Concord GrapeCONCORD

The most popular American bred grape of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Concord premiered at the 1853 exhibition of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, an introduction by Ephraim Wales Bull.  Bull believed it to have been a cross between the Native Vitis labrusca and a Catawba grape.  Its popularity arose from its adaptability to a multitude of growing conditions in different geographic areas.  It grew vigorously, produced abundantly, tolerated heat and cold equally, and enticed buyers with its appearance on produce stands readily. This despite the fact that it was rather sweet, prone to cracking, and had a penchant for rotting after picking.  By the 1880s more Concord grapes were grown and sold than any other grape in the United States--so many bunches that a generation who grew up consuming Concord grape jelly and drinking Concord grape juice came to think of it as THE taste of grapes. The commercial production of juice began in New Jersey circa 1870; large scale jelly production commenced with the turn of the twentieth century. In some parts of the South, east Tennessee and parts of Piedmont Virginia, conditions made the Concord super sweet, indeed so sweet that persons familiar with the New England Concord tasting these southern grapes could scarcely recognize them as belonging to the same family.  

In an 1854 letter, Bull described the grape thusly:  "The grape is large, frequently an inch in diameter, and the bunches handsome, shouldered, and sometimes weigh a pound.  In color it is a ruddy black, covered with a dense blue bloom, the skin very thin, the juice abundant, with a sweet aromatic flavor, and it has very little pulp" ["The Concord Grape," New England Farmer (April 1854), 162.]

Nearly every commercial nursery in the South that carried grape varieties offered the Concord in its stock.  It was grown from seed as well as cuttings.  

Image:  U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705, Royal Steadman, 1934.

David S. Shields