With good reason, observers often associated the pecan harvest with German immigrants. “The pecans were gathered at the Concho,” reported the San Antonio paper, “by some Germans from Fredericksburg.” An 1848 account in the Houston Telegraph noted, “We understand that many of the German emigrants at the west are realizing greater profits by gathering pecans than they have realized in their harvests of grain.” This involvement was somewhat prophetic. As we will see, these German immigrants became central to the promotion of the pecan as an improved commercial crop later in the century.23
All this mad scramble for nuts produced by passively cultivated groves was not purely for the pleasure of experiencing the pecan’s rich flavor. The wild pecan was slowly becoming a niche commodity as a direct result of passive cultivation, and Texas—which was endowed with the most pecan trees—was becoming the thriving epicenter of that commodity. Market reports in several southern papers offer ample evidence of this transition, one that would provide the basis for the expansion and technological transformation of pecan culture from a scattered and disorganized activity into a scientifically driven, consolidated, and eventually global industry by the following century.
The 1850s marked the early stages of this trend toward commodification. Again, the widespread and decentralized habit of passive cultivation was the underlying cause. From Galveston, exports were 1,525 bushels in 1850 and 13,224 in 1854. An 1856 article from the Texas Gazette reported that local accounts from “the Colorado, the Guadaloupe, and the San Antonio represent the pecan crop as quite abundant this season.” As for the Medina River basin, “it is said that [the pecan crop] will be larger this year than at any former season.” A report from Georgia noted that “before the war the small port of Indianola, Tex., exported as many as 100,000 bushels.” Exports at the time were predicted to be worth $50,000 a year.
By the 1860s pecan markets had become even more active, especially in San Antonio, where the Civil War had previously strained or disrupted traditional trading networks. The Express noted in 1867: “Pecans are coming in quite plentifully, and from all accounts the crop is very heavy.” Merchants were typically paying $2.75 to $3.00 per barrel, with those merchants known for “buying largely” singled out by name and actively courted by increasingly commercial-minded owners of pecan groves. Even smaller ports such as Port Lavaca could, in this active economic climate, record the exportation of 1,500 barrels in 1866.24
Supply and demand were carefully monitored by pecan growers and exporters alike. Subtle market shifts were duly noted. On October 30, 1867, an influx of several “cart loads of pecans” depressed the price of the nuts from $3.00 to $2.80 per bushel, a figure that recovered the next week (back to $3.00) when several wagonloads reached New Orleans for export. Two years later, pecan gatherers stormed San Antonio with bushel upon bushel just days after the newspaper reported that “three large wagon loads were shipped east by Merrit and Brothers,” a prominent merchant house with extensive connections on the eastern seaboard. Occasionally a critical mass of groves would fail to mast, as in 1870, and considerable frustration and confusion would ensue. “A few pecans have made their appearance in market,” the Express wrote. “But this year’s crop is very small and inferior.” This situation stood in contrast to 1869, a year that saw “plenty of pecans” produced. As the price of pecans in New Orleans spiked to an unprecedented $12 per bushel due to a short supply, the Express, lamenting “the scarcity of the crop in Texas,” wondered, “Will not some one who understands the matter account for the non-yield this year?” It may have been a bad year, but it wasn’t permanent. By 1889, the Dallas Morning News was noting that “about 55,000 pounds of pecans have been sold in this market this season.”
