William Hotopp and William Ward Minor: Post-Civil War Pioneers of the Grape

Wine production in America, scarcely a million gallons in 1850, reached about 50 million gallons, in good years, by century’s end. Central Virginia shared in this growth. The post Civil War agricultural challenge was to find productive ways of using the land. Local farmers were obliged to do so, while outsiders came here with speculative opportunities in mind.

Among the most important figures in local winemaking, in the decades after the war, were William and Henry Hotopp, wealthy New Jersey industrialists whose Middle Atlantic survey persuaded them to plant vineyards in the Piedmont, and the local Minor family, who turned to vineyard production on their own lands and later helped establish the Monticello Wine Company.

After fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War, William Wardlaw Minor II returned to his father’s estate at “Windieknowe” and started his first vineyard on Rich Mountain a mile away (with Mr. Hotopp across the river at Pen Park to give him advice.)

The Minor family and their kin lived on adjoining estates along the forks and both sides of the Rivanna River. They shared equipment and labor as they cooperated in the grape-growing venture.

Many of the African Americans who had served as W. W. Minor’s father’s slaves were still in the neighborhood after the war. Minor used two of them, Isaac Ross and Tom Flannagan, to do most of his specialized vineyard work. Minor’s sister, who lived at the adjoining Key West estate, remembered, “We girls were not allowed to go about with any of the “hands” except Tom and “Uncle Isaac,” the family’s most trusted and loyal “hands.”

W.W. Minor wrote in Sept of 1879, “I lent Albert Holliday my wagon and barrels today to haul his Nortons to the wine cellar. They are the finest sent there.” Holliday’s house at Eastham on the Stony Point Road is shown below.

“In the late summer the grapes were gathered and though most of these were carelessly thrown in barrels and carried to town to the wine cellar, some fancy varieties were carefully packed for shipment to the northern markets. All of the family helped in this packing and it seemed like a protracted picnic to me, for the packing house was about a mile from our house and we often did not go home for dinner,” wrote Minor’s cousin of Key West.

Minor found his rough and infertile rocky lands ideal for grape growing as the agricultural journals had predicted. Keeping a diary of his grape-growing venture for almost 50 years, Minor survived the economic downturns of the grape market by continuing to raise other crops and by his part-time legal practice.

Windieknowe

19th Century wine press

William Wardlaw Minor II in his 80s

Minor estates (map detail)

Minor family in 1899. W. W. in back row, third from left.