The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  One gets the sense that—and again, we are talking about only the northern reaches of the pecan’s habitat—something of a free-for-all was under way in this region. The commons were experiencing an all-too-familiar tragedy, and the pecan copses were some of the most vulnerable victims. Even the wanton felling of pecan trees undertaken to avoid the bother of climbing them and whacking down the nuts (or waiting for the nuts to fall) was not a rare event—although, naturally, any claim that it was undertaken exclusively by “boys and negroes” is rightly suspicious. As late as 1912, one writer recalled “the extravagant habits of cutting out the tops at harvest time and of chopping down trees altogether in order [to] more easily obtain the nuts.” This practice, he added, happened “in many sections” of the region.10

  But not in others. In the southern regions, especially Texas, pecans thrived as native specimens despite the expansion of the cotton economy, and despite the devastation taking place farther north. Indeed, as it turned out, while encroachment upon pecan groves for cotton and cattle was common in Arkansas, Kentucky, and southern Illinois, it happened rarely—very rarely, it seems—in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. As the Arkansas Gazette article went on to report, “The pecan tree is indigenous to our climate and soil” and had the potential to “be made a source of much gain to our people as it is already to those of Texas.”11 Taking note of the wild pecan’s secure purchase in Texas in 1892, the writer Walter Bigelow Stevens was duly impressed with the extensive and continued prevalence of wild groves. “Every water course,” he explained, “has its fringe” of pecans. This was not happening in northern regions where the pecan grew wild, but the fact that pecan diversity was being purposely preserved in Texas and adjoining regions was quite important for the future history of this tree’s remarkable genetic variance.12

  Further evidence that pecan trees and Texas cotton peacefully coexisted comes from a typical 1889 account in the Dallas Morning News. Titled “Pecans and Cotton,” this brief market report explained that “the pecan crop in this country is unusually large,” adding in the same breath how “cotton has been coming in quite freely.” Notably, there appeared to be no conflict over land appropriation between these two agricultural endeavors. Cotton fields and pecan groves not only coexisted but seemed to thrive together as interwoven aspects of the same commercial landscape. All of which raises a critical question: why? Indeed, why did Texas plantation owners not stretch their cotton fields to the river’s edge, as did their counterparts to the north, thereby wiping out large portions of the region’s wild pecans and turning the area into a homogeneous zone of monocultural production? Answering this question is critical to understanding how pecans in Texas and Louisiana went on to be passively cultivated, actively commercialized, and thereby made central to the future emergence of cultivated varieties, a coherent pecan industry, and the globalization of America’s native nut.13

  The answer has to do in part with quirks of hydrology and geography. Indeed, considerable evidence supports the claim that Texas and Louisiana planters were less likely to build plantations and clear pastures to the very edge of riverbanks. As a result, wild pecan groves, which were predominantly located along these edges, were more likely to be spared. The reason Texas farmers chose not to clear land along riverbanks primarily had to do with floods. Spring flooding was more frequent and intense in the southern portions of the pecan’s native range. According to geographer William Keith Guthrie, proximity to the “moisture-rich Gulf of Mexico,” “the low relief topography of the Great Plains” to the north, and the “long curving topographical discontinuity” of the Balcones Escarpment all combined to make the southern region where Texas pecans grew particularly prone to storms that induced large floods. These especially intense storms were seared into local memories and understood to be a necessary part of ecological life. In combination with the especially aggressive “human induced changes to the land,” they further encouraged farmers and ranchers to avoid planting too close to riverbanks, where their tender crops would surely have been destroyed by the next inevitable surge. As a result, wild pecan groves, which fortuitously grew in these danger zones, were spared in Texas and Louisiana.14

  Conveniently enough, wild pecans were also commonly known not only to survive mammoth floods but to thrive in them. “[I] have known water to cover the land around the trees three feet deep for a week,” wrote one farmer, “without their showing any injury.” As late as 1925, this phenomenon was still being observed and duly appreciated by farmers. “In Oklahoma,” explained the Christian Science Monitor, “there are at least 160,000 acres of creek bottom lands overflowed at various times of the year,” but “this overflow water has no effect on pecan trees other than to make them grow greater.” More recently, a geographer observed how the pecan “has a competitive advantage over other bottomland species” because the tree “can withstand late-spring flooding.” This was decidedly not the case with cotton and cattle—and it was therefore an important factor behind the pecan tree’s survival during the era of cotton and cattle expansion and rapid environmental exploitation.15

  Yet another explanation for the pecan’s persistence and proliferation in Texas during a period of rapid and aggressive environmental transformation has to do with market proximity. As pecans evolved from a wild supplemental food source into a marketable commodity, there was considerable advantage in living closer to the three cities that were, for various reasons, becoming active nodes of agricultural distribution: San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. Markets in urbanizing centers such as Little Rock, St. Louis, and Chicago were certainly significant, but they rarely exported pecans. To the contrary, they often imported them. However, the more southerly cities, surrounded by the world’s densest pecan groves, supplied the nation with at least a sampling of wild pecans. In an age of precarious local transportation, being close to the markets where nuts could be shelled, packaged, and shipped was a keen advantage and, however indirectly, supportive of local pecan initiatives.

