Agricultural Society, the Board also published other treatises to better
educate growers on best practices for pruning, planting, vine training, grafting, and cellar
storage. Between 1886 and 1887, the Board established an experimental cellar in San Francisco
as well as an experimental vineyard in Napa County.
24
Essentially, the Commission took charge
of collecting and managing scientific information for the public. Further, the SBVC was
responsible for advertising the California wine industry through its annual state viticultural

21
Idwall Jones, Vines in the Sun: A Journey through the California Vineyard, (William Morrow
& Company: New York, 1949), 21.

22
California Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Annual Report of the Board of State
Viticultural Commissioners for 1887, (Sacramento: J.D. Young, Superintendent State Printing,
1888), 9.

23
Thomas Pinney, 344.

24
Ibid, 345.

215
convention as well as at international fairs and exhibitions.
25
Finally, the Commission lobbied
both national and state governments for favorable legislation and tax exemptions.
While Arpad Haraszthy, the son of Agoston Haraszthy and son-in-law of Mariano G.
Vallejo, served as president of the SBVC for many years, Charles Wetmore was one of its most
vocal leaders and notorious for his public spats with the agricultural professors at the University
of California. Wetmore was a graduate of the College of California, which would later become
the University of California. After finishing his studies, he worked as a journalist. He often wrote
about wine, and even wrote a series on wine production in France for the Alta California in
1878. Initially, Wetmore had no practical experience as a vineyardist or winegrower. He was a
well-known wine booster, using his position as a journalist to promote local wines. Though
Wetmore eventually tried his hand at winegrowing in the Livermore Valley, his winery, Creta
Blanca, was a financial failure. He was later active in anti-Prohibition movement as was his son,
Louis Wetmore.
26

The same legislative act that created the SBVC also established a Department of
Viticulture within the College of Agriculture at the University of California and put Hilgard in
charge.
27
The College of Agriculture often found itself in competition with the Board of
Viticultural Commissioners for resources from the state. Hilgard and Charles Wetmore often
disagreed on matters of the grape. They fought bitterly instead of collaborating, particularly in
dealing with Phylloxera.

25
Paris 1889, London 1887, Bordeaux, 1895, Chicago Columbian Exposition, 1893, and 1894 in
San Francisco. California Board of State Viticultural Commissioners, Annual Report of the
Board of State Viticultural Commissioners for 1887, 9.

26
Charles L Sullivan, 393-394.

27
Thomas Pinney, 350.

216
Despite their limited resources, the professors at the College managed to do important
work. Under Hilgard’s management, the Department of Viticulture built a wine cellar on campus
to conduct systematic experiments on fermentation. Hilgard believed that the market issues of
the California wine industry could only be improved through more careful and scientifically
sound viticultural methods.
28
Under Hilgard’s supervision, professors, such as Frederic Bioletti,
fermented small batches of wine in order to improve the fermentation process. Vineyardists and
SBVC met this with resistance. Outside of the College of Agriculture, the viticultural community
believed that small batches of wine produced in the laboratory could not actually produce
practical results that could be applied to larger-scale production.
The boom and bust economies of the 1880s and 1890s greatly affected the California
wine industry. Following the economic crisis of the early 1890s, legislative reforms sought to
eliminate “useless” government offices and agencies, including the SBVC. The College of
Agriculture inherited all of the SBVC’s property, research, and materials.
29
This period also
witnessed the demise of several leading wineries, including Leonard J. Rose’s Sunny Slope
Winery and Kohler & Frohling. Subsequently, following the boom of the 1880s, the wine
industry again moved into a cycle of over-production and caused prices to prices dramatically
fall. Wine industrialists again found themselves in dire straits and tried to organize. In 1894, a
group of seven industry leaders gathered in San Francisco to incorporate the California Wine
Association (CWA). The goal of the CWA was to raise prices and increase trade through vertical
integration. The CWA sought control of every step of the winemaking process, from the
vineyard, to the winery, to the market. Industry leaders felt that California winemakers needed to

28
San Francisco Examiner, 8 August 1889.

29
Idwall Jones, 24.

217
do a better job of advertising their wines on the eastern seaboard. They also wanted to create a
market for better wines as opposed to the cheap wine market into which New York merchants
had pigeonholed California wines. Within twenty years, the CWA’s membership included over
half of the state’s wine output and completely controlled of some of its larger competitors,
including the Italian Swiss Colony.
30
Ultimately, the CWA operated almost like a monopoly and
its creation marked the formalization of winegrowing in California.
31

The birth of the CWA marked the final transition of viticulture into a modern business and
demonstrated California’s transformation into an enterprising Anglo place. It was no longer
sufficient for a grower to operate his vineyard with a crew of hired laborers before fermenting
wine himself or selling his grapes to larger wineries, as had been the model of Kohler &
Frohling. In order to become prosperous, vineyardists and winemakers had to transform
themselves into modern businessmen who had access to local, national, and international
markets. The public face of the wine industry was no longer the gentleman farmer or the small-
yeoman family farmer. Even though this vineyardist had only ever existed as a myth, the public
face and ideal winegrower was now a large-scale vineyardist with huge land holdings and the
ability to produce wine on a massive scale. This was in keeping with national trends towards big
businesses built on capital and integration.
32
Given the new public face of winemaking, a
generation of wealthy investors became active in the industry. For example, Leland Stanford
founded Vina Ranch in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. By 1890, Vina had an annual output of

30
Victor W. Geraci, 447.

31
Thomas Pinney, 358.

32
Victor W. Geraci, 442.

218
roughly 1.7 million gallons of wine.
33
Likewise, George Hearst owned Madrone Vineyard in
Sonoma, and fur-magnate Gustave Niebaum took on a new role making wine at Rutherford
Inglenook Vineyard in Napa County.
34

As California’s wine industrialists led the charge against diseases of the vine and economic
stagnation, they completed the process of agricultural modernization that their predecessors had
first begun in the 1850s with the founding of the California State Agricultural Society and the
College of Agriculture at the University of California. Trade groups like the SBVC and the CWA
as well as the University’s new Department of Viticulture worked to complete the industry’s
transformation from the “backwards” methods of the Franciscans at California’s missions and of
Mexican-Californio winemakers like the Yorba family. Distinct groups of vineyardists,
winemakers, and boosters came together to refashion winegrowing into a modern industry. By
changing the culture of winegrowing in California, wine industrialists divorced viticulture from
its Spanish-Mexican roots and rebuilt it based on modern business principles, scientific research,
and national and international markets.
Enlightening the People: Temperance, Health, and Civilization
While the process of grape cultivation served to civilize California’s physical landscape
and improve its population through immigration, winegrowers and their supporters argued that
its product, wine, also had the potential to refine Americans, both within the state and beyond.
Faced with negative stereotypes that described California as a rough frontier, the state’s wine
interest advertised its product outside of the state. While on the eastern seaboard, the European,
Catholic cultures of countries like France, Spain, and Italy seemed dangerous and offensive to

33
Victor W. Geraci, 446.

34
Ibid, 446.

219
Anglo Americans, the opposite held true in California. Wine promoters invoked the long history
of “refined” European wine consumption to demonstrate how regular wine consumption could
enlighten the people of California and beyond. By marketing wine as a civilized product,
viniculture boosters attempted to combat the growing American temperance movement. They
reverted back to early nineteenth century temperance arguments that encouraged the use of
fermented alcohol to avoid drunkenness from more dangerous distilled liquors. By comparing
wine, a fermented beverage, to distilled liquors, such as whiskey, viticultural promoters reasoned
that wine offered healthful benefits. This constituted an important part of the campaign to
civilize California and complete the state’s evolutions towards becoming a refined and modern
state. Wine boosters fought the temperance campaign by fashioning California as a safe and
civilized place, thus helping to secure the Anglo cultural conquest of California.
The growing political momentum of the Prohibition movement in the late nineteenth
century motivated California’s winemakers to protect their business interests by advertising wine
as an agent of temperance. In the wake of Phylloxera and economic depression, the wine trade
could not take yet another hit. Essentially, viticulturists reverted back to earlier temperance
arguments that favored the moderate consumption of fermented alcohol, like wine and beer, over
that of strong distilled liquors. The California Agricultural Society had long made connections
between wine drinking and temperance in its various publications. As early as 1856, the
Agricultural Society maintained that the “most sober people in the world” could be found in the
regions of southern Europe where wine was plentiful.
35
By the late 1860s and early 1870s, the
California State Agricultural Society encouraged higher rates of wine consumption as a way to

35
California State Agricultural Society, Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial
Exhibition, Held at San Jose, October 7
th
to 10
th
, 1856, (San Francisco: California Farmer
Office, 1856), 23.

