The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  4. D. H. Usner, “A Cycle of Lowland Forest Efficiency: The Late-Archaic Woodland Economy of the Lower Mississippi,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 434–437; Lyman Carrier, The Beginnings of Agriculture in America (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), 1–15; http://hubpages.com/hub/Food-native-to-the-Americas-part-2-a-little-less-known. The brewery is the Abita Brewery.

  5. John C. Kricher and Gordon Morrison, A Field Guide to Eastern Forests: North America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998), 107.

  6. http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/our_offices/research_stations/Pecan/Features/Pecan_FAQs/index_seriespage-7.htm.

  7. For Native American adherence to the cycles of their ecological systems, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); also see Paul A. Delcourt and Hazel R. Delcourt, Prehistoric Native Americans and Ecological Change: Human Ecosystems in Eastern North America since the Pleistocene (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  8. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America,” 107.

  9. Flack, “The Spread and Domestication of the Pecan,” 55–58.

  10. Jane Manaster, Pecans: The Story in a Nutshell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994; republished by Texas Tech University Press, 2008), 14.

  11. Larry N. Brown, “Sex Ratio Bias among Grey Squirrels Foraging at a Single Attractive Seasonal Food Source,” Journal of Mammalogy 67, no. 3 (1986): 582–583.

  12. Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 128.

  13. William E. Hoffmann, “The Relation of the Crow to Pecan Culture,” Wilson Bulletin 36, no. 4 (1924): 180–182.

  14. S. B. Vander Wall, “The Evolutionary Ecology of Nut Dispersal,” Botanical Review 67, no. 1 (January-March 2001): 80–95.

  15. T. R. Adkins, “The Red-headed Woodpecker Occasionally Wintering in Alabama,” Wilson Bulletin 38, no. 3 (1926): 161.

  16. L. E. Yeager and R. G. Rennels, “Fur Yields and Autumn Food of the Raccoons in Illinois River Bottomlands,” Journal of Wildlife Management 7 (1943): 45–52.

  17. John K. Strecker, “Notes on the Texas Cotton and Attwater Wood Rats in Texas,” Journal of Mammalogy 100, no. 3 (1929): 216–220.

  18. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential,” 108.

  19. J. D. Speth and K. A. Speilmann, “Energy Source, Protein Metabolism, and Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Strategies,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 2, no. 1 (1983): 1–31; William Caire, Jack D. Tyler, Bryan P. Glass, and Michael A. Mares, Mammals of Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989); Hall, “Pecan Food Potential,” 110.

  20. Joshua Gorman, “Building a Nation: Chickasaw Museums and the Construction of History and Heritage” (PhD diss., University of Memphis, 2009).

  CHAPTER 2

  1. The classic text on this topic is Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972).

  2. Alan Davidson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 592.

  3. Jeff Ball, “The Tasty Pecan,” American Forests 107, no. 3, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1016/is_3_107/ai_84053639/.

  4. Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, 833.

  5. Edward Wilber Berry, Notes on the Geological History of the Walnuts and Hickories (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914).

  6. Andrew Jackson Downing, The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1859), 261.

  7. Patrick Malcolm, “History of Walnuts,” http://thephantom writers.com/free_content/db/m/history-of-walnuts.shtml; Oscar Binner, Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, vol. 11 (Burbank: CA: Burbank Society, 1915), 144.

  8. Charles Henry Snow, The Principal Species of Wood: Their Characteristic Properties (New York: Wiley, 1908), 57; Daily Gazette, January 28, 1874; R. Sidney Boone, Donna Christensen, and Debra Squire, “Wood Species Guide,” Furniture Design and Manufacturing (December 1988); http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/carill/all.html.

  9. Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  10. Rodney Howard True, “Notes on the Early History of the Pecan in America,” in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents, 72 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1919); Cecil Gregg, Pecans for Central Texas: The Establishment, Management, and Care of Pecans in the Area of San Marcos, Texas (San Marcos: Southwest Texas State University Press, 1975), 1.

  11. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America,” 107.

