Nicholas Longworth

• Born: January 16, 1783
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: February 10, 1863
• Place of death: Cincinnati, Ohio

American vintner and real estate developer

Longworth, who established his wealth as a major player in the early years of Cincinnati’s development, later became interested in horticulture. After years of frustrating and expensive trial and error, he established the first successful domestic wineries in the United States.

Sources of wealth: Banking; real estate; agricultural products

Bequeathal of wealth: Children; charity

Early Life

Like many wealthy Americans who lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Nicholas Longworth left few reliable records of his life. He was born in New Jersey in the last year of the American Revolution. He was trained to become a shoemaker, most likely his father’s trade, and records indicate that Longworth briefly plied this trade in South Carolina. However, he was restless, aware of the opportunities for wealth available to those willing to head West. In 1804, he arrived at Cincinnati, then a small river port in a territory that had only the year before become a state. Recognizing the need for a stable income, Longworth apprenticed himself as a law clerk for Jacob Burnet, one of the wealthiest men in the city. For six months Longworth studied the law before setting up his own practice, as was the custom of the era. He married in 1807 and had five children by 1815.

First Ventures

Although a proficient lawyer, Longworth had a better understanding than most of his contemporaries of the potential for real estate development in Cincinnati, which was quickly becoming a major port city, offering critical access to the rapidly opening midcontinent and the central transportation system of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Longworth became a land agent, and for relatively small sums of money he negotiated the purchase of vast lots of open woods all around Cincinnati. By 1819, his investments allowed him to retire from law in order to manage a considerable amount of prime land.

Longworth had long been recognized in Cincinnati for his interest in horticulture. His home near the Ohio River boasted one of the most meticulously kept landscaped gardens in the new American West. However, he was more interested in fruit cultivation. After initial ventures in strawberries and raspberries, he turned his attention (and his fortune) to grapes, specifically his dream of producing a domestic table wine. What few grapes were raised in America at this time were largely used for raisins. Part of Longworth’s enthusiasm for winemaking came from his own moral objections to distilled liquor and beer, which he disdained as uncivilized. He was certainly not the first to venture into domestic winemaking, but the results, largely in Virginia, had failed. These wines proved too heavy, and the crops were susceptible to the erratic climate, infestations of vine mildews, and hordes of insects. In addition, wine struggled to find a market in the United States because of the appeal of hard liquor and beer, both much easier and far cheaper to produce.

Mature Wealth

Longworth began importing vines from European vintners because he could not find a domestic grape vine able to withstand Ohio’s difficult winters and problematic springs. He planted these vines along thousands of acres near the Ohio River, but he had little success. Given his entrepreneurial savvy, he understood that only a domestically grown grape could become the foundation of an American wine industry. In the early 1820’s, Longworth heard of a type of hardy Catawba vine, a hybrid of Lambrusco grapes that was indigenous to the piedmont regions of North Carolina, which was being cultivated in nurseries near Washington, D.C. This grape yielded a particularly sweet, light wine and peaked for harvesting in the middle of autumn, which would enable it to be grown in the Ohio climate. Longworth invested considerable capital in raising Catawba grapes, and the semisweet wine they produced brought Longworth his first success as a vintner. The local German immigrant population, pining for the wines of the Rhineland, enthusiastically embraced Longworth’s affordable wines. Because Longworth was literally the only winemaker in the region, he quickly amassed a considerable fortune.

Longworth kept notes on his plantings, and his writings became a foundation for the new science of domestic vintners. However, it was the quality of his wine that earned Longworth both national and ultimately international recognition from some of Europe’s most exclusive salons, and Ohio became known as the Rhineland of America. Longworth’s wines were even the subject of a lavish celebratory poem written by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

In 1842, when a batch of Catawba wine accidentally went through a second fermentation, thus fortifying its already high acidic content, Longworth was intrigued by the product, a sort of sparkling wine that reminded him of the champagnes of southern France. Drawing on his considerable resources, Longworth brought to Cincinnati some of the most accomplished vintners from France to advise him on the process of producing sparkling wines. The effort was expensive and time-consuming; the bottles, he recorded in his journals, exploded at the rate of thousands per week, and entire batches would be overfermented and ruined if not carefully watched. However, Longworth never abandoned his vision, and by the mid-1850’s his sparkling wines commanded a significant percentage of domestic wine sales, with more than 100,000 bottles sold annually. Longworth was now among the wealthiest industrialists in the American West. The temperance movement responded to his success and the unprecedented rise in alcohol consumption by crusading in numerous states to ban all alcohol. In 1853, Longworth used his enormous influence to defeat such a prohibition in Ohio, where opponents accused Longworth of buying the referendum’s defeat through his influence in Ohio’s large German immigrant population, his first and most loyal market.

Just before the outbreak of hostilities in the Civil War, which would significantly alter the economic conditions of the Ohio River valley, Longworth’s wineries produced 600,000 bottles of still and sparkling wine annually, more than one-third of the total amount manufactured in the now robust American wine market. The Ohio River valley at this time produced more wine than any other region in the nation, including the vineyards in the far more temperate climate of California. Vineyards could be found on thousands of acres along the Ohio River, contributing to the area’s economic boom. Longworth, with his cultured lifestyle and his hands-on interest in the agricultural business, became a template as many gentlemen growers opened similar vineyards around Cincinnati, and, like Longworth, controlled both production and distribution of their products.

However, during the Civil War the Ohio wine industry that Longworth had so meticulously built began to decline, devastated not only by the loss of the workforce to the war but also by shortsighted planting techniques, such as overplanting and a lack of field rotation strategies, and massive crop failures from vine diseases, notably black rot. Longworth himself, because of his long career in the wine business, was able to maintain his wealth. When he died in 1863, he left an estate valued at more than $10 million. With Longworth’s financial support largely gone, however, Ohio’s burgeoning wine industry simply collapsed, and it would not return to any strength for more than a century.

Legacy

On the face of it, Nicholas Longworth might be seen as leaving little significant legacy; after all, the Ohio wine industry he pioneered and into which he poured millions of dollars and devoted more than thirty years barely survived a decade after his death. However, Longworth was a visionary. Following the War of 1812, when America was wrestling to define itself as a nation against the snobbery of a European culture that dismissed the new country as rough-hewn, Longworth envisioned a wine that would help establish an American presence in an industry long associated with taste and culture. In addition, given his devotion to the hands-on work of grape production and his own cutting-edge experiments in crop maintenance, Longworth left a legacy of horticultural achievement, a testimony to how dedication, as well as financial resources, can master the finicky processes of crop production.

Bibliography

Butler, James L. Indiana Wine: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Fascinating history of the Ohio River valley wine industry that puts Longworth in a wider context of other planters who experimented, and failed, with the Catawba.

Lukacs, Paul. American Vintages: The Rise of American Wine. New York: Norton, 2005. Landmark account of the history of wine production in America. Includes detailed analysis of Longworth’s methodology and the influence of Thomas Jefferson on the Catawba wine industry. Assesses the dimensions of Longworth’s achievement as part of a wider endeavor to define America.

Sullivan, Edward J. The Taft Museum: Its History and Collections. Manchester, Vt.: Hudson Hills Press, 1995. Handsomely illustrated review of the holdings of the Taft Museum. Includes a detailed history of the Longworth family and the architectural history of the building itself. Summarizes the contribution of the Longworth family to the development of the arts in the new American West.

Volo, James, and Dorothy Denneen Volo. The Antebellum Period: American Popular Culture Through History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Places Longworth within an important historic context and includes an account of both the rise and the fall of the Ohio River valley wine industry.