220
replace intoxicating “ardent spirits,” the true culprit behind drunkenness and vice.
36
The
Agricultural Society hoped to model California’s society on European wine regions. California
would turn into an Eden where wine “becomes general among all classes and especially among
the yeomanry, to the exclusion of more harmful stimulants…we may hope ere long to see King
Alcohol dethroned among our people and his reign subverted by the milder products of our own
domestic vintage.”
37
A generation later, industry leaders and trade groups, including the
California Wine Association (CWA), found themselves building on the earlier work of the
Agricultural Society. Frona Wait, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, was a staunch
supporter of the wine interest. In 1889, she published the widely read Wines and Vines of
California, which was endorsed by the SBVC. Though she had no formal connection to the
industry as a vineyardist or vintner, Wait proved to be an important booster. In its battle against
the rise of the Prohibition movement, the industry marketed wine as a way to further the goals of
the temperance movement by eliminating drunkenness and its associated vices from American
society. California winegrowers and boosters further depicted wine as an elegant beverage that
would transform California from a backwards frontier into an elegant and refined society like
European culture all the while improving the health and diets of Americans across the country.
Industry leaders argued that moderate wine consumption would actually eliminate
intoxication from American society. By abolishing wine along with ardent spirits, Prohibitionists
would undermine the goals of the temperance movement. Instead, boosters like Wait cautioned
against classifying all alcoholic beverages as criminally dangerous. Wait encouraged Americans
to replace spirits with gentle wines to automatically reduce drunkenness. California wines of

36
“Address Given by Joseph W. Winans,” in Transactions of the California State Agricultural
Society for the Years 1866-1867, (Sacramento: State Printer, 1868), 85.

37
Ibid, 85.

221
“absolute purity, and of low alcoholic strength” could help advance the goals of the temperance
movement, which were to reduce drunkenness and vice.
38
For example, George Husmann
reassured Californians that natural wines, unlike whisky, did not cause cravings that evolved into
a dangerous habit.
39

Wine boosters argued that habitual wine consumption could transform California into a
refined and cultured place like Europe. American wine industrialists in California had long
emphasized the connections between their businesses and Europe as a way of transforming the
frontier west. This was in keeping with a cultural movement in which EuroAmericans sought to
refine the state by modeling its gardens, architecture, and cities according to an idealized
Mediterranean model. As historian Kevin Starr has demonstrated, Mediterranean analogies
allowed EuroAmericans to acknowledge the state’s Spanish past, while satisfying a need for
order, history, and unique regional design.
40
From the region’s undesirable Spanish Catholic
past, EuroAmerican elites used the Mediterranean analogy to construct a “new” California as an
idyllic, historic, and stable civilization that even celebrated the grape vine as a metaphor for “the
emerging Pacific civilization.”
41
Wine boosters maintained that wine had the ability to civilize
Americans at large by encouraging temperance. California’s viticultural businessmen and wine
boosters likened the consumption of wine to the cultured and civilized societies of Europe.
Husmann encouraged Americans to look to wine drinking nations of Europe where wine was a

38
Frona Eunice Wait, 82.

39
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California: A Practical Manual for the
Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker, (San Francisco, Payot, Upham & co., 1888), 369.

40
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 374.

41
Ibid, 374.

222
part of daily life and compare them to those countries where distilled liquors were preferred.
Husmann maintained that the first group emanated “sobriety, health, good temper, and
merriment” while the later suffered from ‘desolation, physical ruin and wretchedness among the
lower classes…”
42
If Americans could simply create “respectable wine rooms” in the European
tradition where young men might gather to share a bottle of wine and enjoy one another’s
company, they might actually steer young men away from the saloon and organically produce a
temperate society. By likening contemporary winemaking on the untamed frontier to the cultured
traditions associated with wine consumption, vinicultural promoters like Husmann sought to
obtain moral credibility for their product and their adopted home, California.
Winegrowers and boosters alike advertised California wine as a religious and moral
beverage. In order to dispel fears about wine, industrialists depicted California wine as a natural
and pure product. Unlike whiskey or gin, wine came from the earth. It was a divine gift from
nature. Good wine, as described by Wait, contained nothing but natural grape juice and
embodied nothing more innocuous than the preservation of the grape, a natural, God-given
fruit.
43
Vineyardists relied on cultured religious rhetoric to validate their claims for an
overwhelmingly Christian audience. In the 1870s, Husmann’s experiments with Phylloxera-
resistant rootstock made him an important contact for vineyardists in California. In 1885, he
purchased a vineyard in Napa and continued his viticultural experiments, which culminated in
the 1888 publication of a new treatise on winegrowing specific to California. For Husmann,
California embodied “the chosen land of the Lord…the great Vineland…destined to overshadow

42
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, 364.

43
Frona Eunice Wait, 85.

223
all others.”
44
He ennobled the “honest, hard-working hands” of winemakers and found honor in
working the vineyard work, describing the civilized ranks of grape-culturists as “that peaceful
army whose sword is the pruning hook.”
45
Husmann tried to moralize wine for his Christian
readers by highlighting scripture passages like the wedding at Cana and the consecration of wine.
For Husmann, these Biblical examples celebrated wine and even made it holy. He chastised his
“temperance friends” who seemed to forget the importance of wine in the Bible when making
their religious claims against all alcohol.
46
By utilizing language infused with Christianity,
Husmann used his position as a respected viticultural expert to ennoble the fruit of the vineyard
and further praise the role of the vintner in cultivating California.
Wine promoters also argued that habitual wine consumption could cultivate the American
palette and refine dining habits. Frona Wait lamented American’s limited tastes in regards to
food and drink. She argued that wine consumption affected “better habits of living” and could
thus reform the “system of cuisine so wretchedly bad” that constituted the American diet.
47
Not
only could wine refine the diet, it could also reform the disgraceful process by which Americans
ate. As a speaker at the Sixth Annual Viticultural Convention in 1888, Frederico Pohndorff, a
notable European wine expert who wrote extensively for viticulture trade journals, brought such
concerns to the table. Quoting a report by his fellow wine enthusiast, Charles Wetmore,
Pohndorff asserted that wine was the “civilizer of the family…it makes dinner eventful and
prolongs its period of enjoyment.” By serving wine with meals, Pohndorff assured his colleagues

44
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, iii.

45
George Husmann, The Cultivation of the Native Grape and Manufacture of American
Wines, (New York: Geo. E. & F. Woodward, 1866), 9-10.

46
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, 365.

47
Frona Eunice Wait, 81.

224
that families would promote “freedom, frankness, and congeniality.”
48
Thus, wine boosters
sought to change American attitudes towards fermented alcohol. By advertising wine as an
agent of dietary improvement, morality, and family unification, they sought to advance the
notion that this beverage could civilize not only California, but also the entire nation. Wine
boosters also described Prohibition as a threat to American liberty. Wait even went so far as to
describe the temperance movement as a coercive and un-American movement to regulate
drinking and eating habits.
49

Wine industrialists and boosters made connections between the family meal and wine to
demonstrate how the beverage could promote temperance and encourage more refined habits.
Arpad Haraszthy served for many years on the board of the CWA. As a reputable Sonoma
winegrower, he used his position of authority to write for broader audiences. Arpad Harszthy
encouraged Americans to consume wine “under the proper condition, with the intention of
deriving the greatest amount of satisfaction, and…better appreciation of the wines.” In order to
consume wine in a civilized fashion, Haraszthy advocated that dishes served at the table should
“harmonize” with the bouquet and general flavor of the wine.” Haraszthy also encouraged
Californians to pay close attention to details when serving wine. The physical dining
environment and the mood around the table were conducive to enjoying the wine. Small details
like using the correct wine glasses and properly decanting the wine and serving wines at proper

48
F. Pohndorff and Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California, Report of the Sixth
Annual State Viticultural Convention: Held at Pioneer Hall, San Francisco, March 7, 8, 9, 10,
1888, (Sacramento: J.D. Young, Supt. State Printing ), 205.

49
Frona Eunice Wait, 81.

225
temperatures mattered tremendously in properly presenting the flavors of the wines.
50
Arpad
Haraszthy emphasized the importance of educating the public in California about the correct
methods by which to serve wines at the table. For Haraszthy, these small details could help make
inroads in making wine a more acceptable beverage. It was the responsibility of Californians to
educate Americans in the eastern states on how to transform wine into an inviting and cultured
beverage.
51

Winegrowers also claimed that wine could also improve American diets. Frona Wait
argued that changing the American diet towards more wholesome foods served alongside wine
would help the nation achieve temperance. She blamed the American diet for national troubles
with drunkenness, “A nation that lives on pie, pickles and ice-water needs watching in the matter
of drinkables. There is not system of cuisine so wretchedly bad, as that distinctively American.”
Wait acknowledged the important role of American women in the battle against intemperance,
but she argued that their campaigns were ineffective. If American women would only fight
intemperance from their own dinner table within the confines of their own homes, Wait
suggested that they might actually reduce drunkenness and vice. She painted a bleak picture of
the life of an average American laborer who seldom saw a bottle of wine and had to endure
meals poorly cooked and served. With such miserable dining environments at home, the working
man had no choice but to seek “relaxation where it can be found—in the light, warmth, music
and cheerfulness of the drinking house!”
52
For Wait, the key to reducing the consumption of

50
Arpad Haraszthy, “How to Drink Wine,” in Frona Eunice Wait, Wines and Vines of
California: A Treatise on the Ethics of Wine-Drinking, 49-50.