  12. Ibid.; True, “Notes,” 139; Manaster, Pecans, 16.

  13. William C. Foster and Jack Jackson, eds., “The 1693 Expedition of Governor Salinas Varona to Sustain the Missionaries among the Tejas Indians,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 97 (October 1993): 286, 288, 289.

  14. True, “Notes,” 439–440.

  15. J. J. McVey, Bartram’s Garden (Philadelphia: John Bartram Association, 1907), 13; William P. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States: Embracing Native and Introduced Species (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896); also see Nancy Hoffmann and John C. Van Horne, America’s Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Appraisal of John Bartram, 1699–1777 (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 2004).

  16. True, “Notes,” 441.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ulysses P. Hedrick and Elizabeth Woodburn, A History of Horticulture in America to 1860 (Portland: Timber Press, 1988), 204.

  19. True, “Notes,” 446; “Savannah Grown Pecans,” October 29, 1886; http://www.mountvernon.org/visit/plan/index.cfm/pid/642/; Ulysses P. Hedrick, A History of Horticulture in America to 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 163.

  20. Hedrick, A History of Horticulture (1950), 81.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Quoted in Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 253.

  2. Christopher Davies, “Life at the Edge: Urban and Industrial Evolution of Texas, Frontier Wilderness—Frontier Space, 1836–1986,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (April 1986): 443–554.

  3. Vera Lea Dugas, “Texas Industry, 1860–1880,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59, no. 2 (October 1955): 172.

  4. Williams, Americans and Their Forests, 240–250.

  5. Robin W. Doughty, “Settlement and Environmental Change in Texas, 1820–1900,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89, no. 4 (April 1986): 424, 429; also see Mark Cowell, “Presettlement Piedmont Forests: Patterns of Composition and Disturbance in Central Georgia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85, no. 1 (March 1995): 61–83.

  6. “From Texas,” Freeman and Messenger, November 17, 1940, newspaperarchive.com, accessed March 24, 2011.

  7. W. Kendall, “Texas,” New York Times, October 13, 1858; Davies, “Life at the Edge,” 451.

  8. Arkansas Daily Gazette, July 15, 1875.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Clarence Arthur Reed, The Pecan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), 12.

  11. Arkansas Daily Gazette, July 15, 1875.

  12. Walter B. Stevens, Through Texas: A Series of Interesting Letters (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Southwestern Railway, 1892), 90.

  13. Ibid.; Terry Cae, “Pecans and Cotton,” Dallas Morning News, October 10, 1889.

  14. William Keith Guthrie, “Flood Alley: An Environmental History of Flooding in Texas” (PhD diss., University of Kansas), 13.

  15. Stuart Pecan Company, “The Pecan and How to Grow It” (Chicago: Women’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1893), 18; “Pecans Profiting Oklahoma Farms,” Christian Science Monitor, December 26, 1925, 5B; Flack, “The Spread and Domestication of the Pecan,” 20.

  16. Aurora and Franklin Gazette, February 18, 1825; Rhode Island American, December 3, 1818; Galveston News, Ja
nuary 8, 1874; Arkansas Democrat, August 26, 1899.

  17. Amos Andrew Parker, Trip to the West and Texas (Concord, NH: William White, 1835), 176; Oran M. Roberts, A Description of Texas: Its Advantages and Resources (St. Louis, MO: Gilbert Book Company, 1881), 31; “Pecans, North,” San Antonio Express, November 18, 1873, 3; Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide (Dallas: Belo and Company, 1904), accessed through Google eBooks.

  18. Milwaukee Sentinel, “Hard Times in Texas,” October 14, 1842; Stevens, Through Texas, 90; The Missionary Chronicle (Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1847).

  19. Reed, The Pecan, 22.

  20. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 53; Charles Sealsfield, The Cabin Book, or Sketches of Lives in Texas (London: J. Winchester, 1844), chapter 3; Walter B. Stevens, “Letter from Texas,” Carroll County Times, March 23, 1877.

