In 1822 an amateur potter from Edgefield, South Carolina, became momentarily interested in what he enthusiastically called “summer grafting.” Grafting is a horticultural procedure whereby the vascular tissues of two plants are joined by inserting a tissue sample of one tree into another tree in order to create genetically uniform canopies with desired traits achieved through asexual propagation. The scion—the tissue from the donor tree—is fused into the stock, or the recipient, leading to the unification of distinct genotypes. The procedure was initiated by the Chinese thousands of years ago, picked up by European orchardists in the medieval period, and is employed by orchard keepers worldwide to this day. It is one of the most basic horticultural techniques in modern agricultural production. Without it our food supply, as well as the diversity of that supply, would be vastly diminished.3
The purpose of this union—which can also be accomplished through other forms of grafting called “budding” and “top working”—is to achieve a uniformity of traits. Farmers historically chose to graft because the seeds of desirable trees—say, trees with hearty root systems and abundant fruit production—do not “come true.” That is, they do not produce seeds that yield replicas of the impressive specimen from which they came. For some woody species the problem could be overcome by propagating off shoots from the roots, an approach that worked for the domestication of figs, pomegranates, and olive trees. For other species—such as apple, pear, and plum trees—rooting did not work. The sole technology that led to the domestication of these species was, therefore, grafting. This was also the case for the pecan tree.4
The pecan was especially difficult to grow from seed for the purposes of commercial production. As a Texas A&M horticulturist wrote in 1922, “Few plants show such a wide variability as the pecan when it is reproduced from seed.”5 The consequences of ignoring this reality were obvious enough. Witness the account of a Florida farmer trying to start a pecan orchard in 1911:
We have yet to find a single instance where the nut of a seedling tree was as indentical [sic] with that borne by its parent plant. Occasionally they are better, but the rule is that they generally are vastly inferior to the fruit produced by the parent plant. Hence, if an orchard of trees of the same habit of growth, prolificness [sic], regularity in bearing, uniform throughout, trees which will produce a crop of nuts uniform in size, shape, color and quality, is desired, do not plant seedling trees. Scores of these seedling trees produce nuts but little larger than chinquapins, and it is a fact which cannot be gainsaid that the seedling pecan, up to the time of fruiting, is an unknown quantity, after which it is too frequently a disappointment.6
Here we have the articulation of one of the early twentieth century’s defining challenges for commercial agriculture: imposing uniformity on diversity for the purposes of enhanced production. The Florida farmer’s frustration with the unpredictability of seedling cultivation is clearly evident. Needless to say, many a prospective pecan orchardist had his hopes dashed after planting a field of pecan seeds harvested from champion trees only to watch them produce an orchard’s worth of gnarled, dwarfed, and unproductive trees mixed in with a few stars and a lot of average specimens. And that would be a ten-year error. Grafting, budding, and top working, however, enabled a farmer to bypass this experience. It allowed him to do something that is essential to successful commercial fruit production: create uniformity within his crop and, in so doing, reduce the problem of unpredictability. Agriculturally speaking, it allowed him, for better or worse, to join pecans to the rationalized agricultural economy of the twentieth century.7
Abner Landrum, whose interest in the hard clay beneath his feet led him to primarily embrace pottery, was almost a century ahead of his time in applying grafting techniques to the pecan tree. By suggesting that pecans (in addition to walnuts, figs, and persimmons) could thrive and be grown uniformly through the grafting of new and improved varieties, he aimed to extend an ancient practice to America’s indigenous nut. Farmers, as mentioned, had been grafting for centuries, but, as far as Landrum knew, never with the pecan. As we have seen, there was little need for doing so—foraging was common, passive cultivation worked just fine, and the demand for something new had yet to materialize. None of this really mattered to Landrum. Most likely, he was at heart simply a tinkerer. He was just a curious guy who wanted to graft a pecan.8
