by Jim Noles
Such facts failed to dissuade the Georgia General Assembly from declaring the peach Georgia’s “‘official fruit’—recognized for their wonderful flavor, texture, and appearance”—in 1995. Nor has it ever sparked the survivors of Lynyrd Skynyrd to rethink the band’s lyrical declaration in 1974’s “Call Me the Breeze”: “I dig you Georgia peaches—makes me feel right at home.”
Despite its third-place national ranking, the value of Georgia’s peach crop nevertheless topped $48 million in 2003. Relatively speaking, that sum paled in comparison to the Georgia figures for such agricultural commodities as tomatoes ($122 million) and was actually more in line with the values of Georgia’s cabbage and squash crops. But the “Cabbage State” lacks a certain ring to it, and it is likewise difficult to imagine calling a Southern belle a “Georgia squash.” And so, economic statistics aside, a Georgia peach will always be a Georgia peach, Georgia will always be the Peach State, and Lynyrd Skynyrd will still dig Georgia peaches—of one form or the other.
Georgia’s history with the peach, a fruit that dates back to China in the 5th Century BC, began in approximately 1571, when Franciscan monks introduced the fruit, in addition to artichokes, citrus, figs, olives, and onions, at Spain’s coastal missions running through St. Simon’s and Cumberland Islands. Thanks in large part to the Cherokee and Creek Indians, the peach tree worked its way west into the state’s interior, a fact noted by the famed naturalist William Bartram in the course of his travels across the Southeast at the time of the American Revolution. In fact, the land across which modern-day Atlanta sprawls was once referred to by the Indians as Standing Peach Tree, after a lone tree atop a hill overlooking the Chattahoochee River.
Although American and European settlers followed the Indians’ lead and began raising peaches in their own orchards, cotton remained king among Georgia’s crops. It was not until 1851 that men like Raphael Moses, a lawyer and planter in Columbus, envisioned a commercial market for Georgia’s peaches. Shortly thereafter, Macon nurseryman Robert Nelson shipped a box of Georgia peaches to New York in 1854, where the fruit sold for 50 cents a peach.
The promise of Northern markets, coupled with the realization— credited by many to Moses—that growers could successfully preserve the flavor of peaches by packing them in champagne baskets instead of in pulverized charcoal, spurred further exports. In the summer of 1858, a steamship departed Charleston stocked with thirty-four railroad cars’ worth of Georgia and South Carolina–grown peaches. Upon arrival in New York, the peaches sold for between $3 and $15 a bushel.
The Civil War, however, deflated the booming peach industry, and, for his part, peach promoter Raphael Moses turned his attention to the Confederate cause. Although already fifty years old, he served as General James Longstreet’s chief commissary officer and earned praise as “the best commissary officer of like rank in the Confederate service.” When Moses’ own death came on a business trip to Brussels, Belgium, in 1893, he was still carrying business cards that read, “Major Raphael J. Moses, CSA.”
By then, Georgia’s peach industry had recovered its antebellum promise, due in no small part to Samuel H. Rumph. In 1870, the Mar-shallville peach grower discovered a new, tastier, yellow-fleshed peach variety. Rumph named the new variety Elberta, after his wife. Devising cleverly partitioned packing crates and refrigerated railcars to keep his peaches fresh, Rumph helped ensure that his peaches would find hungry mouths outside of the state. Prosper J. A. Berckmans, a nurseryman who headed the Georgia State Horticultural Society, lent the society’s efforts to the cause. Berckmans Nursery is now the site of the Augusta National Golf Club.
The efforts of men such as Rumph, Berckmans, and their progeny paralleled socioeconomic shifts in Georgia’s agriculture that became more pronounced with each new generation. Cotton had long dominated the state as its premier cash crop. Cotton, however, not only placed harsh demands on Georgia’s soil and its rural labor force but was also susceptible to the infamous boll weevil.