  21. “Tree Planting,” Daily Gazette, September 28, 1869; St. Louis Inquirer, June 2, 1819; Kendall, “Texas”; Jeff Ball, “The Tasty Pecan,” 46; Clint Crowe, War in the Nations: The Devastation of a Removed People during the American Civil War (PhD diss., University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, 2004).

  22. “Girl Picks Nuts by Balloon,” New York Times, November 9, 1902.

  23. “Siftings,” Galveston News, October 23, 1880; “Pecans,” San Antonio Express, November 9, 1869; ibid., November 27, 1869; “Thieves at Work,” Times Picayune, October 17, 1886; Sealsfield, The Cabin Book; “Pecans,” Houston Telegraph, October 12, 1848.

  24. “Pecan Industry,” The Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dip02.

  25. “Savannah Grows Pecans,” Charleston Mercury, November 7, 1856; San Antonio Express, November 2, 1867; ibid., October 29, 1969; Times Picayune, December 3, 1865; San Antonio Express, October 30, 1867; San Francisco Bulletin, November 23, 1869; San Antonio Express, November 12, 1869; Columbia Daily Enquirer, December 20, 1877; San Antonio Express, November 13, 1970; ibid., December 6, 1870; Dallas Morning News, October 17, 1889.

  26. Luther Burbank, How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man, vol. 8 (New York: F.F. Collier and Son, 1914), 20.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 57; John Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82.

  2. Kingsbury, Hybrid, 25.

  3. Ken Mudge, Jules Janick, Steven Scofield, and Elienzer E. Gold-schmidt, “A History of Grafting,” Horticultural Reviews 35 (2009): 439.

  4. Ibid.

  5. F. W. Brison, American Nut Journal (September 1923): 52.

  6. http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/p/pecan2.htm.

  7. F. W. Brison, “Variations in Pecans,” Journal of Heredity 13, no. 8 (1922), in “pecan excerpts” file.

  8. Aaron de Groft, “Eloquent Vessels/Poetics of Power: The Heroic Stoneware of ‘Dave the Potter,’” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 249–260.

  9. http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/carya/pecans/Centennial.htm

  10. http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G6971. Thomas Fessenden, The Complete Farmer and Rural Economist (New York: C. M. Saxton, 1851), 147.

  11. R. B. Hayes and Guy M. Bryan, “The Bryan-Hayes Correspondence, XVII,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 19, no. 2 (October 1925): 151–156.

  12. Ibid., 151; “Death of Abner Landrum,” Charleston Courier, April 7, 1859; Charlotte Cassels, “Pottery Works Are Art Form,” Aiken Standard, October 5, 1978, 8; de Groft, “Eloquent Vessels/Poetics of Power.”

  13. http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/carya/pecans/Centennial.htm.

  14. Works Project Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, released October 5, 2004, www.gutenberg.org/files/13602/13602-h/13602-h.htm, accessed April 20, 2011.

  15. W. A. Taylor, “Promising New Fruits,” in Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, ed. George William Hall (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904).

  16. “Death of Hubert Bonzano,” Times Picayune, February 1, 1891.

  17. Yearbook of the Usda, 1904 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1905), 406.

  18. “Richard Frotscher: Death of the Leading Horticulturalist and Useful Citizen,” Daily Picayune, February 3, 1986.

  19. H. Harold Hume, The Pecan and Its Culture (published by author, 1910), 138.

  20. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 50.

  21. Ibid., 52.

  22. Reed, The Pecan, 12.

  23. Ibid., 20. The general topic of scientific farming, and its social implications, has a rich historiography. One should consult the following books for an overview: Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); and Philip J. Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  24. F. M. Burnette, William Carter Stubbs, and Harcourt Alexander Morgan, Pecans (Louisiana State Board of Agriculture, 1902), 851.

  25. “California Booms Pecan Industry,” Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1922.

  26. “Industrial Notes,” Daily Evening Bulletin, June 30, 1868; “Tree Planting in Our Valleys,” Daily Evening Bulletin, September 29, 1869; “Budding Pecans upon the Hickory,” New Orleans Times, May 9, 1875; Isabel K. Billings, “Pecan Industry in the United States,” Economic Geography 22, no. 3 (1946): 220.