Whatever the motivation, Landrum made his case for pecan grafting in an 1822 article he wrote for a popular national agricultural paper called the American Farmer. The secret to successful pecan grafting, he argued, came down to the timing of it. Essentially, he urged that pecan grafting practices should take place in the summer rather than in the spring, as was common with other fruit. “I was induced to make this experiment,” he wrote, “from the rationality of the theory; it having occurred upon the slightest reflection that failures in spring grafting might originate from the dissipation of moisture, by the drying winds peculiar to that season, before the sap of the stock [the root section of a grafted tree] acquires sufficient motion to furnish the graft with due nourishment.”9 The pecan in particular did very well under this theory. He explained, “I have, this summer, budded some dozens of the pecan on the common hickory nut, without a single failure as yet.” His self-assessment of this accomplishment was unequivocal: “I made the experiment,” he concluded, “and succeeded.” And then his successful experiment, in essence, was forgotten.10
Landrum died in 1859, just as the nation’s sectional debate was reaching a fever pitch. At the time, not a single pecan farmer, to the best of our knowledge, had picked up on Landrum’s grafting advice. Not only did nobody respond to his article, but for decades the agricultural record is notably silent on the issue of pecan grafting. In fact, Landrum’s discovery went so unrecognized that, in 1885, a citizen as well informed as Rutherford B. Hayes could write his Texas friend Guy Bryan to say, “The pecans . . . reached here today in excellent condition . . . I shall plant some of them,” thus working under the common assumption that they would come true, or at least produce trees with superior nuts. The option of grafting evidently never crossed his mind. The reasons for this reluctance to pursue grafting as anything more than a hobby are basic enough: there were already millions of genetically unique pecan trees to passively cultivate, the commercial demand for pecans was too small to justify the time and expenditure of starting an orchard, and, quite possibly, it was simply more macho to run a ranch with cattle than to turn that land over to pecans. A cowboy was a cowboy, after all.11
Landrum, for his part, was otherwise occupied in a variety of enterprising activities. He seemed not the least bit interested in spreading the news beyond his short American Farmer piece. Not only was he, as his obituary noted, “a pioneer in the pottery manufacture of this state,” but he was also engaged in, of all things, building “a suburban village” and publishing a journal dedicated to “the promotion of the most useful arts and sciences.” Landrum the Renaissance man also spent considerable time ensuring that his pottery investments—large kilns and sawmills in particular—did not go to waste when he died. He did so by assiduously training his slave, Dave, not only to read and write but also to continue his trade. According to one modern account, Dave “became the best potter in South Carolina.” (Whether or not Landrum’s work with Dave had something to do with his overall view of slavery we can only guess. But we do know that when the Civil War started, Landrum the Carolinian slave owner openly sympathized with the Union.) Despite his short burst of pecan enthusiasm in 1822, he spent the rest of his life involved in other fascinating endeavors. He left the future of the pecan—and the many advancements that would occur with pecan grafting—for others to pioneer. His article was, it seems, the end of his short affair with the enterprise.12
Other tinkerers were certainly out there. Indeed, not everyone in Landrum’s wake was working under the mistaken assumption that seeds would come true, or at least result in consistently superior trees. Even if they did not know about Landrum’s graf
t or his obscure article, a few quiet pioneers were experimenting with the idea of pecan orchards stocked with varieties that were both uniform and carefully crafted to avoid the vagaries of local conditions. Many of their efforts came to fruition in Louisiana, where one Dr. A. E. Colomb, of St. James Parish, Louisiana, cut scions (buds and stems) from a particularly impressive pecan tree located on a sprawling plantation abutting the Mississippi River (on the Mississippi side) and grafted them onto several small pecan saplings. High expectations, however, were quickly dashed. The doctor’s grafts all shriveled within two weeks.13
Dr. Colomb had the good sense to pass his scions on to a friend, Telesphore J. Roman, owner of the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. Roman’s plantation was about 1,200 acres, most of it planted in sugarcane. It was also situated on the Mississippi River, a position that provided easy access to New Orleans, where Roman kept a town house to oversee the marketing of his crops. Although small by the standards of Louisiana sugar plantations, Oak Alley was typical in that off in the distance from the big house, nestled behind tight rows of one hundred perfectly aligned live oaks, sat twenty-two small whitewashed slave cabins. Roman himself knew precious little about grafting techniques. However, in one of those rough-hewn cabins lived a slave gardener named Antoine, who did. And where Dr. Colomb failed, Antoine the slave gardener succeeded.