The profitable peach, on the other hand, with its high yields on relatively small parcels of land, seemed to offer a promising alternative. Soon, sprawling orchards sprouted in Crawford, Peach, Taylor, and Macon Counties. Those counties lie far enough north to receive sufficient winter chilling for the trees to go seasonally dormant, but they are far enough south to avoid late frosts and guarantee early harvest dates.
Over the years, as its peach industry grew, Georgia’s inherent advantages in the production and marketing of the fruit became apparent. Proximity to the lucrative Northeastern and Midwestern markets was one. Favorable prices because of early harvests and high-quality fruit production was another. Buoyed by such factors, peach production in Georgia reached an all-time high of almost 8 million bushels by 1928.
The stock market crash of 1929, however, dealt Georgia’s peach industry a blow from which it never fully recovered. By 1935, the state was no longer the nation’s top peach producer. Today, the state’s peach production is slightly over one-third of the 1928 numbers, although it encompasses over forty varieties of the fruit—one of which found its way onto Georgia’s state quarter in 1999.
On that coin, the peach in question is centered within an outline of the state. A pair of live oak branches (the official state tree) frames the image, which is further adorned with a banner that proclaims the state’s motto: “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.”
In at least one sense, though, too much moderation proved a bad thing. Rather than depict the whole of Georgia, the quarter’s outline inexplicably cut out Dade County, in the far northwestern corner of the state. The omission was only the latest in a long series of slights suffered by Dade County over the years; for example, the mountainous county did not even have a reliable state highway connecting it to the rest of Georgia until 1948.
“The first I was ever aware that it looked that way was when an elderly gentleman showed [the quarter] to me,” said Deborah Tinker, the director of Dade County’s Chamber of Commerce. “He laughingly said he supposed Dade County was truly the “Independent State of Dade”—a reference to the county’s long-standing nickname.
Such issues of cartography aside, the quarter’s design evolved from five concepts developed by the Georgia Council on the Arts. Although Governor Zell Miller had the honor of selecting the final design in 1998, the unveiling of the quarter the following year fell to his gubernatorial successor, Governor Roy Barnes. “It perfectly depicts the grace and beauty of our state,” Barnes declared at the quarter’s launch ceremony in Atlanta on July 19, 1999. Whether or not Dade County’s citizens agreed that it was a “perfect depict[ion]” is unrecorded. Nearly 940 million Georgia state quarters later, the question is probably moot anyway.
For her part, the current Miss Georgia Peach finds no fault with the quarter’s design. She is Catheryn Shaw, originally of Perry, Georgia, and now a senior at Columbus State University. Crowned at the annual Peach Festival in Fort Valley, Shaw is, understandably, a staunch supporter of the quarter’s prominent peach.
“I’ve lived in Georgia all my life,” Shaw told me, “and peaches are such a big part of our state. After all, we’re the Peach State, even if California and South Carolina produce more peaches. It’s not a cliché. It’s a proud tradition and it fits us perfectly.”
All the same, today Georgia earns more than twice as much income from onions as it does from peaches. When I reminded her of that fact, Shaw simply laughed.
“I have a friend who is Miss Onion Capital,” she reflected, referring to a pageant based in Vidalia, Georgia. “But I don’t think I could ever bring myself to do that! I know onions are important, but it’s just not the same as Miss Georgia Peach.”
5
CONNECTICUT
An Oak Grows in Hartford
Connecticut’s state quarter offers an elegantly simple design. The coin’s reverse depicts a robust oak tree, its branches filling the quarter. “The Charter Oak,” the coin offers by way of explanation. But unlike the iconic image of Washington cr
ossing the Delaware displayed on the quarters of New Jersey, the lone tree requires more explanation.
The genesis of the image derives, more or less, from 1639. At the time, English settlement in the wide fertile valley that the local Pequot Indians called “Quinnehtukqut” consisted merely of three small, rival towns: Windsor, Wetherford, and Hartford. The travails of the bloody Pequot War, however, encouraged mutual defense and stoked further amity.