Whether the market for pecans was bullish or not, the important point here is simple: there was a market for pecans that showed no sign of abating. Texas merchants—and not just scratch farmers keeping groves for sustenance and barter—were beginning to see pecans less as a convenient local snack or the ideal frontier food and more as a supplemental cash crop. Taste for pecans led to a taste for cash and, as it did, the cultivation of a small market economy for pecans spelled a future for pecans based on higher productivity, higher kernel density, and increasing market share. Producer interest in these qualities was critical in helping to open the farmer’s mind to the idea of active rather than passive cultivation.25
In an era of passive cultivation, Texas—again, with the natural advantage of having more wild pecan groves than any other state—would dominate the industry. By the end of the nineteenth century, Texas remained the unofficial center of pecan production—almost exclusively because of the harvesting of passively cultivated wild pecans. Between 1850 and 1900 the state went from a place where native pecans were a supplement to a frontier diet to a place where pecans had become a profitable commodity gathered from the region’s extensive network of creeks, streams, and riverbanks. The primary mode of cultivation remained passive, gathering and marketing took place on a small, decentralized scale, San Antonio served as a commercial epicenter of sorts, and the nuts coexisted peacefully with cotton and cattle. Large pecan farms—actively cultivated with a narrow range of improved varieties—might have been foreordained from the moment a market formed for this crop, but they were still in the distant future. Even as late as 1899, formal pecan orchards were so few and far between that pecans ranked well behind walnuts and almonds in overall output. They ranked, in fact, dead last among all American-grown nuts.26
Still the situation in Texas foreshadowed a rise in the ranks for cultivated pecans. “The Pecan,” according to a Dallas area farmer, “grows wild upon the valley lands along the streams; also upon the hillsides and heads of streams. Large quantities are shipped out of the state. Many thousands of bushels go to the northern states each year.” As the pecan became increasingly popular among consumers throughout the United States, and as passive cultivators began to make more money from their pecan crops than their cotton crops, enterprising farmers elsewhere—often farmers with an interest in scientific farming—began to take a closer look at the pecan. Specifically, they started to think about being less passive in their efforts to promote the growth of the pecan crop. They began to wonder why the pecan shouldn’t become like the apple, pear, or plum. Why not get more aggressive and systematic in controlling the output and kernel content of this delicious nut, making it more adaptable, more productive, fatter, meatier, and easier to extract than ever before? Why not improve upon nature and, perhaps, make even more money in the process?
CHAPTER 4
Antoine’s Graft
THE BIRTH OF THE IMPROVED PECAN, 1822–1900
The pecan stayed totally wild for a long time. While most of its fruit- producing peers were being domesticated, the pecan avoided the meddling hand of man for centuries. Pecan trees not only benefited from their fortuitous location along flood-prone riverbanks in Texas and western Louisiana, but produced just enough edible nuts under natural conditions for farmers to justify passively propagating them for the purposes of commerce and subsistence. The consistency with which farmers undertook this work was impressive—recall the modest market that formed in Texas by midcentury. Nonetheless, in staying so close to home, the pecan belied a major botanical trend of the time. It proved itself yet again to be a renegade member of the plant kingdom.
Whereas the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eras of botanical wanderlust, the nineteenth century, especially the latter half, was an era of progressive and scientific agriculture. Agriculturalists were becoming less concerned with discovering alien plants and more concerned with controlling the precise details of plant development. If there was one word that was used more than any other in the agrarian literature of the day, it was “improvement.” Virtually every edible crop was being sculpted and chiseled and manipulated—primarily through some form of breeding and grafting—into improved and more marketable varieties of the plant. A small but growing cadre of farmers, extension agents, and pla
nt breeders nationwide worked incessantly to narrow the genetic diversity of fruit crops into select varieties that were higher yielding, more resistant to disease, easier to pick, pack, and ship, and more tolerant to drought or frost (but never, interestingly enough, more nutritious). Fruits and vegetables began to come with names, such as the Early Cortland apple, the Chinese Cling peach, and the Early Golden plum.
These efforts—as a stroll through any modern grocery will attest—eventually led to dramatically more abundant, tastier, and shapelier commercial pears, plums, peaches, walnuts, squash, and apples—fruits that were now capable of thriving under a multitude of conditions and in a multitude of microclimates. Although the genetic stock of these fruits and vegetables was being distilled into a set number of varieties, never before had consumers enjoyed access to so many choices of high-quality plant food. For the most part, plant breeders and their emerging infrastructure of agricultural support—mainly in the form of the USDA—were ultimately the ones to thank for this unprecedented explosion of improved varieties adapted to a wider range of geographies worldwide. It is popular in these days of endless reverence for the rugged individualist to condemn big government for its meddling in the business of doing business, but for nineteenth-century agriculture in the United States, big government made the diversification and abundance of healthy produce a daily reality.
