A merchant's son with dirt under his fingernails
Salem, Massachusetts, in 1824 was a city that smelled of the sea. Essex Street, where Edward Staniford Rogers was born that year, ran straight toward the harbor wharves, and the families living along it had mostly made their money in ships and trade. The Rogers family was no exception: prosperous, mercantile, the kind of household where a son could expect to spend his working life with ledgers and cargo manifests. For a while, that is exactly what Rogers did.
But he had a garden behind the house at 376 Essex Street, half an acre wedged between old apple trees, pear trees, currant bushes, and what one visitor described as flax and everything else mingled in together. It was not a promising plot. The soil was cold, matted, and had been in cultivation for a century and a half. Rogers grew grapes on it anyway, and somewhere in the middle of tending that unpromising ground, he started to wonder what might happen if he crossed one species with another.
The summer of 1851
In the summer of 1851, Rogers set to work with a plan that was simple in conception and fiddly in practice. He chose as his seed parent a local selection called Carter, also known as Mammoth Globe, a pistillate, self-sterile variety that was one of the hardier things he could find growing nearby and which itself likely carried some Vitis vinifera ancestry. For pollen he turned to two European Vitis vinifera varieties, Black Hamburg and White Frontignan, grown in a nearby greenhouse owned by his neighbor, Captain John Turner. Because Carter bore only functionally female flowers, no emasculation was required; he simply applied the pollen by hand and covered the blossoms with small cotton bags to prevent stray fertilization.
From all that careful work, he collected about 150 seeds. He planted them in the fall. The following spring most germinated, but cutworms and general garden attrition whittled the survivors down to 45 vines. He grew them on poles for three years, then transplanted 25 of them to give the others room to breathe. The untransplanted ones started bearing fruit in 1856. He numbered each vine, one to forty-five, though later distribution of cuttings would introduce some confusion and duplication in numbering, and waited to see what he had.
A lame man in a half-acre lot
Marshall Pinckney Wilder of the American Pomological Society came to look at the garden at some point during those years, and what he saw clearly impressed him despite its modesty. "How much can be done with little," Wilder wrote, "is illustrated by the fact that all [of his grapes] were produced by a lame man in a half-acre city lot 150 years in cultivation." The detail about Rogers being lame appears in Wilder's account and is not elaborated on elsewhere; whatever the physical difficulty was, it did not slow the work.
Rogers had no room to trial his 45 vines at any useful scale, so he did the next best thing. In 1858 and 1859, he sent cuttings to growers and horticulturists across the region and beyond for evaluation under different soils and climates. The reports came back encouraging. The hybrids were vigorous. They resisted disease better than their European parents. In 1859, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society awarded Rogers a silver medal for his work, bringing wider attention to what had begun as a private experiment. Rogers wrote with visible satisfaction that the vines were "even more vigorous than the parents, and more exempt from diseases, and more hardy than most out-door varieties."
Out of the shipping trade
When his father died in 1858, Rogers left the family shipping business without apparent hesitation and put his energy into horticulture and real estate investments in Rockport. It is worth understanding what he was actually trying to build. European Vitis vinifera varieties failed consistently in the eastern United States: they could not handle the winters, the humidity, or the fungal diseases. Native American varieties like Concord were hardy enough but produced fruit with what polite horticulturists called a foxy flavor, the distinctive musky quality of V. labrusca that European palates found off-putting. Rogers wanted something in between: the hardiness and productivity of American stock, the more refined flavor of the European vine, ripening before the first fall frost, with large berries and improved texture.
He had articulated this goal himself from the beginning. When he started experimenting he had, he said, "no knowledge of any one who had raised grapes by this process," though in fact interspecific hybridization had already been attempted in both Europe and America. Articles in horticultural journals helped shape his thinking, but he was working largely without a clear model, developing a practical method of controlled crossing and selection as he went.
Naming the numbered
Rogers introduced his hybrids to the public gradually. One, Salem (Rogers’ No. 3), was named in 1867, and in the following years twelve more received names. Agawam, Massasoit, Salem, Essex, and Merrimac honored the region and its history. Barry, Lindley, Gaertner, Wilder, and others recognized horticulturists he admired. And Goethe, a pale greenish-amber grape, bore the name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In total, thirteen of the original seedlings were formally named as cultivars, though nursery catalogs and later records sometimes expanded or rearranged the numbering system, leading to references to a larger set of selections. The American Pomological Society promoted the named varieties through its Catalogue of Fruits, and from Boston the Rogers hybrids began spreading across the United States, Canada, and into other regions. Their influence extended well beyond their initial area of distribution.