In 1639, their cooperation evolved into formal union as a single colonial endeavor, governed by the dictates of a document known as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Under these Fundamental Orders, the colonists established qualifications for voting (which, despite the colony’s Puritan ties to Massachusetts, did not expressly require church membership as a condition of suffrage) and elected their own governor and magistrates.
Buttressed by such democratic assurances, Connecticut’s settlers turned confidently to the task of carving a vibrant colony out of the American wilderness. Their numbers included Samuel Wyllys, who established a large estate near Hartford and wasted little time in clear-cutting his newly claimed land. At the behest of local Indians, however, he spared a majestic white oak, revered by them as a symbol of an ancient peace treaty forged by their ancestors. In those early days of Connecticut’s democracy, Wyllys could not imagine the role his oak—or his decision to spare it—would play in perpetuating that same democracy.
A generation later, in 1662, the bulwarks of Connecticut’s self-government grew even stronger. King Charles II granted the colony an unusual royal charter. Rather than establishing firm British control over the colony, as was the case with so many of the other colonial charters, this one affirmed the colonists’ ongoing political freedom and system of self-government as established by the Fundamental Orders. Not surprisingly, Connecticut’s settlers cherished their charter, and to a large extent, it stoked the feisty streak of independence that characterized the colony’s collection of small towns and settlements.
That same streak of independence ran headlong into the forces of history two decades later. King James II, seeking to consolidate his control over his North American colonies, merged Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine into a single province in 1686 under the rule of governor Sir Edmund Andros. This was the so-called Dominion of New England.
The fifty-year-old Andros was a stern, dictatorial, and short-tempered autocrat determined to oversee the dominion with an iron fist. As governor of New York several years earlier, he had failed in an attempt to expand his colony east into Connecticut when confronted with a defiant fort at Saybrook. Now, he thought, he had a golden opportunity to avenge his earlier humiliation as he archly ordered Connecticut’s governor, Robert Treat, to surrender his colony’s charter and send it to him in Boston.
Treat, however, had no such intention and firmly declined. In angry response, Andros mounted his steel-gray horse in late October 1687 and led a column of seventy scarlet-clad soldiers, armed to the teeth with muskets and pikes, to Hartford to seize the charter himself.
Andros’s chagrin only increased when his militant arrival failed to produce the immediate surrender of the charter. Confronted with the colonists’ intransigence but hesitant to resort to open violence, Andros fell into a heated debate at Moses Butler’s tavern with Governor Treat and an assorted collection of assemblymen and magistrates. Even as the daylight faded and temperatures cooled outside, the argument inside grew ever more heated as Andros threatened to totally dismember Connecticut, with all of the colony’s lands east of the Connecticut River to be annexed to Massachusetts and the western remainder to become part of New York. Resigned to enduring a lengthy debate, the tavern keeper lit a pair of candelabra to illuminate the scene.
Meanwhile, the subject of debate—the charter itself, which was housed in a box—was brought into the tavern. At that point, history merges, somewhat fuzzily, into legend—but the story, if one accepts the legend, becomes even more dramatic.
Upon the charter’s arrival in the tavern, Andrew Leete, of Guilford, rose to his feet and, gesticulating angrily, warned that “measures obtained by force do not endure.” Then, either by prearranged signal or purely by accident, Leete knocked over both candelabra, suddenly plunging the room into thick darkness. By the time they were lighted once more, the table was bare. Someone—some say Nathaniel Stanley, others John Talcott—had snatched the charter from under Andros’s very nose and, according to legend, passed it out the window to Captain Joseph Wadsworth.
Wadsworth, a middle-aged officer in the local militia and a first-generation American, was a resolute, practical man, well respected within the local colonial community but with scant patience for outside interference or officious arrogance. If there was a man capable of seizing the moment by seizing the charter, it was certainly Wadsworth.
As chaos erupted inside the tavern, Wadsworth darted across town, picking his way through the darkness to the Wyllys estate, where the charter had originally been stored. Clearly, however, An-dros would search the Wyllys’s home. A better hiding place had to be picked, and soon.