Historically speaking, the concerted emphasis on improving fruits such as apples, pears, plums, and peaches made perfect sense. In their wild state, these fruits were commercially inadequate, if not virtually inedible. For whatever reason, though, something about them in their undomesticated form sparked human interest in their transformation. Their potential to become a crop was evident, albeit dimly, to some person, group, or, most likely, animal. Eventually, as interest grew and as the edible promise of the plant emerged, these chosen weeds evolved under the hand of human selection into crops. Indeed, their long-term popularity was the result of extensive and ad hoc human intervention through such techniques as seed selection, budding, and grafting, as well as agricultural refinements like soil enhancement, synthetic fertilizers, pest control, and irrigation. The history of agriculture is the history of these bit-by-bit ongoing efforts to tame, shape, and conquer plants that once grew wild but had to be increasingly tamed in order to offer a diversity of predictable foods to a growing population.
In its wild state, however, the pecan remained immune to such efforts until the late nineteenth century. This was much longer than any other native edible plant, highlighting yet another aspect of the pecan that makes it an exceptional commodity. Unlike so many other popular fruits, the wild pecan could remain edible on its own terms for hundreds, even thousands, of years longer than its counterparts because it is intrinsically pleasing to the human palate. The significance of this factor should not be overlooked. Throughout the nineteenth century, when farmers were actively improving fruits and planting orderly orchards of fruit trees, and thus rendering these crops directly and exclusively dependent on human management, the pecan—as a result of its natural edibility, relative abundance, and ease of extraction—continued to stand tall on its own terms. It was passively cultivated to achieve commercial viability, but its genetics were not commandeered and streamlined to the point of dependence. This was yet another aspect of this remarkable tree that placed it in a league of its own, allowing it to escape the full grasp of agricultural science longer than any other commercial fruit or nut crop in the history of American plant life.
Consider, by way of contrast, the peach. In its wild state the peach—imported to North America in 1747—is certainly edible. But it is also a bitterly acidic fruit—possessing nothing like the sweetness and juiciness one associates with it today, and certainly not, in its natural state, a plant poised to become a commonly consumed item. The Chinese began to cultivate these small, astringent fruits as early as the tenth century BC, and in time peaches became delicacies fit for the ruling elite. During ancient times the peach—which had now benefited from thousands of years of selective breeding—was introduced to India, where it reached a much wider audience of consumers. Eventually, Alexander the Great imported a few peach samples to Europe, and by the sixteenth century, the Spanish and French were hauling bags of peach stones to the New World, where Euro-Americans grew them in neatly kept orchards. This migration and transmutation was made possible, in large part, by slow and steady human-directed improvements—changes that made the peach more adaptable, available, accessible, tasty, and capable of long-distance travel. The aggressive hand of humanity was essential throughout.1
When we associate peaches with Georgia or South Carolina, or when we appreciate the peach as a staple summer fruit, we must not forget this history. The only reason the peach grows in Georgia or South Carolina (or Connecticut or California, for that matter), and the only reason I can walk to the nearest grocery store and buy one right now, even if I am in Idaho, and the only reason it will taste good is that it has been aggressively manipulated by humans to adapt, migrate, and thrive in a wide array of climates and conditions. In its native state the peach was an interesting little weed, and effectively useless, at least when it came to the human diet. As an improved crop, though, it became wildly popular, and remains so to this day. This background is well worth considering the next time we hold up a perfectly round and juicy peach and deem it “all natural.” It is, after all, as natural as a baseball (and, if harvested too early, might taste like one).