  Import records of other cities confirm the point. As early as 1819, Providence, Rhode Island, was importing pecans from New Orleans; in 1825 a Philadelphia firm was advertising “PECAN NUTS . . . from New Orleans”; in 1874 pecans leaving from San Antonio and Galveston constituted the state’s fifth-largest export; and by 1899 none other than Little Rock, located in the center of what had once been dense pecan land, was importing “pecans, Texas, polished.” (Early pecan sellers polished pecans with varnish to make them appear fresher than they were.) To be sure, this trade was in its infancy, but, again, being near the key centers of export provided a certain incentive for farmers to preserve, passively cultivate, and transport wild pecans the relatively short distance to a vibrant market.16

  Perhaps the most unlikely factor contributing to the persistence of wild pecans in Texas and western Louisiana involved pigs—or at least the decision to let them roam on their own. There is much to suggest that the citizens of Texas and Louisiana were more likely than those living in northern native pecan regions to allow domestic swine to live in a state of semi-domestication, feeding off the natural bounty of the backwoods, moving about at will. This decision was critical for the pecan tree, because one of the most substantial sources of nourishment for southern swine turned out to be scattered pecans, a factor that surely encouraged landowners to keep the trees standing. Writing in the 1830s, A. A. Parker, a farmer of modest means, explained how “hogs keep in good flesh all the year” primarily because “in autumn, when the nuts fall from the trees” they “grow fat.” He described how “hogs can be kept in this country without any more trouble than merely looking after them to prevent their straying.”

  By the 1880s, the practice of allowing hogs to roam free through pecan groves remained alive and well. Oran Roberts, writing in 1881, noted how Texas swine breeders organized their breeding plans around expected pecan masting schedules. “When a good mast did come,” he explained, “close attention would be given [the hogs], so as to raise a large number o
f pork hogs that year.” Acknowledging how “this primitive mode of raising meat gradually gave way in most sections of the country,” yielding to the increasingly common practice of “fattening them with corn,” the author went on to confirm that Texas pig farmers held firm to a “dependence on masts for feeding swine.” It was a habit, he claimed, “prevalent in most of the cotton growing portions of Texas.” An 1873 newspaper account referred to “hard fisted farmers feeding [pecans] to swine,” a decision that raised the price of pecans for humans but, alas, caused “no dispute between the [farmers] and the swine.” As late as 1904, a state almanac could report on the common practice in Texas of “fattening hogs for market” with the use of pecans.17

  A final explanation for the pecan’s lasting presence in Texas (and Louisiana) centers on the fact that as it had been for Native Americans, the pecan was an excellent frontier food for pioneers. Texas had a comparatively long period of frontier expansion and development. Settlers were cut off for longer periods of time from systematic trade, transportation, and communication with the rest of the country. Much in the way that pecans served Native Americans as they developed a diet rooted in semi-nomadic wanderings, the nuts supplied Anglo-American settlers with subsistence calories and, in especially dire circumstances, a valuable means of exchange. An 1842 account from Austin revealed how “money of every description . . . has disappeared from this section,” a situation that compelled citizens “to do business by barter, and take hides, pecans, etc. instead of money.” Another observer of Texas’s economic landscape in 1847 explained, “If the heavens do not rain manna in Texas” one could always rely on pecans for trade and sustenance. By the end of the century, an observer, speaking of the pecan tree, noted “what a golden layer the goose was.” The author went on to chide Texans for taking this abundance for granted, adding that there were once “twice as many pecans as there are now,” a comment that, in its lament, underscored the importance of pecans in local, barter-based, frontier-economy exchange. The reason for the decline, he explained, was the lazy habit of cutting down trees to acquire their nuts during times of scarcity, a shortsighted approach that, as we’ve seen, took place wherever the pecan grew.18

  In the end, though, the bottom line was simple enough. As one choice piece of Manifest Destiny promotional literature noted, not inaccurately, “Millions of pecans grow wild in our forests.” For a society holding firm, on at least some level, to a frontier ethic, this bounty was indeed a blessing. While relatively undeveloped landscapes gave way to commercial forces, the pecans in Texas and Louisiana held their ground against this onslaught.

  If a wide variety of circumstantial factors—pine trees, flooding, swine, and the need for frontier food—conspired to ensure that Texas pecan trees remained “in boundless profusion” throughout areas of the Southeast, settlers themselves capitalized on the opportunities presented by this turn of events. Given what’s been presented thus far, one might think that Anglo-American settlers did precisely what Native Americans had done—that is, basically pick up pecans where they fell and work annual harvests into the daily cycles of life. This they certainly did. Unlike Native Americans in Texas, however, white landowners between 1850 and 1900 nurtured pecan groves through passive cultivation. To be clear, they did not (with rare exceptions) plant orchards. What they did do, however, represented a crucial step in that direction. Basically, passive cultivation meant identifying thick patches of preexisting wild pecan growth, thinning out the competition, managing the pecan trees to favor the stronger and more productive individuals, and then allowing the groves to flourish on their own terms. Again, passive cultivation was not actually orchard keeping (that was indeed coming), but insofar as farmers channeled nature to serve human interests, it was a carefully calculated way to maximize pecan production without becoming actual pecan farmers burdened with the considerable task of managing formal and genetically narrowed orchards. So prevalent and successful was this method in Texas and Louisiana that even after the turn toward cultivated orchards with improved varieties in the twentieth century, there were always some farmers who continued to pursue the fine art of passive cultivation with, as we will see, beneficial consequences for the industry as a whole.