51
Arpad Haraszthy, Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California, Report of the Sixth
Annual State Viticultural Convention, 184.

52
Frona Eunice Wait, 82

226
ardent spirits was as simple as serving “a good wholesome dinner with a bottle of dry wine free
from adulteration.” By serving a gentle and pure alcohol within the safety of their own homes,
women could keep men at home instead of wandering the streets after dark in search of whiskey
and other liquors.
53
Wait drew upon the language of purity and nutrition to make gendered
arguments in support of wine. Further, she described “knowledge of good wines” was “one of
the highest attainments of a gentleman.”
54
Wait charged women with the duty of transforming
American men into a nation of wine drinkers, assuming that they would automatically substitute
wine for more dangerous distilled alcohols. From her point of view, American women could
easily save the nation from countless social problems—poor diets, drunkenness, wandering
around at night—and do it all from the confines of their dining room tables. Indeed, Wait seemed
to imply that women need not leave their homes and families to engage in the public and
political spheres to wage a successful fight against alcohol abuse. Wine was not simply a
beverage for Wait. It was a gateway to preserving morality and cultivating more refined family
life. More importantly, it was the duty of American women to accomplish these tasks.
According to Arpad Haraszthy, drinking should be strictly restricted to mealtimes. He
described drinking between meals as “a pernicious habit, amounting almost to second nature in
our American population, and is injurious in every way….” Haraszthy argued that Americans
could avoid this dangerous moral transgression by integrating wine consumption into mealtimes.
Wine, he maintained, could not be properly enjoyed or appreciated without accompanying food.
Further, diners should show restraint while enjoying wines. Haraszthy questioned why an

53
Frona Eunice Wait, 81.

54
Ibid, 83.

227
individual would drink two glasses when “one glass is quite sufficient for the capacity of his
head.”
55

Haraszthy framed his treatise as a guidebook on how to properly appreciate wine and avoid
drunkenness. However, his main goal as president of the CWA was to protect the business
interests of its member wineries. By teaching Americans how to properly and safely enjoy wine
every day, Haraszthy hoped to increase sales and protect against the ever-encroaching arm of the
temperance movement. Haraszthy clearly understood the precarious situation winegrowers
confronted, “At this critical moment our future success depends upon the immediate popular
increased consumption of our wines more than greater production, increased quality, or any other
thing that I can think of.”
56

California wine boosters also advertised the health benefits associated with regular wine
consumption. Frederico Pohndorff directly addressed common anxieties about alcohol by
appealing to the health concerns of his nineteenth-century contemporaries. Again, he encouraged
wine drinkers to practice moderation. He maintained that concerns about alcohol itself “should
not outweigh the other valuable ingredients of wine, extractives and acids that could help
digestion.
57
For Pohndorff any imagined dangers of imbibing fermented liquors were far
outweighed by the health benefits that wine afforded its patrons. Likewise, wine boosters
highlighted wine’s medicinal benefits. Arpad Haraszthy described how different wine varietals
could heal various maladies. For example, white wines might improve health issues of those with
a “phlegmatic disposition,” while Bordeaux wines could help strengthen “weakened invalids.”

55
Arpad Haraszthy, “How to Drink Wine,” in Frona Eunice Wait, 70.

56
Ibid, 30.

57
F. Pohndorff and Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California, Report of the Sixth
Annual State Viticultural Convention, 203.

228
Haraszthy cautioned those with excess blood to avoid fortified red wines as these beverages
might exacerbate the problem.
58
Charles Wetmore also argued that wine played an important role
in preserving the health of the heart and improving circulation of the blood. At the end of a hard
day of work, Wetmore noted that men found themselves weary and without good cheer or
appetite. To remedy this, he prescribed a glass of light claret to start “the blood in motion” and
restore warmth, comfort, and equilibrium to a tired body.
59
Frona Wait contended that acids,
particularly from fruit, were important to maintaining digestive health and avoiding biliousness.
Wine could serve as a substitute for fruit, particularly when fruit was out-of-season or otherwise
unavailable. An individual who enjoyed wine with a meal had simply enjoyed fruit in its
fermented form. By making wine a regular part of the diet, Wait assured her readers that they
would avoid the health issues faced by teetotalers and “total abstinence philosophers,” groups
she dismissed as sad and bilious.
60
George Husmann even went so far as to claim that a daily
glass of wine was sure to prevent malaria.
61
Wine industrialists like Haraszthy and boosters like
Wetmore and Wait used scientific language to validate their message that wine was not only a
safe beverage that could foster temperance, but one that could improve health.
Winegrowers argued that wine, unlike distilled spirits, was not an impediment to the
work ethic or productivity of laborers. In an 1880 report to the state legislature, Arpad Haraszthy
commented that California claret was popular among San Francisco’s fishermen. Despite their
natural love for wine, Haraszthy assured his audience that they would “never see any drunkards

58
Arpad Haraszthy, “How to Drink Wine,” in Frona Eunice Wait, 72.

59
Charles A. Wetmore, quoted in Frona Eunice Wait, 85-86.

60
Frona Eunice Wait, 86-87.

61
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, 364.

229
among them,” insinuating that fishermen’s sobriety could be attributed to their wine
consumption.
62
Frona Wait projected similar viewpoints. She equated socially respectable
alcohol consumption with wine. She described European’s moderate enjoyment of wine to
contest the idea that consumption of any alcohol would cause immorality and laziness. She
sought to convince her readers that wine drinking did not compromise the strong work ethic and
integrity so valued by American sensibilities. Wait argued that wine-drinking European societies
did not lack industriousness, prudence, and manners. For example, French and Spanish laborers
used wine judiciously in the same manner that Americans enjoyed coffee—as a small enjoyment
with meals.
63
Likewise, Frederico Pohndorff suggested that wine was a means of “weaning
people from strong distillates” and teaching them the “patriotic” obligation of moderation.
64
In
order to protect the wine business interest and advance the cultivation of California, Wait,
Haraszthy, and others viticulturists offered wine consumption as a safeguard against drunkenness
and a vehicle for upholding the American work ethic.
Towards National Prohibition
In the first decade of the twentieth century, “dry” laws prohibiting alcohol sales swept the
country and threatened the economic viability of California’s wine businesses. Andrew A.
Sbarboro, one of the founders of the Italian-Swiss Colony, was especially vocal in the anti-
Prohibition campaigns. Civically minded and well-respected in San Francisco’s business
community, Sbarboro served as head of the Italian-American Bank and as president of the

62
Arpad Haraszthy and Eugene Hilgard, “Report of the Culture of the Grape,” Appendix to the
Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Twenty-Third Session of the Legislature of the State
of California, Volume V, (Sacramento: State Office: J.D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1880), 2.

63
Frona Eunice Wait, 82

64
F. Pohndorff, F. Pohndorff, Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California, Report of
the Sixth Annual State Viticultural Convention, 203. Charles Sullivan, 268.

230
Manufacturers and Producers Association of California.
65
As the temperance movement gained
momentum after the turn of the twentieth century, Sbarboro became increasingly alarmed and
helped found the California Grape Protective Association (CGPA) in 1908 in an attempt to
protect his business. The CGPA’s main strategy lay in differentiating the wine industry from
beer and liquor interests. Indeed, the CGPA worked hard to distance itself from the unsavory
images of liquor businesses, particularly saloons.
66
The CGPA also published a series of
pamphlets that differentiated wine from other alcohols and encouraged the consumption of wine
as a temperance drink. Frank T. Swett, an active member of the CGPA who would serve as
president in 1914, echoed such views. Swett and his father, John, owned Hill Girt Vineyard in
Martinez, California, and were active in the State Viticultural Commission and other later anti-
Prohibition trade groups.
67
Swett regularly corresponded with other growers and individuals
involved in the wine industry, including Frederic Bioletti, Professor of Agriculture at the
University of California, College of Agriculture. In one such letter to Bioletti, Swett sympathized
with “poor benighted Easterners” who had access to few alcohols other then whiskey, rum, and
other dangerous distilled alcohols. These Easterners suffered from such appalling ignorance that
they confused California’s salubrious wines for rum. Under such circumstances, Swett declared
that he too would support the temperance movement. Swett argued that regular alcohol
consumption only affected certain races and therefore should not be a concern for Californians.
In one such letter, the two men discussed the rise of blue laws in the East. Swett was confident

65
John R. Meers, “The California Wine and Grape Industry and Prohibition,” California
Historical Society Quarterly 46, no. 1 (March 1, 1967), 21. See also Charles L Sullivan, 318-
319.

