Grape-growing and wine-making now add a billion dollars a year to Oregon’s economy, and in histories describing the industry’s development, credit is rightly given to pioneers Richard Sommer, David Lett, Dick Erath, Dick Ponzi, and others. But sometimes lost in those histories are earlier pioneers, the ones who scrabbled across thousands of hard miles, carrying cuttings and seeds, and eventually, when they settled in Oregon’s fertile valleys, growing grapes and making wines. These were Germans, Italians, French . . . folk whose traditions for generations included making their families’ wines. One major figure in that early era was Jacksonville’s Peter Britt.

Some fortunate aficionados might connect the name with great music at Jacksonville’s annual Britt Festival, but few Oregonians—and almost no one outside of Oregon—recognize the name. That’s regrettable, because when people discover the depths of Britt’s story, he emerges as something like a hero, but with a distinctively Oregon spirit—the kind of person that we might hope to see young Oregonians admire, even emulate.

Britt, the pioneer

Peter Britt never wore a cape, had no super powers, never (far as we know) killed anybody in a shoot-out, but he certainly was brave, even daring, and also strong, enterprising, and amazingly decent.

What little we do know is largely thanks to Alan Clark Miller’s book, Photographer of a Frontier: The Photographs of Peter Britt. The Southern Oregon Historical Society (SOHS) in Medford has preserved Britt’s photo plates, journals, letters, and other records, even his furniture, though the Society, like other such organizations in Oregon, is currently struggling with a budgetary meltdown. Lack of funds unfortunately limits their ability to share Britt’s contributions with Oregonians.

The plain facts of Britt’s biography form an image of a man almost too good. He was a courageous young artist who was also a man of peace; a man of honor who was a doting father, loving husband, and generous neighbor; an enterprising businessman who was honest in his dealings and constructive with his profits; a builder, planter, grower, and a pillar of tolerance in a time of frontier bigotry and violence. In addition to Britt having been one of the most productive of pioneer photographers (he took the first photo of Crater Lake), he led, as Miller’s history summarizes, a long and valuable life: “When he retired into well-heeled respectability after the turn of the century, he had also been, by turns, miner, mule train packer, bee-keeper, financier, property magnate, government meteorologist, first vintner in the Oregon Territory, and a father of the region’s fruit industry.”

Actually, Britt might not have been the Territory’s first vintner. In The Boys Up North, historian Paul Pintarich credits Henderson Luellen with Oregon’s first planting of wine grapes, in 1847. But Britt might be credited as the region’s first commercial winemaker. Family lore has it that Britt, an acute observer of area flora and climate, discovered wild grapes growing in the valley and quickly bought vines and planted them near his cabin/studio, which he constructed above a wine cellar, by 1854.

Looking back now, Britt seems almost destined for a life fraught with risks.

Britt, the artist

The second son of Jacob Peter Britt and Dorothea Britt, Peter was born March 14, 1819, in Obstalden, Switzerland. He trained early as an artist, abandoning generations of family farming. Probably fleeing the civil and religious turmoil that resulted in the Sonderbund War (1845-48), the family emigrated in 1845 to the Swiss-German settlement in Highland, Illinois. There Britt first pursued his art in portraiture, before being taken by the nascent craft of photography, then called daguerrotypy. He served his apprenticeship, then ran his own gallery from 1847 until 1852. In 1849, cholera ravaged Midwest settlements, killing some of his friends and family. When gold was discovered in the hills and streams of California and Oregon, the young Britt was both pushed and pulled to take the Oregon Trail.

In the spring of 1852, Britt, then 33, loaded a wagon with personal baggage and 300 pounds of photographic lenses and chemicals. Three friends joined him behind the ox team for the seven-month trek across the plains and over the Rockies and Cascades, aiming for Portland and the Willamette Valley.

Britt was the acknowledged leader of the company. Not only was he the eldest, he was also tall, rangy, darkly handsome, and exuded strength and confidence. Nevertheless, his companions grew increasingly weary of wrestling with the heavy (and delicate) photo gear. At the foot of the rugged Blue Mountains, one of the company, a skilled wagon-maker named John Hug, sawed the large wagon in half, creating two two-wheeled carts. Hug loaded all of the photo equipment on one and handed Britt the reins.

Months later, when Britt finally rolled into Portland, he found too many “daguerrian artists” already established in the town. But gold had been discovered in the Rogue Valley, so he turned south, alone now on the rough pack trail opened only a few years before (1846) by the Applegate brothers and Levi Scott. The track wended down the Willamette Valley, through the Umpqua Valley’s oak- and madrone-draped hills, across three major rivers and dozens of winter-swollen creeks. He trekked over 325 miles to reach the Valley of the Rogue and the collection of dusty tents, clapboard shanties, and dug-out log cabins that filled the mining camps at Table Rock City (later Jacksonville), population 2,000, not counting Rogue Indians and Chinese. Britt arrived in the frigid November of 1852, his cameras and chemicals intact, with his oxen, a mule, a rifle, and five dollars.