  Here is how a pecan manual published in 1896 by the USDA Division of Pomology described the process of passive cultivation: “Numerous efforts have been made to clear up native groves by cutting out trees of inferior pecans and other timber, leaving good pecan trees as thick as they ought to stand for good crops.” Another popular manual wrote about owners of “pecan-producing forests” who were increasing their productivity by “a careful and systematic elimination of all unprofitable trees, so as to give greater advantage to superior nuts.” It warned that “clearing too suddenly will expose the remaining trees to injury by high winds.” Gradual clearing, by contrast, will help in “converting the forest into an orchard.” Ultimately, this was precisely the goal of passive cultivation—to convert the forest into an orchard—or at least something approximating it. Texas pecans were soon living in a state somewhere between the wild and the sown, which was not such a bad place to be, as it conferred higher yields while maintaining genetic diversity and, in turn, healthy trees.19

  Examples on the ground show that this passive form of conversion became the nineteenth-century norm throughout Texas. A landowner in central Texas who maintained a native pecan grove noted that the cost of “converting” pecan banks to a pecan grove was “so small as to scarcely deserve a name.” A visitor to Weatherfield, Texas, in 1877 observed the passive cultivation of pecans, noting “pecans on the creeks” that were thriving in the absence of other species. Another traveler to Texas in 1844 provided a more detailed description of a passively cultivated grove of pecans. “It seemed impossible to me,” he wrote, “that nature, left to itself, could be so incredibly clean.” He went on: “I involuntarily looked about to see the hand of man, of the artist, but I only saw a herd of deer.”20

  Naturally, the hand of man was present, but the touch, as the visitor suggested, was light. Indeed, it was the comparative ease of passive pecan cultivation that appealed to so many landowners who managed wild groves from western Louisiana to central Texas. It was the fact that one could, if fortunate enough to own land stocked with patches of wild pecan trees, turn them into a profitable natural resource with comparatively little effort that inspired so many Texans to selectively protect and propagate the tens of millions of pecans in their midst. As a newspaper columnist aptly put it, pecans, unlike apples or plums, were able to “yield amazing quantities of fruit without care or cultivation.” And that, perhaps more than any other factor, was the key: this was work that could be done without care or cultivation.

  This critical aspect of the pecan economy was well appreciated by labor-strapped Texans trying to fashion an economically stable life on an often unaccommodating frontier. After listing a range of fruits that required careful attention, the attorney G. W. Kendall commented on the pecan’s ability to produce abundantly with minimal human input. “Where this nut grows,” he wrote, “there is little need of any other—it is the best of all.” “With comparatively little trouble,” one newspaper explained, “extensive groves of these trees could be cultivated.” A contemporary assessment of today’s many pecan cultivars notes that “for 150 years growers have managed and harvested nuts from pecan ‘groves’ found throughout the tree’s native territory.” An Arkansas farmer in the 1850s was able to harvest pecans from several passively cultivated groves, travel to Fort Smith twice a year, and return loaded with “sugar, coffee, and other supplies.” Again, this situation was much more common in southern rather than northern climes—and it essentially defined pecan cultivation, if not the entire “industry,” for more than half a century.21

  Cultivation may have been passive, but the gathering of nuts was anything but inactive. Harvesting pecans could be a contact sport. Eager to beat the competition and acquire pecans before supply increased and prices dropped, farmers sent the
ir children scrambling into the pecan groves to scale trees and strafe nuts from precarious limbs. Needless to say, this activity precipitated its fair share of newsworthy mishaps. “Judging by the number of boys injured while picking pecans,” opined the Galveston News, “it is fair to presume there is only one way to fall out of a pecan tree.” In 1902, a teenage girl living in the Texas Hill Country decided to get a jump on the competition by rising into a pecan grove in a hot-air balloon, as a group of men held her in place with an anchor rope. She rewarded them by sending down, as she put it to the New York Times, “a shower of gold.”22

  Harvesting nuts from the ground, though, was a big enough deal to warrant mention in the local press, as it did when the San Antonio Express reported that “nuts were gathered from some large trees on the edge of the San Marcos bottom.” Pecan poaching was not uncommon. When a boy was caught helping himself to pecans from private property during harvest season he quickly found his backside peppered with buckshot, a response that left him nursing what the paper deemed “painful but not dangerous wounds.” The account of a missionary mentioned how “the banks of the Guadaloupe were strewed with Pecans, and very many were the persons, male and female, old and young, who went out to gather them.” The man continued, “The pecan crop, once in three years, is a great affair in Texas,” equal, he ventured, “to the cotton crop.”