Hermann Jaeger (1844-1895), a native of Switzerland, was a grandson of the famous pedagogue and school reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and learned the profession of a gardener. He emigrated to America as a young man and settled east of Neosho (Missouri) in 1865. Together with his brother John he cultivated grapes there. Subsequently, he was active as a breeder of grape varieties, regularly writing articles for magazines and exchanging information with European grape experts. For this purpose, he preferred to make selections of wild vines of the Vitis lincecumii species from the Ozarks area in Missouri. Jaeger experimented with crosses of other American species such as Vitis aestivalis and the phylloxera-resistant Vitis rupestris.