66
John R. Meers, 19.

67
Charles Sullivan, 357.

231
that wine-drinking European immigrants would fight the tide of Prohibition. Further, he
reassured Bioletti that “outside the nigger belt, where liquor interferes with labor in a disastrous
way,” these laws would not likely be strictly enforced.
68
As had laws restricting Indians’ access
to alcohol before 1860s, Swett racialized alcohol consumption. For him as an Anglo winegrower
living in California, alcohol seemed to pose no threat to his labor force, which likely would have
included Chinese and Mexican workers. Swett seemed to sympathize with the concerns of
landowners who employed black agricultural laborers in the south. However, his sympathy did
not extend to support for laws that might threaten viability and mere survival of his vineyard and
winery, particularly when he did not seem concerned about the effect of alcohol on his own
vineyard workers. Though he might agree with growers in other parts of the country who felt the
need to restrict their labor forces’ access to liquor, it did not mean that Swett and his fellow
vineyardists and winemakers should face legal restrictions. In framing access to wine as a
question of racial privilege, Swett moralized alcohol along the lines of race and citizenship.
Swett’s private letter turned temperance into a question of citizenship and rights to be
determined by race, but this sentiment was also reflected in public ads. Swett implied that
Californians need not face alcohol restrictions because unlike Southern Blacks, California’s
citizens possessed the ability to self-regulate their consumption of wine. Thus, their rights as
citizens should not be restricted. Likewise, an advertisement in the Santa Rose Republican
framed national temperance laws as a threat against the rights of local citizens. Sonoma’s
residents were “energetic and progressive, always in the vanguard of improvements and alive to
the best interests of their pretty little city.” The advertisement held up the industriousness of

68
Letter from Frank T. Swett to Frederic Bioletti, January 23, 1908, Records of the College of
Agriculture, University of California, CU-20, Box 6, Folder 1907-1908 R-S, University
Archives, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California.

232
Sonoma’s large population of Italian and Swiss immigrants as proof of their transformation into
stellar American citizen, declaring, “These men, through their thrift and industry, are all property
owners and business men. Their stocks are neat and up-to-date, and their methods modern. Many
of them have sworn allegiance to the country of their adoption, and are among the first citizens
of the county…the vintage here is the equal of that of the best producing part of Europe for
wines.”
69
As in Anaheim, Sonoma’s immigrant winegrowers had transformed themselves into
model agricultural citizens as indicated by their modernity, industriousness, and status as
property owners. Though they embodied the virtues of model agricultural citizens, temperance
threatened the economic freedom granted to them by virtue of their citizenship.
Sbarboro himself wrote extensively on behalf the CGPA using moral and economic
arguments to paint a positive image of the California wine industry. One such pamphlet, “The
Logical Way to Real Temperance,” encouraged California voters to protect what he predicted
would one day be one of the state’s greatest industries. According to Sbarboro, the wine industry
and Prohibitionists actually shared the common goal of removing the “evil of drunkenness.”
However, they differed in offering a solution to this social ill. First, Sbarboro argued that strict
oversight and perhaps even the eradication of the saloon would swiftly eliminate the problem of
intoxication at the source.
70
Second, Sbarboro proposed dealing with drunkenness on an
individual level instead of eliminating entire industries. According to him, Prohibitionists were
shortsighted in only dealing with intemperance on a macro-level by attacking businesses like the

69
Santa Rosa Republican, “The Sonoma County Development Edition,” February 22, 1911,
Sonoma County Agriculture, Land Use and Tourism Collection, Box 2: Ag 07-007, North Bay
Regional & Special Collections, Sonoma State University Library, Sonoma, California.

70
Andrea Sbarboro, Temperance Vs. Prohibition: Important Letters and Data from Our
American Consuls, the Clergy and Other Eminent Men, Second Edition, (San Francisco: H.S.
Crocker Co, 1914), 4.

233
Italian-Swiss Colony. Twenty years earlier, George Husmann had proposed that temperance
campaigners should focus their energies on preventing drunkenness by criminalizing the act of
being drunk.
71
Sbarboro picked up on this argument bye encouraging temperance groups to focus
their energies on dealing with the issue on a micro-level, by correcting the behavior of
drunkards. Individuals who habitually became intoxicated should be removed from the public
space, arrested, and forced to work in order to cure them of their drunkenness. According to
Sbarboro, this punishment would actually be a “blessing” to drunkards everywhere, and to their
families as well. In an effort to protect the economic interests of his industry, Sbrarboro
encouraged the public to remedy social problems by correcting individual behaviors and not by
attacking businesses or even entire industries, like the wine interest in California. Doing so
would not eliminate the abuse of alcohol and would have a devastating economic effect.
Like Wait, Haraszthy, and Husmann had in the 1880s, Sbarboro proposed substituting
California wines for distilled spirits. Intemperance, he argued, could never be the caused by
“proper” enjoyment of wine with meals, as was done in France or Italy. If Americans would
make it a habit of serving wine at the table, they could mimic European wine producing
countries in reducing intoxication to a minimum and help expand winegrowing in the United
States.
72
Sbarboro compared these European wine drinking nations to those countries where beer
and spirits were the norm. According to Sbarboro, the populations of England, Scotland, and
Ireland drank beer and distilled liquors habitually. As a result, these countries suffered from
alarming rates of intoxication among both men and women.
73
He encouraged Californians to

71
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, 247.

72
Andrea Sbarboro, 8.

73
Ibid, 7.

234
cultivate and foster the wine interest in order to help further its moral imperatives against
intemperance. Wine promised to remove the “great evil” of drunkenness from the United States
and “to bring to the American people the blessings of sobriety and happiness which prevail in the
wine-drinking countries.
74
Sbraboro seemed to imply that if United States were to continue down
the dangerous path towards prohibiting wine, it could potentially threaten American
womanhood. Indeed, Sbarboro implied that full Prohibition of wine would threaten ideals of
femininity and temperance. If women were thus compromised, then who would serve as a moral
compass for American society?
Despite the best efforts of the CGPA, the CWA, and individual winegrowers and boosters,
the wine industry failed to fully differentiate itself from the alcohol industry as a whole or
prevent Prohibition, particularly after 1913 when the “dry” movement gained more political
momentum on a national level. That year, Congress gave Prohibitionists a huge victory when it
passed the Webb-Kenyon Act, a significant exemption of the Constitutional Commerce Clause.
Ordinarily, the Commerce Clause would have prevented states from passing laws that
discriminated against inter-state commerce. With the Webb-Kenyon Act, Congress legally
exempted states from these restrictions and allowed them to prohibit inter-state trade of
alcohol.
75
In 1914, the CGPA found itself in desperate straits and again joined forces with all
liquor interests to fight the California Anti-Saloon League’s political campaign in support of the
Hobson Amendment, which attempted to institute national Prohibition.
76
When the Hobson
Amendment failed, wine industrialists again found themselves at war with the Temperance

74
Andrea Sbarboro, 7.

75
Webb-Kenyon Act of 1913, Public Law 122, U.S. Statutes at Large 27, 1913.

76
John R. Meers, 21.

235
supporters when two more “dry” amendments were on the California ballot in November of
1916.
77
Again, these measures were defeated. As the United States entered World War I,
temperance advocates attempted to attach prohibition to laws regulating food during wartime and
the California wine industry had to turn its focus to national politics. For example, in June of
1917. Congress passed the Presidential Food Control bill, which “prohibited the use of any
foods, food materials, and/or feeds in the production of alcoholic beverages.” After numerous
debates about what beverages would be included as an alcoholic beverage, beer and wine were
ultimately exempted from this regulation.
78
In December of 1917, efforts to amend the
Constitution with a permanent Prohibition law proved successful when the Eighteenth
Amendment was ratified in both the Senate and House of Representatives. A year later, two-
thirds of the states in the union had approved the law. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified
on January 16, 1919 and went into effect one year later. Officially, Prohibition affected
“manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” within the United States and its
territories.
79
And, it prohibited the importation or exportation of alcohol to and from the United
States. Although the California wine interest fought hard during the winter and spring of 1919 to
nullify the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment via referendum vote, they proved
unsuccessful and the wine industry seemed to face its untimely death.
80

77
John R. Meers, 22.

78
Ibid, 25.

79
Constitution of the United States, Amendments 11-27, “Charters of Freedom,” National
Archives, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_amendments_11-27.html
Accessed March 8, 2014.