Fortunately, Ruth Wyllys offered a clever suggestion—to hide it in the ancient oak tree down the hill from the main house. Taking her advice, Wadsworth stuffed the charter, wrapped in his coat, into a crevice at the base of the tree. In doing so, he secured not only the charter but his own place in Connecticut’s historical lore. Some historians call his and his accomplices’ larceny the first act of civil disobedience in Britain’s North American colonies.
Despite Wadsworth’s good intentions, his seizure of the charter was little more than a symbolic gesture. Ignoring Hartford’s defiance, Andros proceeded to absorb Connecticut into the Dominion of New England’s autocratic fold. Nevertheless, Andros’s rule lasted little more than a year. When the Glorious Revolution deposed James II in England, Andros’s own days were numbered. A coup d’état toppled his regime shortly after James lost the throne, and in 1689, Connecticut’s charter was restored. After a brief intermission in England, Andros returned to North America to govern the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, albeit with scarcely more success.
Meanwhile, as the years passed, the charter’s erstwhile hiding place became known as the “Charter Oak.” Already ancient in Wadsworth’s time, it stood for another 150 years before being toppled by a ferocious storm on August 21, 1856. That same day, Hartford draped an American flag over the splintered trunk and placed an honor guard around the tree’s shattered remains. Colt’s Band of Hartford performed a solemn funeral dirge and, as the day drew to an end, all of the city’s church bells chimed in mourning.
Such sentiment soon gave way to souvenir hunting. Before long, wood from the oak was being used to fashion a variety of keepsakes, including the chair used by the Speaker of the House in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Confronted with the multitude of such relics when he came to live in Hartford fifteen years later, Mark Twain declared that there were so many of them that they could all be lumped together and used as supports for the city’s Charter Oak Bridge over the Connecticut River.
Twain’s cynicism aside, the oak remained firmly rooted in the hearts and minds of Connecticut’s population as a living symbol of their rights as free citizens. The development of a design for Connecticut’s state quarter provided ample proof of the felled oak’s staying power. Of 112 design concepts submitted in 1998 in response to a statewide contest, nineteen featured renditions of the Charter Oak. The Connecticut Commission on the Arts selected five of those submissions and forwarded them to the U.S. Mint. The Mint returned three designs to Governor John Rowland for the state’s ultimate consideration.
In response, the Connecticut Commemorative Coin Design Competition Review Committee, with the governor’s approval, unanimously selected the final design, conceived by W. Andy Jones, currently an art professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Because of Jones’s work, and that of U.S. Mint engraver Jim Ferrell, on October 7, 1999, the Charter Oak grew once
more—this time on the state’s quarter as the first Connecticut quarter was struck. Over 1.3 billion would follow.
Ironically, that massive quantity stands in marked contrast to Captain Wadsworth’s financial remuneration for his good deed. In 1715, Connecticut’s General Court awarded the daring Captain Wadsworth the sum of twenty shillings “upon consideration of faithful and good service . . . especially in securing the . . . charter, in a very troublesome season, when our constitution was struck at.” Converted into modern U.S. currency, that amount would be approximately $225—or 900 Connecticut state quarters.
6
MASSACHUSETTS
Just a Minute
In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson penned “The Concord Hymn.” To commemorate the Revolutionary War battles at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Emerson wrote of “embattled farmers” firing “the shot heard ’round the world” and sacrificing their lives to “leave their children free.” Two hundred and twenty-four years later, a pair of Massachusetts schoolchildren recognized that same birthright when they submitted the winning design concept for Massachusetts’ state quarter. Their design focused on Concord’s famed Minuteman Statue, which stands by the village’s North Bridge.
The bronze Minuteman Statue should not be confused with Lexington’s statue, which some historical purists stress is not really a statue of a “minuteman” at all, because it represents a member of a force that insisted on calling itself militia. Concord’s statue, however, does indeed depict a minuteman, with a plow at his feet to remind the viewer of his livelihood and a musket in his hand to demonstrate his martial defiance.