  27. “Pecans and English Walnuts,” Macon Telegraph, October 7, 1887; “Pecans in Georgia,” Macon Telegraph, October 24, 1886.

  28. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 51, 53.

  29. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (Philosophical Library, 1968), 34.

  30. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 54.

  31. “The Pecan Tree and Nut,” Daily Gazette, March 25, 1870; “Nut Trees for Shade,” Hinds County Gazette, February 8, 1872; “Plant Trees,” Daily Gazette, January 28, 1874; “Savannah Grown Pecans,” November 5, 1875; Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 50. As late as 1902 a popular publication on the nation’s pecan cultivation could report as a matter of fact that “all of the older pecan groves are seedlings”; Burnette et al., Pecans, 852.

  32. Elmer L. Callihan, “Texas Is Going Nutty,” Texas Monthly 5, no. 4 (1930): 432.

  33. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 57.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. National Pecan Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the National Pecan Growers Association (Author, 1926), 91.

  2. Burnette et al., Pecans, 851.

  3. George W. Oliver, Budding the Pecan (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), 10.

  4. G. M. Bacon, Illustrated Catalogue And Price-list Of Grafted, Budded And Choice Seedling Papershell Pecans And Other Nut-bearing Trees: With A Treatise On Pecan Culture (self-published, 1902), 17.

  5. Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 55.

  6. Ibid., 56.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Callihan, “Texas Is Going Nutty,” 433.

  9. Ibid., 435–441.

  10. Clarence Arthur Reed, Pecan Culture: With Special Reference to Propagation and Varieties (usda, 1916), 8.

  11. James E. McWilliams, American Pests: America’s War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 95–96.

  12. Ibid., 40–45.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Bacon, Illustrated Catalogue, 6.

  15. M. R. Osborn, Insects and Diseases of the Pecan and Their Control, usda Bulletin 1829: 1940 (Washington, DC: usda, 1954).

  16. Ibid.

  17. Callihan, “Texas Is Going Nutty,” 441.

  18. James Gieson, Boll Weevil Blues (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

  19. Callihan, “Texas Is Going Nut
ty,” 441; F.W. Brison, “The Pecan Crop,” Journal of Heredity 13 (1922): 5.

  20. E. E. Risien, “Eastern v. Western Pecans,” Bulletin of the Texas Department of Agriculture 8 (1909); Corsa, Nut Culture in the United States, 58.

  21. “The Improved Pecan,” McIntosh County Democrat, July 21, 1927.

  22. “Texas Farm News,” Texas Monthly.

  23. “Interest in Pecan Culture Increases,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1920; “Arizona Man Finds Pecans Good ‘Game,’” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1928; “South Carolina Harvests Pecans,” Christian Science Monitor, November 11, 1932.

  24. Pecan and Its Culture, 12; Bacon, Illustrated Catalogue, 15.

  25. H. A. Halrert, “The Edible Nuts of Texas,” Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide 8 (1904): 6.

  26. Helen King, “Haven’t We a Place for the Pecan?” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1929.

  27. National Pecan Growers Association, Report, 83.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).

  2. William Henry Chandler, North American Orchards (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1928), 12.

  3. H. P. Stuckey and Edwin Jackson Kyle, Pecan Growing (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), 51–57.

  4. Ibid., 55–60.

  5. Ibid., 108–109.

  6. National Pecan Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the National Pecan Growers Association (Author, 1926), 139.

  7. Stuckey and Kyle, Pecan Growing, 112.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid., 116; “Pecans,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1931, and April 12, 1931.

  10. Manaster, Pecans, 24; Jane Manaster, The Pecan Tree (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

  11. Robert Tomsho, “Pecan Industry Finds Getting Organized Is Driving It Nuts,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1994.

  12. Manaster, Pecans, 50.

  13. National Pecan Growers Association, Report, 112.

  14. Ibid., 120–122, 144.

  15. Ibid.

  16. New York Times, December 19, 1942; Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 1938; New York Times, October 12, 1937; New York Times, July 22, 1939; Wall Street Journal, October 28, 1937.