Slaves such as Antoine knew pecans well. Accounts by former slaves indicate that pecans were an excellent forage crop for plantation chattel, one that complemented a sort of frontier, even Native American-like diet. Slaves passively cultivated pecans as part of plantation subsistence. Georgia Baker, an eighty-seven-year-old woman who worked on a Georgia plantation, recalled, “Dere was allus plenty of pecans” for the taking. These nuts, gathered up from the fields, were complemented with “possums, rabbits, coons, squirrels.” A Mississippi slave who foraged for pecans when enslaved eventually planted them on his own property, once he was free. “I got ’karns (pecans) all sot out on my place,” he told an interviewer. “De ree-lief folks say I ought ter sell ’em, but shucks! We eats ‘em.” Lizzie Norfleet, another former Mississippi slave, recalled that “the yard was filled with pecan trees,” the nuts of which complemented, yet again, “possums, coons, rabbits,” and fish. These are just a few references to pecans found in recorded slave narratives. While they say very little about pecan cultivation per se, they do suggest that Antoine was hardly alone as a slave taking an interest in pecans, if only for the purposes of basic sustenance.14
But Antoine’s interest, surely due to his role as plantation gardener, clearly went beyond sustenance. When Roman handed Colomb’s scions to Antoine, the slave successfully grafted them onto sixteen young pecan trees located on the gentle slope of land between the Oak Alley mansion and the slave quarters. This quietly momentous event turned out to be perhaps the most important development in the entire history of pecan cultivation. It took place in either 1846 or 1847. These improved trees bore impressive nuts, so much so that Roman had Antoine graft 110 more trees in a big pasture abutting the river. This was an ideal spot, rich with alluvial soil and primed for rapid pecan growth. Antoine used the same scions as he had for the original 16 grafted trees. These new trees, too, thrived impressively and produced fantastic nuts. By the Civil War, there were thus 126 grafted trees on the Oak Alley planation, all genetically uniform descendants of that lone tree situated on the banks of the Mississippi—a tree that was, evidently, killed on March 14, 1890, in a thunderstorm.
When the Civil War ended, Roman sold his plantation. The new owner, burdened with higher labor costs, summarily cleared the pasture of Antoine’s 110 grafted pecan trees in order to expand the production of sugar. This decision was made just when the trees were reaching “their most productive age and the nuts from them were selling from $50 to $75 per barrel.” But no matter. Commodity prices ultimately determined what a farmer chose to clear and what he chose to plant. In the early 1870s, due largely to the high price of sugar, only Antoine’s 16 original grafted trees remained rooted in Mississippi soil, destined, one might have guessed, to fade into irrelevance.15
The plantation, however, was sold yet again. The new owner of Oak Alley was a German immigrant named Hubert Bonzano. Bonzano left Antoine’s original sixteen pecan trees in place after he purchased the property—by now the unlikely global center of pecan experimentation—in the early 1870s. Bonzano (who had also “identified with the Union sentiment”) typified the perseverance of so many immigrants to the United States. He moved to Louisiana in 1845 and delved into the ample opportunities offered to ambitious white men (no matter where they were from) by a rapidly westernizing nation. He held a variety of minor public offices—all elected positions—while serving as a voluntary administrator of Charity Hospital, a position to which he was appointed by the state’s governor. He was a model citizen.