Britt tried gold-panning: didn’t pan out. So he built a cabin on his claim site, set up his photo studio, turned to his art. He supplemented his income by running mule trains through the Coast Range to Crescent City, bringing back supplies for sale to miners. Later, Britt partnered with Chinese labor boss Gin Lin, buying up gold claims that white miners had abandoned as played-out. Gin applied hydraulic mining techniques to extract more gold, eventually making himself and Britt very wealthy. But fast-forward to the wines.

Britt, the vintner

Britt’s farming heritage apparently resurfaced in that beautiful valley. Not only did he plant the first pear tree in 1858 (also apple, fig, walnut, almond, Japanese persimmon, even orange and lemon), he also began planting grapes passionately, starting with cuttings from the California missions, then buying from itinerant nurserymen, even buying through the mail. A note, undated and apparently unsent, shows Britt paying two dollars for “a few cuttings of the following grape vines: Grosser Blauer, Bourchet Hybrids, Gamay, Johannisberg Riesling, Black Burgundy, Trousseau, Mataro, Gutedel, Malbeck.” Britt’s cellar records indicate that he may have experimented with more than 200 varieties.

It’s believed that Britt planted his first vineyard near his house, on a hilltop overlooking Jacksonville. He pressed his first wine in 1858; by 1866, his wine was receiving notice from local papers and passing visitors. And he began acquiring more land, planting more orchards and vineyards. He had a piece north of Jacksonville, called The Farm, and a much larger site called The Ranch. Alan Miller believed The Ranch to be land only about a mile from town, but my reading of Britt’s journal and cellar book has convinced me that The Ranch was located very near Phoenix, Oregon, about 10 miles away. There Britt had his largest vineyard, 15 acres, from which, by 1880, he was taking three tons of grapes a year. Serious about his winemaking, Britt liked the wines from his hillsides better than the wines from The Ranch, out on the flat.

In 1884, Britt ordered two 1,000-gallon redwood fermenting casks from San Francisco and, in 1887, 15 200-gallon oak barrels from the cooperage of Alfonse Lorentz. Then he installed a press house near the Britt home.

And no sooner did Britt make his wine than he began selling to neighbors. One of his earliest and steadiest customers was Catholic priest Father Xavier Blanchet, who may have influenced other dioceses up the valley; records show Britt shipping “altar wine” (usually at a discount) as far as Portland. The 1882 sales book tallies many of Britt’s regular customers and drop-in buyers, most listed by name but some just as 25-cent sales to “Little girl,” or to “bricklayers,” “drillers,” “boys.” Customers usually toted their own containers—jars, ceramic jugs, tin pails—but Britt shipped small kegs and glass demijohns to distant places; in 1892, the price of wine was 50 cents per gallon.

And the wines were very good, usually—the cellar book laments that the 1882 vintage was “of poor quality, very light in color and quite acid.” Miller’s bio reveals that one visitor enthused in West Shore magazine (1887) that “a very excellent article of grapes grows in this country, and at Mr. Britt’s place we tasted a one-year-old Claret of his own growth and manufacture, and we very much doubt if it could be surpassed in the much boasted of California vineyards.” The list of 39 exhibitors at the California State Viticultural Commission meeting of Oct. 14, 1889, notes that Britt’s Valley View label presented its “Riesling, Burger, Sauvignon Vert, Burgundy, Zinfandel.” In 1895, Britt sent to the Portland Exhibition Valley View’s “Claret, Zinfandel, Muscat, Gutedel, and Cabernet.”

Britt’s successes with wine influenced his neighbors to plant their own grapes. In Wines of America, historian Leon Adams notes that in the national wine census of 1880, Jackson County reported producing “15,000 gallons of wine and two Willamette Valley counties, Clackamas and Marion, reported producing 1,900 gallons.”

The story of Peter Britt and his wines is richer and deeper (and often more humorous) than we can tell here, but the tale is shadowed by loss. First, although Britt’s son, Emil (1862-1950), took great interest in the wines, and his daughter, Amalia (1865-1954), great interest in music, both died childless, and Britt’s line ended with them. Second, Prohibition was enacted in Oregon in 1916, four years before the national law, and Oregon’s most fervent prohibitionists not only set about to destroy extant wines (and prosecute even respected local citizens for making their family wine), they also determined to expunge from history books any record of wine in Oregon. This last only adds credit to David Lett and Richard Sommer and the other second-generation wine pioneers who defied conventional wine wisdom that Oregon was too wet, too cool, and too far north for vinifera grapes to thrive.

Dick Troon was one of the first to replant grapes in the Rogue Valley, in 1972, and he has claimed, “Someday people will say that the world’s best cabernet grapes are grown in the Applegate Valley” of the Rogue River, Oregon. If Troon proves prophetic, that will do great honor to the brave, energetic artist, farmer, and entrepreneur who made some of the region’s first wines and believed so passionately in its land and climate. By then, we hope, Peter Britt will be better remembered and honored, for his wines—and much more.

For more about Peter Britt
Photographer of a Frontier: The Photographs of Peter Britt (Interface, 1976), now regrettably out of print but available in the libraries of the Oregon Historical Society in Portland and the Southern Oregon Historical Society (SOHS) in Medford.

Oregon Historical Society
1200 SW Park Avenue, Portland
503/306-5198
ohs.org

Southern Oregon Historical Society
106 N Central Ave, Medford
773-6536
sohs.org

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