The reports of this success had penetrated into all parts of Missouri where German was spoken at that time, and even visitors from St.
“As we arrived there towards evening a six-pounder thundered its greeting and welcome over the hills and valleys. One early historian recorded his pilgrimage: Hermann held its first Weinfest in the fall of 1848, a tradition that continues in today’s Octoberfest celebrations. Husmann, who was recognized by the French government, later moved from Hermann to California, where he became a founding father of the Napa Valley wine industry. One depicts a young woman cradling an old woman in her arms-the New World saving the Old World. In commemoration of the event, two statutes were erected in Monpellier, France. Missouri grape growers shipped 17 carloads of phylloxera-resistant root stock to France. Husmann’s research proved invaluable in the 1860s when the vineyards of southern France were devastated by phylloxera, a bug blight spread by aphids. Some of his vines still thrive today at OakGlenn Winery. Husmann studied soil types and crossed wild and cultivated grapes to create hybrids that could tolerate Missouri’s hot, humid summers and freezing winters. The quality of the wines improved dramatically in the 1840s, thanks to the introduction of the first cultivated grape varieties-Isabella, Virginia Seedling, Catawba and Delaware-and the work of George Husmann, a self-taught scientist whose father had purchased a Hermann lot while the family was still living in Germany. Home wine cellars were common, and wine halls were a favorite Sunday gathering place where families socialized after church. The only condition was that the lot had to be planted in grapes.Ī total of 600 grape lots eventually were sold-the entire town was growing grapes, building wine cellars and making wine. Town fathers nurtured the infant wine industry by selling “grape lots,” vacant city lots a settler could buy or $50, interest free, over a five-year period. Inspired by the tangles of wild vines that covered the craggy hillsides, the resourceful Germans planted grapes and began making wine.
Instead, they stepped off the last steamboat of the season into a howling wilderness. In 1837 a band of German settlers from Philadelphia arrived at the site of their new colony expecting a land of milk and honey. Photo courtesy of the Edward Kemper Collection, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, MO. Thousands of acres of vineyards once covered the hills in and around Hermann.