1880-1904

Vines yield grape expectations

Cotton wasn't the only crop to prosper in the sandy soils of Cumberland County after the Civil War. Grape growing and winemaking were big business, starting before the war and reaching a peak in the 1890s.

Nowhere did the grape business reach higher on the vine than at Tokay.

Tokay - decades before it would become a neighborhood lined with streets and houses off Ramsey Street - was the name of a 100-acre vineyard a few miles north of Fayetteville.

An 1889 special edition of The Fayetteville Observer hailed it as "the most extensive vineyard in the South or indeed at any place this side of the Rocky Mountains."

Col. Wharton J. Green bought the property for $10,000, enlarged the vineyard and operated it until his death in 1910.

The scuppernong grape was predominant, at Tokay and elsewhere in the South. Other Cumberland County vineyards in operation during this time included Happy Valley, north of town on Raleigh Road, and Bordeaux - future site of another big development - southwest of town off Raeford Road.

According to an 1896 report, Cumberland County produced about 100,000 gallons of wine annually, with about 400 acres of land devoted to growing grapes.

According to the 1889 newspaper account: "The wines as prepared at the Tokay cellars are the Dry Red and Dry White, and Sweet Red and Sweet White, and are so denominated." As for their quality: "Their purity and excellence is beyond all question, and have been greatly extolled by those qualified to judge."

Green

Wharton Green had high hopes for his enterprise.

"Col. Green, the genial, affable and warm-hearted proprietor, is an enthusiast in his vocation, both on moral and economic grounds," the Observer reported, "and his highest ambition seems to be that he may hereafter be the accredited pioneer of an industry which he is sanguine is destined at an early day to be the leading one of his State."

But it was not to be.

Prohibition eventually put a cork in the operations at Tokay, Bordeaux and other vineyards.