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Edward Antill (17 June 1701-15 August 1770) was a colonial plantation owner, attorney, and early politician in New Jersey colony. His early work in cultivating grapes and producing wine received an award of the Royal Society of Arts and makes him among the earliest winemakers in Britain’s North American colonies.
Biography
Antill was born on 17 June 1701 in New York City and was the son of attorney Edward Antill (. His father died when Edward was young and he would be raised by the pirate Giles Shelley (d. 1710). Shelley had been one of his father's clients, and the elder Edward had saved Shelley from execution for piracy. His father had left young Edward large tracts of land at Piscataqua (now Piscataway Township, near New Brunswick, in Middlesex County, New Jersey. When Shelley died, Edward Antill inherited a large portion of his estate.[1]
On 2 December 1767, the Royal Society of Arts awarded Antill a £200 prize that had been pending since 1758 challenging colonial landowners in North America to plant of vineyards and produce quality wine. The Society sought to award the first colonist who planted 500 vines of Vitus vinifera grapes and from them produced "five tuns of red or white wine of acceptable quality" that equalled "those Sorts of Wines now consumed in Great Britain." Antill had advised the society that he had planted 800 vines of Madeira, Burgundy and Frontenac grapes as well as a few "Sweet-water Grape vines, and of the best sort of the Native Vines of America by way of tryal."[2]
In the last years of his life, Antill prepared an 80-page tracted entitled "An Essay on the cultivation of the Vine, and the making and preserving of Wine, suited to the different Climates in North-America" which was published a year after his death in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. It was a "how-to" guide with the intention of disseminating to other colonial farmers the knowledge he had gained about cultivating grapes and producing wine.[3]
Works
- 1771: "An Essay on the cultivation of the Vine, and the making and preserving of Wine, suited to the different Climates in North-America" (published posthumously) in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
See also
References
- ^ Will of Giles Shelley, filed 19 February 1710, in Abstracts of Wills on File in the Surrogate’s Office, City of New York, Volume 2, 1708-1728. in Collections of the New York Historical Society (Volume 26). (New York: New York Historical Society, 1894).
- ^ McCormick, Richard P. "The Royal Society, The Grape and New Jersey" in Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, Volume LXXXI, Number 2, (April 1953); and later in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (January 1962).
- ^ Burt, Daniel S. The Chronology of American Literature: America's Literary Achievements from the Colonial Era to Modern Times. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 71.