A golden moment, then a long decline
The reception when the varieties went public was, by the standards of nineteenth-century horticulture, euphoric. Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick, writing in 1908, noted that when Rogers released his grapes, "enthusiasm and speculation ran riot," and described the following decade as one of intense interest in grape growing in America. Contemporary catalogues praised the hybrids as productive, attractive, and of good quality, and agricultural magazines covered them extensively.
It did not last. After 1880, California grape production began undercutting eastern growers on price, fungal disease increased pressure on vineyards, and the market consolidated around a few commercially reliable varieties such as Concord, Niagara, and Delaware. Prohibition in 1920 further reduced demand for wine grapes, which had been a primary use for many of the Rogers hybrids. Most of the varieties also required cross-pollination, as many bore pistillate or imperfect flowers, though a few—including Agawam, Salem, and Goethe—had perfect flowers and could self-pollinate. For commercial growers, this variability added complication.
The Agawam exception
Agawam was the one that survived most successfully. Dark purplish-red with a lilac bloom, large-berried, and borne in medium clusters, it is a cross of Carter and Black Hamburg and possesses perfect flowers, allowing it to set fruit reliably on its own. Hedrick reported in 1908 that it was the most widely grown Rogers variety in the country. The wines it produces are aromatic and distinctive, with notes often described as Muscat-like fruit, guava, and herbal tones, and a full body. It is still cultivated today in parts of North America and appears occasionally in collections and vineyards beyond the northeastern United States.
Goethe in Brazil
The variety Goethe, derived from Carter and Black Hamburg, took a different path. A white or greenish-amber grape, it became established in the Urussanga region of Santa Catarina, Brazil, where it formed the basis of a small but enduring wine industry. Production there has grown substantially over time, with hundreds of thousands of liters of wine made annually, often as sparkling wine.
In the 1950s, a natural mutation producing lighter-colored fruit was identified and propagated as Goethe Primo, yielding wines stylistically closer to Vitis vinifera while retaining some of the aromatic qualities associated with V. labrusca. That a cross made in a cramped Salem garden in 1851 became central to a regional wine identity in southern Brazil is one of the more unexpected legacies of Rogers’s work.
What Munson saw in Rogers
Thomas Volney Munson, one of the most consequential American grape breeders of the next generation, gave Rogers a specific kind of credit. Rogers had taken, Munson said, "the first intelligent step" toward developing improved American grape varieties. The distinction lay in method. Earlier successes such as Concord arose from chance seedlings that were selected and propagated. Rogers instead chose parents deliberately, controlled pollination, and tracked his results, even if records of exact parentage for every seedling remain incomplete or uncertain.
This approach did not emerge in isolation, but Rogers’s work helped establish a practical model for systematic hybridization that others would refine and expand.
The Grapes of New York
The most thorough account of Rogers's work appears in The Grapes of New York, published in 1908 by Hedrick. The book describes each cultivar in botanical detail, traces its history, and assesses its commercial value. A portrait of Rogers serves as the frontispiece, and the volume remains a key reference.
Hedrick's account is the primary biographical source available. Rogers left few published writings, and his personal records are fragmentary. The Rogers Family Papers, held at the Peabody Essex Museum, provide important material but do not resolve every uncertainty, including questions about exact parentage in some cases. Even the commonly cited crosses reflect the best available reconstruction rather than complete documentation.
What came after
Rogers died in 1899. His varieties did not die with him. At Cornell University, the Rogers hybrid Herbert was used to breed Sheridan in 1921 and Buffalo in 1938, which contributed to later introductions including Geneva Red, Corot Noir, and Noiret. Elmer Swenson of Wisconsin used the Rogers variety Wilder in developing Marquette, now grown across cool-climate wine regions of North America. Rogers material also appeared in breeding programs in the Midwest and elsewhere, and Munson drew on it extensively.
In recent years, growers and researchers have revisited the Rogers hybrids for their potential in low-input viticulture and distinctive flavor profiles. What Rogers developed in that crowded half-acre garden in Salem proved not to be an endpoint, but an early step in a much longer story of grape breeding.