Bonzano’s primary quest, like that of most of his neighbors, was to grow sugar and create wealth, a linked endeavor that focused his attention on his land, every aspect of it—including his trees. When he encountered Antoine’s pecans, and found out where they had come from, he learned to appreciate the quality of the nuts they produced and, in turn, made some fortuitous decisions. Bonzano not only left the trees alone, but also took steps to make them known beyond his plantation.16 He applied to exhibit Antoine’s improved pecans at the Centennial Exposition, held in observance of the nation’s hundredth birthday, in the then booming city of Philadelphia. This event was a vibrant celebration of American innovation and Bonzano’s choice to showcase the fruits of Antoine’s labors there changed the history of pecan cultivation, leading not only to several awards but also to an official name for Antoine’s grafted improvement: the Centennial. History leaves no record as to the former slave gardener’s location—or whether he was even alive—when the nuts from the tree he grafted were praised by the nation’s leading agricultural experts for their “remarkably large size, tenderness of shell, and very special excellence.”
The fact nonetheless remained: the Centennial became the nation’s first improved, marketable, and widely disseminated pecan variety. Hundreds of other varieties would follow, but the Centennial led the way. As the Department of Agriculture noted in its 1904 Yearbook, “The Centennial is the first variety of pecan that was successfully propagated by budding or grafting. It was also the first variety planted in commercial orchard form, with a definite view of producing nuts for sale.” The text went on to describe the varietal’s signature qualities in the following terms:
Size large . . . form long, compressed cylindrical, gradually tapering to a wedge shaped apex; base conical, color bright grayish brown with rather scanty purplish splashes toward the apex; shell rather thick, partitions thin, cracking quality medium; kernel clear . . . of delicate texture and flavor, quality very good.17
Gates of change had opened for the pecan, which had finally, if only modestly, joined the ranks of grafted fruit. We must not forget that the wild pecan would continue to maintain many advantages, including reduced production costs and genetic diversity, but the improved pecan was now on the innovative pathway that the peach, the apple, and the plum had followed. As indicated, hundreds of other pecan varieties, each endowed with its own quirks and characteristics and, eventually, name, would follow. But the Centennial set this process in motion. The Centennial created a new course for pecans, pecan trees, and the American diet—eventually even the global diet—because the Centennial allowed growers to impose uniformity on diversity, predictability on chaos, commercialization on what had heretofore been a mostly foraged food.
The only reaction we have from Bonzano about the remarkable success of the Centennial was a brief “letter to the editor” he wrote to a Philadelphia paper that had reported on the grafted pecan nut’s impressive performance at the exhibition. Bonzano’s message could not have been more unexpressive or perfunctory: he wrote for the sole purpose of correcting the spelling of his name. Back in New Orleans, though, he was all business, pushing
his product at every turn, aggressively marketing the Centennial through a variety of venues. He hired his friend Richard Frotscher, who was yet another German immigrant, to help him spread the word about the Centennial throughout the South. Nobody was better qualified to do so. Frotscher was a well-known merchant and a credentialed horticulturalist (the Royal Horticulture School in Leipzig) who, after initially migrating to Pennsylvania, came to New Orleans to start a small nursery business. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s Frotscher’s advertisements for new and improved seeds and seedlings appeared weekly in southern newspapers. His well-regarded book Gardener’s Manual for the Southern States became a standard reference manual for professional and amateur growers alike. He was eager to help his friend.18
Horticulturalists and nurserymen were perhaps the biggest champions of grafting, for obvious reasons: grafted trees were critical for their business. Frotscher wanted to make money. Still, his enthusiasm for the Centennial was strong, so strong that not only did he promote it, but he spent considerable time educating consumers about the art and science of grafting, budding, and top-working pecans in order to pioneer other improved varieties. The idea was this: growers who were skeptical of grafted varieties (and most were) would, if they embraced improvement, have more choices and more flexibility than ever before. Eventually, Frotscher was so taken with improved pecans that he even created his own pecan varietal: Frotscher’s Eggshell. It became a moderately popular variety. “The variety,” remarked one analysis of the nut, “is precocious, productive, and succeeds over a wide range of country.” Given Frotscher’s reputation, the description seemed apt.19
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