80
John R. Meers, 27.

236
Though Prohibition destroyed wine production in California, in the greatest of ironies, the
Eighteenth Amendment actually buoyed grape cultivation in the northern parts of the state. In
Los Angeles and its neighboring regions, viticulture and winemaking seemed dead given the
simultaneous rise of Prohibition and citrus. Vineyards that had not already been destroyed by
Anaheim Disease were uprooted in 1919 in exchange for citrus orchards, which promised great
economic returns. The region would no longer be the vineyard of California. In San Francisco,
the CWA considered different ideas to circumvent the Prohibition Law, including one fleeting
proposal to crush grapes and ferment wine on floating ship-wineries sailing to Japan.
81
This plan
never came to fruition and in the end, the CWA liquidated its assets. However, Napa and
Sonoma counties saw different results because the land there not especially suited for other
crops. Indeed, a 1919 agricultural survey of Sonoma County vineyards conducted by the
University of California concluded that of the 23,000 acres under vineyard cultivation, only
4,000 acres would be useful for other crops.
82
Paradoxically, 1919 and 1920 proved to be
excellent years for grape sales. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, which had been charged with
enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, allowed individuals to produce up to two hundred
gallons of non-intoxicating fruit juices and ciders a year in their homes.
83
As demand for fresh
grapes increased across the United States, growers in Napa and Sonoma scrambled to plant more
vineyards. This unlikely prosperity continued until 1926 when the over saturation of grapes
caused a depression in grape prices.
84
Faced with an industry that was no longer economically

81
John R. Meers, 28.

82
Ibid, 28.

83
Ibid, 29.

84
Thomas Pinney, 437.

237
viable, vineyardists and winemakers partnered with broader liquor and beer groups in 1927 in
their fight against Prohibition. In 1889, Frona Wait predicted, “Temperance, like every other
American fad, bids fair to run itself to death, because of the terrible American habit of overdoing
everything.”
85
Her prophecy did not come true until 1933 when the Twenty-First Amendment
repealed Prohibition.
Conclusion
George Husmann concluded Grape Culture and Wine-making in California with a chapter
devoted to wine songs. These poems and songs were mostly translations of German wine songs,
but Husmann hoped that these would inspire “native poets” to compose “California lyrics” that
could be included in future editions of his book.
86
One such song, “American Vintner’s Song,”
celebrated the labor of the vineyardist: “Now we pour the wines rich treasure/Gods might envy
us the pleasure...Freedoms land, freedoms land!/ Where anew my home I planned/ Lo! I drink to
thee brave nation/ Comrades, join in this ovation/ Hail! Our chosen fatherland.”
87
Frederick
Muench, a German immigrant to Missouri and a friend of Husmann, had written this song in
celebration of American winemakers. Though not a resident of California, Muench honored all
vintners across his adopted country—his “chosen fatherland”—and praised their work under the
banner of freedom. As a resident of the west, Muench also had an interest in the cultivation of
the frontier. And though he was an immigrant, Muench embraced American ideals of freedom,
adopting the civilizing rhetoric used by wine-boosters in California. Husmann affirmed
Muench’s glorification of wine cultivation as the tool by which the frontier might be enlightened

85
Frona Eunice Wait, 81.

86
George Husmann, Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California, 375.

87
Ibid, 379-380.

238
and civilized. California’s vineyardists, winemakers, and boosters were not just growers,
manufacturers, or tradesmen. Husmann’s book, including his chapter on wine songs, ennobled
the conquering work of vineyardists and winemakers in California. For winegrowers like
Husmann, the subjugation of California’s Spanish-Mexican culture in favor of modernity and
progress was something to celebrate.

Conclusion
Today, any mention of California wine conjures images of lush grapes, leafy
green vineyards, cellars lined with fragrant oak barrels, and Mediterranean-inspired
wineries—romanticized symbols of a distinctly “Californian” lifestyle. As a tourist
attraction, food export, and multi-billion dollar mainstay of the state’s economy,
California “Cabs” and “Pinots” occupy popular imaginations like never before. Films
such as Sideways (2004) and Bottleshock (2008) underscore the cultural significance of
wine across the United States. These popular stereotypes—icons of California’s natural
beauty and rich agricultural bounties—belie how the wine industry was born amid the
social turmoil and racialized violence that followed the Spanish colonization of
California.
This dissertation argues that California’s nineteenth-century wine industry
operated as a site of conquest and racialization, and as a tool of imperial expansion and
nation building. Wine cultivation in California first took root at the Spanish missions and
underwent commercial expansion under the management of Mexican-Californios and
American migrants. Wine was not merely an agricultural product in Spanish, Mexican, or
American California. Rather, viticulture and winemaking gave newcomers the tools to
assert control over the region’s land and people. Winegrowing—from its impact on the
land to its labor and market needs—helped reconfigure racial hierarchies and define the
boundaries of citizenship in California.
The wine industry came out of one of the California’s most visible historic
symbols, the mission system. As they constructed missions across the region, the
Franciscans supervised Indians to plant vineyards and construct wineries. This ensured

240
that missionaries had a regular supply of sacramental wine for the mass. The missions
existed primarily to civilize and Christianize the region’s indigenous populations, and
viticulture offered a way for the Franciscans to train neophytes in European agriculture
and land-use methods while the finished product, wine, made it possible for the friars to
celebrate the mass and convert Indians to Catholicism. Under Spanish and Mexican rule,
legal access to alcohol, grapes, and winemaking tools helped define the boundaries of
race and class. One’s role in the winegrowing process, whether as a grower, a laborer, or
a merchant, denoted status and the legal rights of citizenship. Winegrowing had social
and cultural consequences beyond the confines of California’s vineyard and wineries, and
this trend would continue well beyond the end of Spanish imperial rule in 1822 and
Mexican governance in 1848.
After the end of the Mexican War, EuroAmericans poured into California. Former
gold miners transitioned first to wheat culture and then to specialized horticulture,
particularly viticulture. EuroAmericans justified their expansion westward and their
conquest of the land by promoting their enterprising work ethic and racial superiority.
Grape culture blossomed as a promising economic venture for the state’s new
immigrants. Though EuroAmerican grape cultivators delighted in the environmental
riches they encountered, they were also faced with the task of taming undomesticated
land and people on the frontier. The words of one commenter epitomized northeastern
stereotypes that characterized California as “a land of big beets and pumpkins, of rough
miners, of pistols, bowie-knives, abundant fruit, green wines, high prices…and
abounding in dangers.”
1
In the wake of such vulgarities, immigrants used fruit cultivation

1
Chares Nordhoff, “California,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1872, 865.

241
to improve the frontier through education, labor, and wine consumption. Atlantic Monthly
gushed about the noble work implicit in converting “vast tracts of her [California’s] yet
untilled soil into blooming vineyards, which will give employment to thousands of men
and women.”
2 ⁠ Viticulturalists were part of a cohort of growers who espoused Manifest
Destiny through the vehicle of specialized horticulture.
Viticulturists actively participated in the EuroAmerican campaign to expand
American imperial control over California, beginning with the region’s natural elements.
Vineyardists cultivated undomesticated tracts of land and became experts in the local
environments, soils, and native plants. As part of the campaign to bring the wine industry
to its full potential, viticulturists argued that California’s indigenous soils and vines had
to be improved and elevated from their natural state. Grape cultivators attempted to
discipline nature and establish control over the environment by improving native grape
varietals through controlled plant reproduction and by applying modern technology to
winemaking. By educating themselves about the natural environment, winegrowers used
their knowledge to tame California’s native terrains. Viticulturists also lobbied for
government support, which came in the form of tax breaks, infrastructure development,
and, most notably, in the founding of the California State Agricultural Society and the
College of Agriculture at the University of California. These publically funded
institutions helped produce and disseminate advanced scientific information about
agriculture, much to the benefit of the state’s vineyardists. At the same time, the
California State Agricultural Society and College of Agriculture served to create new
knowledge that could supplant the “antiquated” Spanish-Mexican winegrowing methods

2
“California as a Vineyard,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1864, 600.

