Wealthy New Jersey landowners began to produce wines during the colonial period. In 1767, two men, Edward Antill and William Alexander, Lord Stirling received recognition for their successful efforts to cultivate grapes and produce wine on their plantations from the Royal Society of Arts in London. The Society had challenged colonists in Britain's North American colonies to cultivate grapes and produce "those Sorts of Wines now consumed in Great Britain." While the cultivation of grapes and fruit trees supported a flourishing wine industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the effects of Prohibition (1919-1933) and a legacy of restrictive laws constraining the industry's recovery subsequent to its repeal, practically devastated the industry. For fifty years after the repeal of Prohibition, New Jersey was limited by law to a ratio of one winery license for every 1,000,000 state residents, which by 1980 effectively allowed for only seven wineries. The growth of the state's winery industry has been bolstered by the repeal, starting in 1981, with the New Jersey Farm Winery Act, of many Prohibition-era laws and allowed many small growers to open new wineries.