In 1817, an installment of one hundred and fifty French settlers left Philadelphia taking with them an assortment of grape and olive plants. December 12, 1821, Charles Villars, one of the company, reported to the American government[29] that there were then in the colony eighty-one actual planters, 327 persons all told, with 1100 acres in full cultivation, including 10,000 vines and that the company had spent about $160,000 in the venture. Villars tells in full of the ups and downs of the Society. It was apparent from the start that the olive could not be grown. The history of the vineyards on the Tombigbee, as he tells it, is but a record of misfortune. All efforts to cultivate the foreign vines resulted only in failure. The few vines that the vintners made grow yielded a scant crop of miserable quality which could not be made into wine because of ripening in the heat of summer. The land was not adapted to growing grapes. The Society, meeting failure at every turn, finally disbanded and the colonists were scattered. For a half century after, there were records in the southern agricultural literature of the attempts of stragglers or descendants of this colony to grow European grapes in the South. Yet these grapes are not now cultivated in this region, which seemingly has the climate and the soil of France. The history of these French settlers on the Tombigbee is a most pathetic one.[30] Many of the leaders had been officers of high rank in Napoleon's armies unaccustomed to field work and the hardships of a new country. Here, in a rough and hardly explored country, part of which was overflowed half of the year, visited by all the sicknesses inherent to such a location, they passed several years in their attempts to grow European grapes. Failure was predestined because of natural obstacles which by this time were apparent, and was foreshadowed by so many previous unsuccessful attempts that it would seem that this culminating tragedy in growing European grapes could have been prevented. The certain failure of the attempt makes all the more pathetic the story of the Vine and Olive Colony on the Tombigbee.[31] In closing the record of the Old World grape in America a few of the later individual attempts to grow this grape must be recounted.