The exact origins and parentage of the Catawba grape are unclear. While most sources agree that Major John Adlum was growing the variety at his nursery in Georgetown, Washington, D.C by at least 1823, where he got the cuttings of the vine is unknown with two widowed Maryland women given attribution by different writers. Wine writer Bern Ramey and University of California, Davis viticulture professor Lloyd A. Lider credit Mrs. J. Johnston of Fredericktown, Maryland who wrote to Adlum and said while her late husband always called the grapes "Catawba", she did not know where he got the original vines from. Historian Thomas Pinney describes a similar story with Adlum receiving the cuttings in 1819 from a Mrs. Scholl of Clarksburg, Maryland whose late husband grew the grape. Again, the story goes that Mrs. Scholl told Adlum that while her husband always called the grape "Catawba", she could not recall where the vines came from. It is possible that the source of the Catawba grapes came from the Rose Hill property, in Rockville, Maryland, which was acquired early in the 19th century by Lewis and Eliza Wootton Beall, as part of Eliza's dowry from her father Richard Wootton. It is during their ownership of Rose Hill that grapes were first cultivated on their property. The remnants of these grapes are still evident in the sole surviving grapevine that runs eastward from the side of the barn towards the Rose Hill Mansion. According to J. Thomas Scharf, the presence of Catawba grapevines at Rose Hill can be traced back to the early decades of the 19th century. Cuttings of the Catawba grape, first discovered in western North Carolina around 1801, are believed to have been transported to Montgomery County before 1816, when they were left by a traveler with Jacob Scholl, an innkeeper in Clarksburg. They appeared at Rose Hill shortly thereafter when Eliza Beall obtained some cuttings from her brother Singleton Wootton, who had, in turn, gotten them from Scholl.