242
and modernize the industry. Despite the booster rhetoric of the wine industry,
viticulturists’ progress was nonlinear and riddled with inconsistencies as their methods
did not always differ from that of their Spanish and Mexican predecessors.
By establishing a relationship between citizenship and fruit cultivation,
horticulturalists invoked Jeffersonian ideals that linked agriculture to the virtues of
American republicanism. At the same time, the model grower in California was not a
Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, but an agricultural citizen: a large-scale landowner who
relied on crews of wage laborers—Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans—to complete all the
hard labor associated with farming. Agricultural citizens also applied modern
technologies and tools to their vineyard and winery work. Agricultural citizenship was
defined by cultivation on a large-scale with an emphasis on modernity and agricultural
science, which was created by viticultural trade groups and the College of Agriculture. In
and of itself, agricultural citizenship symbolized progress and Americanization for
California’s vineyardists and winemakers. In particular, German winegrowers across the
Los Angeles region embodied the ideal agricultural citizenship through their industrious
cultivation.
Winegrowers advertised their trade in the eastern United States in the hopes of
attracting desirable EuroAmerican migrants to California who could help whiten the state
and move it away from its Spanish-Mexican past. Though wine promoters ostensibly
sought to use their industry to attract white migrants, their rhetoric contradicted the
reality that many of their hired laborers were people of color. This paradox exposed the
wine business’s conflicting goals: to civilize California by enticing new immigrants from
Europe and the eastern states, or to maximize their profits by hiring low-wage Indian,

243
Chinese, and Mexican workers. These tensions between race, labor, and Americanization
made vineyardists and winemakers key participants in framing immigration debates in
California. As vineyardists and winemakers struggled to negotiate the contradictions
between their civilizing rhetoric and the realities of their racialized labors they found
themselves—and their laborers—under attack after the 1870s.
Wine industrialists helped reconfigure racial and cultural hierarchies that sought
to reconfigure whiteness away from Mexican-Californio culture towards modernity,
progress, and economic mobility. Culture operated as a tool of racial exclusion and
cultural conquest, as Mexican populations living in the present were segregated as
outsiders and relics of the past. Winegrowers used agricultural citizenship to redefine
themselves as Anglo-Californians. In doing so, they claimed a sense of native belonging
in California and appropriated whiteness away from Mexican-Californios. Whereas
EuroAmericans and Mexican-Californios had both shared a white identity in 1848, by the
close of the century, the latter group’s racial status was decidedly in flux.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, winegrowers confronted a series of
environmental and economic challenges. First, vineyard pests (Anaheim Disease,
Phylloxera) and two national financial crises threatened to cripple the industry. New,
professionalized trade groups, including the California Wine Association and the Board
of State Viticultural Commissioners, emerged to lead the fight against these vineyard
pests and to raise grape prices in the wake of economic depression. Viticultural scientists
were able to apply hybridization techniques to save the industry from Phylloxera.
However, Anaheim disease ultimately destroyed vineyards across the Los Angeles

244
region, shifting California’s viticultural center to its northern coasts, namely Napa and
Sonoma Counties.
Wine boosters argued that while viticulture could civilize California’s physical
landscape, its finished product, wine, promised to refine Americans across the United
States. Moving beyond the boundaries of California, vinicultural boosters hoped to
civilize Americans at large by converting them into temperate wine-drinkers.
California’s vinicultural advocates likened the consumption of wine to the cultured and
civilized societies of Europe in an effort to validate their national endorsement of alcohol
consumption. Promoters of the California wine industry lauded the healthful benefits of
wine. Wine promoters also argued that habitual wine consumption could cultivate the
American palette and refine mealtimes.
The accelerating temperance movement of the late nineteenth-century posed a
new threat to the survival of state’s vineyards and wineries. California’s winemakers
sought to protect their business interests by advertising wine as a temperance agent.
Essentially, viniculturists reverted back to earlier temperance arguments that favored the
moderate consumption of fermented drinks over that of strong distilled alcohol. By
likening contemporary winemaking on the untamed frontier to the cultured traditions
associated with wine consumption, wine boosters sought to obtain credibility for their
product and their adopted home, particularly as national temperance campaigns gained
momentum.
“A Cultivating Enterprise” brings together the histories of conquest, agriculture,
and racialization in California. Historians have thoroughly examined the legal, political,
and social forces that upended Californios from their positions of power. In particular,

245
scholars have focused on Californios’ loss of property and cattle to explain the decline of
their wealth. This dissertation argues that specialized horticulture —particularly
viticulture—merits a closer look in order to better understand its role in helping to
displace Mexican-Californios and in the Americanization of California. By placing this
viticultural history within broader ones of American expansion and migration, scholars
can understand the significance of viticulture in bringing to fruition the Western promise
of upward mobility. Finally, this project encourages scholars to reexamine the trajectory
of agriculture in California between wheat cultivation in the 1850 and citrus culture in the
early twentieth-century. As this dissertation argues, the viticultural industry played a key
role in laying the foundation for California agribusiness, decades before the rise of citrus.
Between the late eighteenth century and 1920, viticulture had a deep impact on
California’s natural terrains, its people, and its diverse cultures. Winegrowers took an
active role in structuring and challenging definitions of race and citizenship, from the
Spanish empire, to Mexican California, to the arrival of the United States. By the
twentieth century, the cultural and social implications of the wine industry had helped
remake California into a modern American place.

246
Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California
Bancroft Reference Notes
Benjamin Davis Wilson Papers
Buena Vista Vinicultural Society Record Book: 1864-1866
Charles Kohler and Isaac De Turk, Bancroft Dictations
Eugene W. Hilgard Papers and Field Notebooks, 1849-1891
Frederic T. Bioletti Papers
Hayes Scrapbooks
Records of the College of Agriculture, University of California, 1881-1945
Wines and Viniculture in California
California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento, California
Bergez-Frank Old Poodle Dog Collection
California Information File: Textual File, Menus 1910-1915
California Information File II: Viticulture in California
Chinese in California
Vertical File Counties: Sonoma County Pamphlets
Wines and Wine-Making Photograph Collection
Cal Poly Pomona, University Library Special Collections, Pomona, California
Thomas Pinney Collection
Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Benjamin Davis Wilson Papers
California Scrapbooks
James De Barth Shorb Papers
Leonard J. Rose Papers
Leonard J. Rose Family Photograph Collection
Matthew Keller, Papers
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
American History Wine Documentation Project
Larry Zim World’s Fair Collection
Warshaw Collection of Business Americana
Sonoma State University, Special Collections, Sonoma, California
Sonoma County Agriculture, Land Use and Tourism Collection
Stanford University, Special Collections, Stanford, California
George Husmann Vina Ranch and Distillery Album
Jane Lathrop Stanford Papers
Leland Stanford Papers 1841-1897
Leland Stanford Collection 1869-1974
Stanford Ranches and Lands Records
Vina Ranch Collection
University of California, Davis, Special Collections, Davis, California
Frederic T. Papers Bioletti

247
California Wine Clippings
Viticulture Scrapbook

Periodicals
Agricultural History
Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and Pioneer
Register
Atlantic Monthly
Bulletin of the Chinese Historical Society of America
California Farmer
California Magazine of the Pacific
California Mail Bag
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Daily Alta California
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
Harper’s Weekly
Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly
Huntington Library Quarterly
Los Angeles Star
Los Angeles Times
Overland Monthly
Pacific Historical Review
Pacific Rural Press
Pacific Wine and Spirit Review
San Francisco Examiner
Scrivener’s Monthly
Wines and Vines

Agricultural Manuals and Government Documents
Bailey, L. H. Sketch of the Evolution of Our Native Fruits. New York: Macmillan, 1898.
___________. Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture Volume III, 2
nd
Edition. New York:
Macmillan Company, 1917.

Bancroft, Hubert Howe. History of California, 7 vols, 1860-1890. San Francisco, The
History Company Publishers, 1890.

__________________. California Pastoral, 1769-1848. San Francisco: History
Company, 1888.

Bell, Horace. Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in Southern California. Los
Angeles: Yarnell, Caystille & Mathes, Printers, 1881.

Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California. Report of the Sixth Annual
State Viticultural Convention: Held at Pioneer Hall, San Francisco, March 7, 8,
9, 10, 1888. Sacramento: J.D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1888.

248
Brace, Charles Loring. The New West: or, California in 1867-68. New York: G.P.
Putnam & Son, 1869.

Bryant, Edwin. What I Saw in California. 1849. Reprint. Palo Alto: L. Osborne, 1967.

California. Board of State Viticultural Commissioners. Annual Report of the Board of
State Viticultural Commissioners for 1888. Sacramento: J.D. Young,
Superintendent State Printing, 1888.

_________________. The Chaintre System of Pruning and Conducting the Vine: Annual
report of the Chief Executive Viticultural Officer to the Board of State Viticultural
Commissioners. Sacramento: Superintendent of State Printing, 1883.

_________________. Report of the Commissioners on
the Culture of the Grape-Vine California. Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery State
Printer, 1861.

_________________. Report of I. DeTurk, Commissioner for the Sonoma District.
Sacramento: A.J. Johnston, 1893.

California Commission on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California. Report of
Commissioners on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California. Sacramento:
Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1861.

California State Agricultural Society. Third Annual Fair, Cattle Show, and Industrial
Exhibition, Held at San Jose, October 7
th
to 10
th
, 1856. San Francisco, California
Farmer Office, 1856.

California Wine Growers; and Wine and Brandy Manufacturers’ Association.
Transactions, 1872. In California State Agricultural Society, Transactions, 1872.
Sacramento: T.A. Springer, State Printer, 1873.

Campbell, George W. “The Grape and its Improvement by Hybridizing, Cross-Breeding,
and Seedlings.” In Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1862.
Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1863.

Cronise, Titus Fey. The Natural Wealth of California. San Francisco: H.H. Bancroft,
1868.