The story of the peach provides a useful contrast to help us understand the late-nineteenth-century pecan. When the Chinese were bringing the ever-improving peach to India, and as Alexander the Great was introducing it to Europe, and as Europeans were hauling it to America, the pecan—which, recall, was treated by the Indians as a forage-able (rather than commercially marketable) crop and rejected by the Europeans as too close to the walnut to cultivate—remained rooted in its native habitat, generally unchanged as an integral and natural and inherently edible component of an indigenous, semi-nomadic diet. Remarkably, this remained the case all the way through the late nineteenth century, even after Anglo-American commercial agriculture came to dominate the colonized landscape and passive cultivation was increasingly (if unfairly) deemed the desperate refuge of the uneducated cultivator.
The pecan was thus in an odd situation, one that raises questions. Why this multi-thousand-year period of stasis for the pecan in the midst of constant agricultural change for crops such as the peach? What accounts for the pecan’s longevity in a state of relative wildness? Why didn’t farmers work to improve the pecan as they had the peach once its dietary and commercial value became evident? Obviously dozens of factors go into explaining the idiosyncratic botanical evolution of any crop, but the point here is this: the well-entrenched habits of foraging and passive cultivation obviated the need for “improvement.” The pecan, in essence, was allowed to remain a wild plant for a much longer time than any other commodified fruit or nut primarily because its wild variety happened to bear fruit that tasted supremely domesticated. The long-term evolutionary arrangement between pecans and other forms of wildlife created fat and buttery nuts well before humans ever came along to discover them. Once humans did make this discovery, once they realized they wanted to eat pecans as an integral component of a standard diet, they were wise enough to agree that nature was doing well enough on its own with regard to pecans. Humans chose to encourage that process, nudge it along, but not dictate it. Given that every wild pecan tree had a unique genetic composition, this choice was a good thing, as that diversity protected the trees from insect damage and disease while still supplying an ample quantity of nuts.2
Eventually, of course, this balance would be upended. Demand for pecans—as well as commercial pressure to achieve bumper crops of them—would dictate more-efficient and more-aggressive methods of production. Today, as a result, the pecan is treated much as if it were a peach. It is this fact that ties back to our larger story. When the pecan joined the heady
game of improvement—and it did so, as we will see, in hesitant fits and starts—the nature of the pecan, pecan cultivation, and the entire meaning of what it meant to grow pecans fundamentally changed. There are now hundreds of commercial varieties of pecans, all of them pioneered by expert plant breeders, most of whom worked during the first half of the twentieth century. Pecans have extended modestly beyond their native range, with the world’s largest orchards stretching from South Carolina and Florida to New Mexico and California. Georgia and New Mexico—neither of which have native pecans—are the largest producers of pecans today. The Chinese consume more pecans than any other nation. To be sure, compared to other global commodities, the pecan continues to flourish in the general region where it was born—relatively speaking, it remains a provincial crop—and there is no doubt that wild pecans remained extremely popular as the transition to domestication occurred. Nonetheless, by the late nineteenth century, the game of pecan production (and, in a sense, the essence of the pecan nut) had entered a new realm.
How this transition was effected—that is, how the process evolved from passive propagation in native habitats to active orchard keeping in and beyond native habitats—is a compelling story, one that will unfold over the next two chapters. Two basic points guide the narrative. First, once the means of improvement was established—that is, once it became clear that a pecan could be successfully grafted onto an improved specimen—it took a long time, at least fifty years, for skeptical farmers to accept and adopt this technological change in significant numbers. A variety of reasons accounted for their hesitancy. Second, once farmers did accept the fact that grafted varieties could profitably coexist with passive cultivation, it took a mere twenty years to accomplish with the pecan what it took more than two thousand years for the world to accomplish with the peach—that is, transform it from a predominantly wild fruit into hundreds of domesticated varieties. The beginning of this story involves more than simply the scientific process of grafting. It involves people willing to carry out that process—an unlikely cast of characters that includes a pottery maker from South Carolina, a Louisiana slave, and several German immigrants. It is to them that we now turn.
The Pecan Page 6