Canton Weekly Register

A Huge Grape Vine. One of the celebrities of California is the immense grape vine now growing at the Monticito, near Santa Barbara. A woman planted it some seventy years ago from a slip she obtained in Monterey county for a horse-whip, and after using it for that purpose she thought she would transplant it. This was in 1796. She hardly expected it would live, but to her surprise it took root and began to bud and leaf, and from careful attention, before she died, it was made to produce more than any known vine in all America, North or South. Between 1850 and 1860 it had been trailed over some eighty feet in circumference, with a trunk of twelve inches diameter, rising clean fifteen feet from the ground. Some years it has borne over 6,000 bunches of ripe and sound grapes, or close on to 8,000 pounds, and became the wonder of every resident or sojourner in that part of California. And what is more, for the last thirty years it has principally maintained the old woman and her numerous family.