Dana, Richard H. Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea.
1840. Reprint, Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1878.

Davis, William Heath. Seventy-Five Years in California. San Francisco: J. Howell, 1929.

Du Breuil, A. and John. A. Warder, ed. Translated by E. and C. Parker. Vineyard Culture

249
Improved and Cheapened With Notes and Adaptations to American Culture.
Ohio: Robert Clarke and Co., 1867.

Gillette, M.G. Report of Special Committee on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in
California: Introduced by Mr. Morrison Under Resolution of Mr. Gillette, to
Examine into, and Report Upon, the Growth, Culture, and Improvement, of the
Grape-Vine in California. Sacramento: Charles T. Botts, State Printer, 1861.

Englehardt, Zephyrin. Missions and Missionaries of California. 4 vols. San Francisco:
James H. Barry, 1908-15.

Flagg, William J. Three Seasons in European Vineyards. New York: Harper & Brothers,
1869.

Fuller, Andrew S. The Grape Culturist: A Treatise on the Cultivation of the Native
Grape.” New York: Orange, Judd, and Company, 1864.

Haraszthy, Agoston. Grape Culture, Wines, and Wine-Making. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1862. Reprint, Ed. Theodore Schoenman. Father of California Wine:
Agoston Haraszthy. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1979.

_______________. The Father of California Wine. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1979.

_______________ and California Board of State Viticultural Commissioners. Report of
the Commissioners on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California. Sacramento:
Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1861.

Haraszthy, Arpad and Eugene Hilgard. “Report of the Culture of the Grape.” Appendix
to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly of the Twenty-Third Session of the
Legislature of the State of California. Volume V. Sacramento: State Office:
J.D. Young, Supt. State Printing, 1880.

Hayne, Arthur Peronneau, and California Agricultural Experiment Station. Resistant
Vines: Their Selection, Adaption, and Grafting. Sacramento: A.J. Johnston,
superintendent state printing, 1897.

Hilgard, Eugene W. Report of the Viticultural Work During the Seasons 1885 and 1886
Being Appendix No. VI to the Report for the Year 1886. Sacramento: James J.
Ayers, Supt. State Print, 1886.

______________. Report of the Professor of Agriculture to the President of the
Unitersity. Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1879.

_______________. University of California-College of Agriculture Report of the
Viticultural Work During the seasons 1887-1893 with Data Regarding the Crush
of 1894-95. Sacramento: Superintendent of State Printing, 1896.

250

Hilgard, Eugene and Frederic Theodore Bioletti. Report of the Viticultural Work During
the Seasons 1883-4 and 1884-5. J. J. Ayres, Superintendent State Printing, 1896.

Hittel, John S. The Resources of California Comprising Agriculture, Mining,
Geography, Climate, Commerce, etc, and the Past and Future Development of the
State. San Francisco: A. Roman & Company, 1863.

C.T. Hopkins. Common Sense Applied to the Immigrant Question. San Francisco:
Turnbull & Smith, 1869.

How to Raise the Price of Grapes, and an Analysis of the Sweet Wine Law. Sacramento:
J. Johnston, Supt. State Printing, 1891.

Husmann, George. American Grape Growing and Wine Making. Fourth Edition. New
York: Orange Judd Company, 1919.

_______________. An Essay on the Culture of the Grrape in the Great West. Hermann,
Montana: C. W. Kielman, 1863.

_______________. The Cultivation of the Native Grape and Manufacture of American
Wines. New York: Geo. E. & F. Woodward, 1866.

______________. Grape Culture and Wine-Making in California: A Practical Manual
for the Grape-Grower and Wine-Maker. San Francisco: Payot, Upham, & Co.,
Publishers, 1888.

Hyatt, Thomas H. Hyatt’s Handbook of Grape Culture; or Why, Where, when, and How
to Plant a Vineyard, Manufacture Wines, etc. San Francisco: H.H. Bancroft and
Company, 1867.

Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California. Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1889.

Illustrated History of Sonoma County. Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1889.

Jones, Idwall. Vines in the Sun: A Journey through the California Vineyard. William
Morrow & Company: New York, 1949.

Leggett, Herbert B. Early History of Wine Production in California. San Francisco:
Wine Institute, 1941.

McMurtrie, William. Report upon the Statistics of Grape Culture and Wine Production
in the United States for 1880. U.S. Department of Agriculture Special Report no.
36. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1881.

Menefee, C.A. Historical and Descriptive Sketchbook of Napa, Sonoma, Lake, and

251
Mendocino. Napa: Reporter Publishing House, 1879.

California Sheet Music Covers. San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1959.

Newmark, Harris. Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. 1916. 4
th
ed. Los
Angeles: Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, 1970.

Newmark, Maurice H. and Marco R. Newmark. Census of the City and County of Los
Angeles, California, for the Year 1850: Together with an Analysis and an
Appendix. Los Angeles: The Times-mirror press, 1929.

Official Report of the California State Agricultural Society’s Fourth Annual Fair, Cattle
Show and Industrial Exhibition 1857. San Francisco: O’Meara & Painter, 1858.

Pierce, Newton B. The California Vine Disease: A Preliminary Report of Investigations,
Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892.

Pohndorff F. and Board of State Viticultural Commissioners of California,. Report of the
Sixth Annual State Viticultural Convention: Held at Pioneer Hall, San Francisco,
March 7, 8, 9, 10, 1888. Sacramento: J.D. Young, Supt. State Printing.

Report of Assembly Committee on the Culture and Improvement of the Grape Vine in the
State of California. Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, State Printer, 1868.

Report of Commissioners on the Culture of the Grape-Vine in California: Reported by
Two of the Commissioners Appointed by the Governor to Report Upon the Ways
and Means Best Adapted to Promote the Improvement and Growth of the Grape-
Vine in California. Sacramento: B.P. Avery, State Printer, 1862.

Reports of the Board of Trustees and Officers of the Buena Vista Vinicultural Society,
San Francisco: Alta California Job Office, 1864.

Rose, L J., Jr. L.J. Rose of Sunny Slope, 1827-1899. San Marino: Huntington Library,
1959.

Sbarboro, Andrea. Temperance Vs. Prohibition: Important Letters and Data from Our
American Consuls, the Clergy and Other Eminent Men, Second Edition. San
Francisco: H.S. Crocker Co, 1914.

Sexton, Ella M. Stories of California. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902.

Shorb, J. De Barth. “Vines and Vineyards.” In A.T. Hawley, ed., The Present Condition,
Growth, Progress, and Advantages of Los Angeles City and County. Los
Angeles: Mirror Printing, Ruling, and Binding House, 1876.

Smythe, William Ellsworth. History of San Diego, 1542-1908: The Modern City. History

252
Co., 1907.

The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration. Sacramento: State
Printing Office, 1876.

Southern Pacific Company, California at the American Exposition. New Orleans: W.
Stansbury & Co., 1886.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1858. Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1859.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1859. Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1860.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1860. Sacramento:
C.T. Botts, State Printer, 1861.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1861. Sacramento:
Benj. P. Avery State Printer, 1862.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Year 1863. Sacramento:
O.M. Clayes, 1864.

Transactions of the California Agricultural Society During Years 1864 and 1865
Sacramento: O.M. Clayes, State Printer, 1866.

Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society for the Years 1866-1867.
Sacramento: O.M. Clayes, State Printer, 1868.

Transactions of California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1868 and 1869.
Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, 1870.

Transactions of the California State Agricultural Society During the Years 1870-71.
Sacramento: T.A. Springer State Printer, 1872.

Wait, Frona Eunice. Wines and Vines of California, Facsimile Edition. 1889. Reprint,
Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1973.

Wetmore, Charles A. Ampelography of California. A Discussion of Vines Now Known in
the State, Together with Comments on Their Adaptability to Certain Locations
and Uses. Reproduced and Rev. from the San Francisco Merchant of Jan. 4 and
11, 1884. San Francisco, Merchant Publishing Company, 1884.

Wetmore, Charles. Treatise on Wine Production. Appendix B to the Report of the Board
of State Viticultural Commissioners, 1893-94. Sacramento: State Office, 1894.

253
Wickson, Edward James. California Fruits and How to Grow Them. San Francisco:
Pacific Rural Press, 1919.

Williams, Henry T., ed. The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Arts and Rural Taste,
New York: Henry T. Williams, 1874.

Wilson, John Albert. History of Los Angeles County. Oakland: Thompson & West,
1880.

Comprehensive Bibliography

Alamillo, Jose M. Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and
Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2006.

Amerine, Maynard A. “An Introduction to the Pre-Repeal History of Wine.”Agricultural
History 63 (April 1969): 259-68.

___________________. “The Napa Valley Grape and Wine Industry.” Agricultural
History 49 (January 1975): 289-91.

Almaguer, Tomás. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York:
Vintage, 1993.

