The Concord Grape Association - The History of Concord Grapes

The History of Concord Grapes

The Concord Grape
-- A Native American

The grape for the millions
-- Horace Greeley

A large dark-blue grape native to North America.
-- Webster

A variety of grape having purple-black fruit with a bluish bloom, used for making jelly, juice and wine.
-- American Heritage Cook Book

FROM SEEDS: Although commercial grape production dates back to the year 1000 B.C., it was not until 1854 that the Concord variety made its debut, appropriately named after the Massachusetts village of Concord where the first of its variety was grown. The Concord grape is a robust and aromatic grape whose ancestors were wild native species found growing in the rugged New England soil.

Experimenting with seeds from some of the native species, Boston-born Ephraim Wales Bull developed the Concord grape in 1849. On his farm outside Concord, down the road from the Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Alcott homesteads, he planted some 22,000 seedlings in all, before he had produced the ideal grape. Early ripening, to escape the killing northern frosts, but with a rich, full-bodied flavor, the hardy Concord grape thrives where European cuttings had failed to survive. In 1853, Mr. Bull felt ready to put the first bunches of his Concord grapes before the public -- and won first prize at the Boston horticultural Society exhibition. From these early arbors, fame of Mr. Bull’s (“the father of the Concord grape”) Concord grape spread world-wide, bringing him up to $1,000 a cutting, but he died a relatively poor man. The inscription on his tombstone states, “He sowed--others reaped.” Click here to see the first Concord grape vine grown by Mr. Bull.

TO JUICE: The first unfermented grape juice known to be processed in the United States was by a Vineland, New Jersey dentist, Dr. Thomas Welch in 1869. Dr. Welch, his wife and 17-year old son, Charles, gathered 40 pounds of Concord grapes from the trellis in front of their house. In their kitchen, they cooked the grapes for a few minutes, squeezed the juice out through cloth bags, and poured the world’s first processed fresh fruit juice into twelve quart bottles on the kitchen table.

To preserve the juice, Dr. Welch stoppered the bottles with cork and wax and boiled them in water hoping to kill any yeast in the juice to prevent fermentation. Dr. Welch’s process was a success, and his application of Louis Pasteur’s theory of pasteurization to preserve fresh grape juice pioneered the industry of canned and bottled fruit juices in America. This first juice was used on the Communion table in the local Methodist church for sacramental purposes, and most of the first orders for grape juice came from churches for Communion.

Charles Welch transferred the juice operations to Watkins Glen, New York in 1896, and the following year to Westfield, New York. He processed 300 tons of grapes in 1897.

In the century following the introduction of Concord grapes, more of these blue-black slip-skin grapes were sold than all other species combined. Today, growers harvest more than 336,000 tons in the U.S. Washington grows the largest number, followed by New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.