pumpkin: the curious history of an american icon

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William Cronon, Editor

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with

natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek tocast new light on the ways that natural systems aect human communi-

ties, the ways that people aect the environments of which they are a part,

and the ways that dierent cultural conceptions of nature profoundly

shape our sense of the world around us. A complete list of the books in

the series appears at the end of this book.


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The Curious History of an American Icon

Seattle and London


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Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon is published with the

assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation,

members of the Weyerhaeuser family, and Janet and Jack Creighton.

2012 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Design by Thomas Eykemans

Composed in Sorts Mill Goudy, courtesy The League of Moveable Type

Display type set in Poplar, designed by Barbara Lind

16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,

recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

University of Washington Press

Box 50096, Seattle, 98145,

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ott, Cindy.

Pumpkin : the curious history of an American icon / Cindy Ott. 1st ed.

p. cm.(Weyerhaeuser environmental books)

978-0-295-99195-5 (hardback)

1. PumpkinHistory.

2. Cooking (Pumpkin)United StatesHistory.

3. Pumpkin growersUnited StatesHistory.

. Title.

3 47.8 8 20 12 641.5dc23 2012011199

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39. 48 -19 84 .


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Foreword: Not by Bread Alone, by William Cronon vii

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 3

1 , , 9

10,000 BCEto 1600

2 32

From Pumpkin Beer to Pumpkin Pie, 1600 to 1799

3 57

The Making of a Rural New England Icon, 1800 to 1860

4 85

The Pumpkin and the Nation, 1861 to 1899

5 -- 112

Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins, 1900 to 1945

6 -- 139

The Changing Nature of Pumpkins, 1946 to the Present

7 165

The Changing Nature of American Rural Economies,

1946 to the Present

Notes 199

Bibliography 269

Index 309


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William Cronon

T

familiar times, places, people, and things in ways that help us see the

past and even the world today with entirely new eyes. Edmund Mor-

gans classic American Slavery, American Freedomdirected our attention to

the paradox that the Declaration of Independencewhich has served as

a symbolic beacon of freedom and democracy from the moment Thomas

Jeerson rst drafted itwas in large measure the creation of wealthy Vir-

ginians whose lives were utterly dependent on the profoundly unfree andundemocratic institution of slavery. In Morgans hands, this surprising

fact became a means for understanding not just the American Revolution,

but the contradictions of race and class that have bedeviled the United

States since before its founding. In a very dierent but no less revelatory

way, Dava Sobels little volume on Longitudeasked readers to take a closer

look at the north-south east-west lines we see every time we encounter a

map or a globe in an eort to help us recognize the practical and mathe-

matical challenges those lines have historically posed for navigation. From

that small beginning, she tells an unforgettable tale about mariners on the

high seas who found it nearly impossible to determine their east-west posi-

tion until an eighteenth-century English inventor nally devised a clock

that didnt lose time even after many weeks at sea. The world we inhabit is

lled with things like these that we typically take utterly for granted. Only

when we ask how they came to beonly when we inquire about their his-

toriesdo we recognize how strange and wondrous they truly are.In the book you now hold in your hands, Cindy Ott performs just such

a minor historical miracle with a plant youve probably known your entire


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celebration that has ever since been ritually reenacted on the fourth

Thursday in November. Unfortunately, what we all know turns out to

be wrong in most of its particulars. Harvest celebrations like this one have

ancient antecedents on both sides of the Atlantic, so this kind of gather-

ing hardly originated at Plymouth. Furthermore, the idea of a special meal

for the purpose of giving thanks emerged during the sixteenth century as

a feature of the English Reformation, in which Days of Feasting and Days

of Thanksgiving were meant to honor special acts of divine providence

and also to replace what Protestants saw as the too-frequent celebrations

that typied the ritual calendar of the Catholic Church.

As for the Pilgrims, we have no idea of the date on which they held

their feast, only that it took place sometime during the autumn of 1621.Thanksgiving celebrations began to be a regular feature of the New Eng-

land calendar later in the seventeenth century, but not on any predictable

date. By the early nineteenth century, dierent states chose dierent dates

for these feasts, and not until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, did Abra-

ham Lincoln regularize the holiday as the nal Thursday in Novembera

date that in 1941 Congress redened as the fourthThursday in November

to anticipate those rare occasions when the month contains ve Thurs-

days. (Canada celebrates its own version of Thanksgivingwhich obvi-

ously has nothing to do with the Pilgrimson the second Monday in

October, though that particular date wasnt nally resolved until 1957.)

Just as it took quite a while for Thanksgiving to migrate to its present

place on the U.S. national calendar, so too did pumpkins take rather more

time than we might imagine to nd their way onto Thanksgiving menus.

There are only two documents from Plymouth that make any mention

at all of that rst Thanksgiving celebration, and neither of them says a

word about pumpkins. Although the pumpkin itself originated in the

western hemisphere, it had made its way to Europe within three decades

of Columbuss rst voyagea full century before the Pilgrims landed in

Massachusettsand its distinctive appearance had already been depicted

on a fresco in Rome by 1518. Ott notes that, much like the early Ameri-

can colonists, Europeans were quicker to recognize the visual appeal of

this vegetable than they were its culinary possibilities, and her playful

discussions of the diverse and changing roles pumpkins have played inEuropean and American art are among the unexpected treats readers will

discover in this book.


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Today, American farmers grow more than a billion pounds of pump-

kin worth more than a hundred million dollars each year. Since so much

of that crop is devoted to the ritual celebrations associated with just

two national holidays, it would be hard to nd more striking proof that

culture is just as important as ecology or economics if we truly wish to

understand changing human relationships with the natural environment.

In their very dierent ways, both the jack-o-lantern and the pumpkin pie

serve in the modern United States as symbols of the pastoral harvest, of

food that, despite all the industrialization and technological manipula-

tion it has endured, still has deep roots in the farm elds to which so many

American families make pilgrimages when they purchase pumpkins each

October. The desire to sustain such rituals has equally deep roots inAmerican popular culture. This outsized orange vegetable is now a sym-

bol of Americas rural pasteven if what we believe it says about that past

has as much to do with myth as with history. Pumpkin: The Curious History

of an American Iconshows how a plant that we ignore for most of the year

is all the more important to the popular culture of the United States and

to the imaginations of its citizens precisely because we pay attention to it

so occasionally. By reencountering it at harvest time, we remind ourselves

of where we come fromthough, as Cindy Ott so playfully reveals, thestory of where we come from, like that of the pumpkin itself, is a good deal

more complicated than we think.

pumpkin: the curious history of an american icon

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