Camarillo, Albert. Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American
Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1979.

Carosso, Vincent. The California Wine Industry: A Study of the Formative Years.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Chan, Sucheng. This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Chávez-García, Miroslava. Negotiating Conquest Gender and Power in California, 1770s
to 1800s. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.

Chiu, Ping. Chinese Labor in California, 1850-1880. Madison: The Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1963.

Deutsch, Sarah. No separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic

254
Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.

Deverell, William. A Companion to the American West. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, Ltd., 2004.

_______________. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of
its Mexican Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Deverell, William Francis, and Greg Hise. Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History
of Metropolitan Los Angeles. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton
Culture. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997.

Fredericksen, Paul. The Authentic Haraszthy Story: An Historical Research Project by
Wine Institute for Wine Advisory Board. San Francisco: 1947.

Fuller, Robert C. Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking in the United
States. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.

Garcia, Matt. A World of its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los
Angeles, 1900-1970. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Geraci, Victor W. “The Family Wine-Farm: Vintibusiness Style.” Agricultural History
74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 419-32.

Gibson, Wayne Dell. Tomas Yorba’s Santa Ana Viejo, 1769-1847. Santa Ana: Santa Ana
College Foundation Press, Rancho Santiago Community College District, 1976.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001.

Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire.
Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican
National Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the
Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Gutiérrez, Ramón A., Richard J. Orsi, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Contested Eden:
California before the Gold Rush. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Guttadauro, Guy J. and University of California, Davis, and United States. A List of

255
Reference for the History of Grapes, Wines, And raisins in America. Davis:
Agricultural History Center, University of California, Davis, 1976.

Haas, Lisbeth. Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.

Hackel, Steven W. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish
Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850. Chapel Hill: Published for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg,
Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In “Race,” Culture, and Difference, edited by James
Donald and Ali Rattansi, 252-260. London: Sage Publications, 1992.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture
in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Heidenreich, Linda. This Land was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from
Northern California. Austin: University of Texas Pres, 2007.

Heintz, William F. “The Role of Chinese labor in Viticulture and Winemaking in
Nineteenth Century California.” Master’s Thesis, California State University
Sonoma, 1977.

_______________. Wine Country An History of Napa Valley, The Early Years: 1838-
1920. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1990.

Hine, Robert V. and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive
History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Hsu, Madeline Yuan-yin. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and
Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000.

Hofner, James D. “Cucamonga Wines and Vines: A History of the Cucamonga Pioneer
Vineyard Association.” Master’s Thesis, Claremont University, 1983.

Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mothers to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism,
and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia,
1880-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign
Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang,
2000.

Johannsen, Robert Walter. To the Halls of the Montezuma: The Mexican War in the

256
American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: the Social World of the California Gold Rush. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Kraut, Alan. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace.” Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-
1898. 35th ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Lee, Erika. At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-
1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Limerick, Patricia Limerick. The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken Past of the
American West. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987.

Love, Eric. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Lukacs, Paul. American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2000.

McArthur, Mildred Yorba. Anaheim: “The Mother Colony.” Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie
Press, 1959.

McConnell, Joseph A., Jr. “The Stanford Vina Ranch.” M.A. thesis, Stanford
University, 1961.

McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Santa Barbara:
Peregrine Smith, 1979.

________________. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in
California. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1939.

Meers, John. “The California Wine and Grape Industry and Prohibition.” California
Historical Quarterly 46 (1967): 19-32.

Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

257

____________. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the
Historical Power of Racial Scripts, 2014.

Mollno, Linda Frances. "Immigrant Dreams: A Social History of Viticulture in Southern
California, 1769-1960." Doctoral Dissertation, Claremont Graduate University,
2008.

Muscatine, Doris, Maynard A. Amerine, and Bob Thompson, eds. The University of
California/Sotheby Book of California Wine. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Ornstein, Dara. “Void for Vagueness: Mexicans and the Collapse of Miscegenation Law
in California.” Pacific Historical Review. 74 (2005): 367-407.

Ostrander, Gilman M. The Prohibition Movement in California, 1848-1933. Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1957.

Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British
Columbia, 1849-1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Penninou, Ernest. The History of the Sonoma Viticultural District: The Grape Growers,
the Wine Makers and the Vineyards, Volume I. Santa Rosa: Nomis Press, 1998.

______________. A Directory of California Wine Growers and Wine Makers in 1860.
Berkeley: Tamaulipas Press, 1967.

______________. Leland Stanford’s Great Vina Ranch, 1881-1919. San Francisco: Yolo
Hills Viticultural Society, 1991.

Penninou, Ernest and Gail G. Unzelman. The California Wine Association and its
Member Wineries, 1894-1920. Santa Rosa: Nomis Press, 2000.

Phillips, George Harwood. Vineyards & Vaqueros : Indian Labor and the Economic
Expansion of Southern California, 1771-1877 /. Norman, Oklahoma: Arthur H.
Clark Co., 2010.

Perry, Adele. On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British
Columbia, 1849-1871. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Pinney, Thomas. A History of Wine in America From the Beginnings to Prohibition,2
nd

Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

258
_____________. The Makers of American Wine: A Record of Two Hundred Years.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Leonard J. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking
Californians, 1846-1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Robbins, Williams G. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the
American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class. London; New York: Verso, 1991.

Roske, Ralph J. Everyman’s Eden: A History of California. New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1968.

Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in
Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Sánchez, Rosaura. Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonies. University of
Minnesota Press, 1995.

Salyer, Lucy E. Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern
Immigration Law. Chapel Hill: University North Carolina, 1995.

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973.

Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Stephenson, Terry E. Don Bernardo Yorba. Los Angeles: G. Dawson, 1941.

Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in
Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

___________. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.

Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California
Farmworkers, 1769-1913. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.

259

Sullivan, Charles L. A Companion to California Wine: An Encyclopedia of Wine and
Winemaking from the Mission Period to the Present. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.

_______________. Napa Wine: A History from Mission Days to Present, 2nd. Edition.
South San Francisco, 2008.

_______________. “A Viticultural Mystery Solved.” California History 57 (Summer
1978): 114-29.

Vaught, David. After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

___________. Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-
1920. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Webb, Edith Buckland. Indian Life at the Old Missions. Los Angeles: Warren F.
Lewis, Publisher, 1952.

Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under
Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

_____________. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994.

Weber, Devra. Dark Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New
Deal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American
West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

PDF

Liberalizing belonging: race, service, and the making of the postindustrial San Fernando Valley

PDF

Oilmen and cactus rustlers: metropolis, empire, and revolution in the Los Angeles Mexico borderlands, 1890-1940

PDF

Representational conquest: tourism, display, and public memory in “America’s finest city”

PDF

Creating cities and citizens: municipal boundaries, place entrepreneurs, and the production of race in Los Angeles county, 1926-1978

PDF

A community on the air: Latino Los Angeles and the rise of Spanish-language TV in the United States, 1960-1990

PDF

A place in the sun: Mexican Americans, race, and the suburbanization of Los Angeles, 1940-1980

PDF

Making transborder Los Angeles: Japanese and Mexican immigration, agriculture, and labor relations, 1924-1942

PDF

Nature, nurture, nation: race and childhood in transatlantic American discourses of slavery

PDF

Managing marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: the struggle over policing and social control in Los Angeles, 1965-1992

PDF

The people's book: making, selling, and reading reference works in nineteenth-century America

PDF

Urbane bouquets: a floricultural history of California, 1848 to 1915

PDF

The progressive dilemma: grassroots liberals, the Democratic Party, and the search for political power in mid-twentieth century America

PDF

Good hosts as ideal citizens: crafting identity on Isla de Mujeres

PDF

Producing heritage, remaking immigration: American cultural policies, 1950-2003

PDF

Religion of a different color: Vietnamese Catholic and Caodai U.S.-Cambodia ties in comparative perspective

PDF

Translating race, class, and immigrant lives: the family work of children language brokers

PDF

Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

PDF

Worthy of care? Medical inclusion from the Watts riots to the building of King-Drew, prisons, and Skid row, 1965-1986

PDF

Exposing humanity: slavery, antislavery, and early photography in America, 1839-1865

Asset Metadata

Creator Ornelas-Higdon, Julia (author)

Core Title A cultivating enterprise: wine, race, and conquest in California, 1769-1920

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 07/15/2016

Defense Date 05/01/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Agriculture,Chinese,conquest,Grapes,Horticulture,Imperialism,Labor,Mexican California,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,Spanish Empire,the West,Viticulture,Wine

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sanchez, George J. (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Halttunen, Karen (committee member), Hoskins, Janet A. (committee member)

Creator Email julia.ornelas@gmail.com,jyornela@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-442596

Unique identifier UC11286971

Identifier etd-OrnelasHig-2690.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-442596 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OrnelasHig-2690.pdf

Dmrecord 442596

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Ornelas-Higdon, Julia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA