In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

57 i Three j ThoreauSitsonaPumpkin The Making of a Rural New En­ gland Icon, 1800 to 1860 T aste—that is, the quality of its meat—was the least likely reason pumpkin became a dessert. Indeed, when most Americans in the early republic sat down to a meal, they did not expect to find pumpkin on their plates. With increasing national prosperity and a greater number and variety of foods available, most Americans could afford to be more particular about what they ate. While they continued to keep winter and summer squashes a part of dinner fare and as a valuable commodity in the marketplace, many people dropped varieties known as pumpkins as daily sustenance. Although little market existed for pumpkins , some farmers kept them in production for livestock fodder, “adding to the solid comfort of barnyard dependents,” as one Maryland farmer remarked in 1837.1 A farmer from Massachusetts summed up the everwidening gap perceived between a pumpkin and a squash: “It is considered with us that the Winter Squash is not a substitute for pumpkins in our section of the country. The squash is accounted a valuable vegetable for the table, and is also used for pies. The pumpkins I raised for the use of my cows and fatting cattle. They increase and enrich the milk, whether for cheese or butter.”2 The seemingly innocuous ways in which Americans began to distinguish pumpkins from squashes tell a much deeper story of how they experienced and thought about the transformations going on all around them in American society. Although the United States population remained mostly rural through the end of the nineteenth century, the development 58 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin of manufacturing in the Northeast, of more extensive national and international markets, and of larger transportation and communication networks , along with the rise in European immigration, impelled dramatic growth in urban centers.3 The advent of mechanized agriculture and the opening up of western land to American settlement increased the average farm size and revolutionized farm work. These larger economic and technological transformations helped inspire new recipes and new attitudes toward the foods that people ate. To figure out why and how a pumpkin began to mean something different from a squash requires connecting the crops’ physical attributes, market status, and pragmatic and playful uses. The botanical names C. pepo, C. maxima, C. moschata, and C. ovifera had little to do with the ways most people thought about and used pumpkins and squashes. Adding to the age-old confusion over the cucurbit family was the introduction of new varieties, such as the warty, football-shaped Hubbard squash, the huge mammoth pumpkin (both C. maxima), the oblong, orange Nantucket pumpkin, and the green autumn marrow squash (both C. pepo), that fell into the same Linnaean botanical classifications.4 “Their common names have so multiplied,” a writer in the Southern Planter complained, “that a farmer wishing to grow some for his stock, or his table, can hardly tell what to ask for at the seed stores, or what will be the character of this crop when obtained.”5 Taste and use were truer indicators of the differences between a squash and a pumpkin than botanical species. If people cooked it for dinner, they most likely called it a squash, whether the vegetable was categorized as Cucurbita pepo or Cucurbita maxima. The names of new squash varieties denoted culinary appeal, as in the case of the custard squash, or respected status, as in the case of the Commodore Porter Valparaiso squash, which The Farmer’s Cabinet called “the best of its species.”6 The custard squash, with its round, ribbed shape, is a dead ringer for a pumpkin by today’s standards, but nineteenth-century seed catalogs categorized it as a squash, presumably because people ate it. Publications still referred to some old varieties, such as the winter crookneck, or cushaw, which has buff skin and a long curved neck, as both pumpkin and squash, suggesting that the lines people drew between the two were still a bit blurry. Determining that a squash was actually something different from a pumpkin broke with earlier traditions, in which the utility of one was indistinguishable from Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 59 that of the other. This shift forces one to recognize yet again that the present -day habit of defining a pumpkin or squash simply by its appearance is more ideological and less rational than we might ordinarily assume. The rapid growth of cities created an equally dramatic rise in consumer demand for food, leading many farmers in the Northeast to reorient their production toward urban markets.7 Writing in The Market Assistant in 1867, Thomas DeVoe stated, “It is not many years ago when the suburbs— or say twenty miles around the City of New York—from Long Island, Westchester, and New York counties, and New Jersey, furnished the city with a plentiful and cheap supply of vegetables.”8 Improvements in roads and the introduction of canals in the early 1800s eased access between towns and their hinterlands. Markets for many perishables, such as dairy products and fresh fruits and vegetables, as DeVoe noted, remained local until the railroad dramatically altered the scale of farming and market access after mid-century. Despite the great influx of immigrants, the American diet retained its Anglo-Saxon biases.9 Americans continued to eat a lot of meat, with beef the most popular and pork the most common type they consumed. Fruits and vegetables became more important parts of meals because of new ideas regarding nutrition and also the increased availability of produce due to production and processing innovations. Sugar and wheat, once upper-class indulgences, became common stock in kitchen cupboards as the price of sugar beets, sugar cane, and wheat declined.10 As a result, Americans heartily consumed sweet pies, cakes, and candies. With improved sanitation, water became safer to drink, and so the consumption of beer and cider as daily beverages—though certainly not as social drinks—declined. Lager beers became the draft drink of choice, and pumpkin brews went the way of homespun.11 In keeping with colonial cooking traditions, squash recipes in earlynineteenth -century cookbooks usually called for boiling or baking the vegetable and then mashing it into a savory side dish. For “winter squash or cushaw,” Miss Leslie’s 1854 Complete Cookery recommended, “Pare it, take out the seeds, cut it in pieces, and stew it slowly till quite soft, in a very little water. Afterwards drain, squeeze, and press it well, and mash it with a very little butter, pepper and salt.”12 Ironically, while squash held onto the colonial culinary traditions that once applied to all forms of pumpkins and squashes, it lost the earlier meanings. Because it had more 60 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin flavorful meat, people ate it on a regular basis, which made it economically viable in the marketplace and a product of urban as well as rural homes. As most winter and summer squash varieties acquired respectability as a food and a commodity, they lost their power as a sign of nature and an oldfashioned , primitive way of life. They were too much a part of the modern , everyday world. The pumpkin was different. Because the pumpkin—the field pumpkin in particular—became divorced from the expanding marketplace and retained its association with the subsistence farm economy, it remained a powerful symbol of nature and of people living on the edge of civilization, the symbolism long associated with all forms of squash. Popular names for pumpkins reflected the cultural associations that differentiated them from squashes. In contrast to the distinguished Commodore Porter Valparaiso squash were the Jonathan pumpkin and the possum-nosed pumpkin , which evoked images of an unsophisticated country bumpkin and a down-and-out way of life. Jonathan was a nickname for a country rube and was used to poke fun at Americans, specifically New En­ glanders.13 In defense of the pumpkin, the New En­ gland Farmer complained about the biases against the plant: “We believe this crop is more neglected than it ought to be. Whether this is owing to the old cant phrase of ‘Brother Jonathan and Pumpkin pie,’ used by our transatlantic brethren we know not.”14 The possum-nosed pumpkin got its name from the opossum, a large white rodent stereotyped as a dirty animal because it ate household trash. The animals might have scavenged the compost heaps where pumpkins propagated. By identifying the pumpkin with the seamier sides of the natural world and the country, Americans drew a picture of a way of life that communicated as much about their own cultural attitudes toward nature and rural living as it did about the vegetable itself. Farming changed broadly and profoundly in the nineteenth century, but most of the great agricultural innovations bypassed the field pumpkin .15 New machines, first horse-drawn and then steam-powered, aided the plowing of fields and quickened and refined the seeding, hoeing, and harvesting of wheat and other cash crops. Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, John Deere’s steel plow, and Eli Whitney’s cotton gin increased the outputs of the most profitable crops and compressed farm chores from weeks of manual labor into hours. Developments in biological and botanical sciences encouraged the use of fertilizers and crop rotation in the hope Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 61 of increasing yields per acre of wheat, tobacco, and cotton. The geographical distribution of American agriculture also changed. Wheat farming moved west to the Great Plains with the expanding settlement of European immigrants and the displacement of American Indian populations. The southern economy continued to rely heavily on enslaved laborers to produce cotton, rice, and tobacco. New experimental crop varieties and agricultural practices were exhibited at agricultural fairs, discussed in farm journals, and disseminated through seed catalogs. The first agricultural fair took place in Massachusetts in 1818, and by the turn of the next century most states and many counties were holding annual exhibitions to display the newest developments in the agricultural sciences and the most impressive specimens of plants, animals, and domestic arts.16 Yet fairs were as much places of entertainment as of business. According to Susan Fenimore Cooper in her 1850 memoir of life in New En­ gland, “Neither the circus, nor menagerie , nor election, has collected so many people as the fair.”17 Organizations such as the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture and leading horticulturists such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Thomas Fessenden published journals dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of agricultural knowledge.18 Downing’s Horticulturalist and Fessenden’s American Agriculturalist were both national and regional in scope, and they openly exchanged and duplicated articles and information from competing publications. Articles and letters from Maine Farmer and New En­ gland Farmer routinely appeared in the Maryland-based American Farmer and the Buckeye state’s Ohio Cultivator. Like the fairs, the journals were sites for the exchange of jokes and social commentary as much as scientific data. The expansion of commercial nurseries, greenhouses , and seed companies in the early 1800s can be measured by the exponential growth in the number of seed catalogs published and the increasing thickness of each new annual issue.19 Pages devoted to each of the lucrative varieties of potatoes, onions, peas, strawberries, apples, pears, and peaches commonly outnumbered pages describing the pumpkin by more than two to one. The field pumpkin was a secondary crop in every respect. While farmers shipped grains overseas and trucked fresh produce by wagon into towns, for the most part they left pumpkins behind on the farm. “Parsnips and winter squashes must be retailed,” noted one farmer in 1835, but 62 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin “pumpkins in any quality would not sell for anything.”20 Although the pumpkin had value in the farm economy as a cheap addition to livestock feed, it lacked the monetary value of the food crops that farmers sold to urban dwellers for home consumption. One clear reflection of the disparity value in pumpkins and squashes was the price of seeds. Seed catalogs usually listed the cost of squash seeds by the ounce, and that of pumpkin seeds by the quart. Thomas Dunlap’s 1852 catalog advertised seeds for cheese pumpkins (for domestic consumption) for 12.5 cents an ounce and Connecticut field pumpkin seeds for 37.5 cents a quart.21 The 1856 Transactions of the State Agricultural Society of Michigan reported that the “best winter squash” was worth 75 cents and the “best and largest pumpkin” just 25 cents. Similarly, it valued four squash at 50 cents total and three sweet pumpkins at 25 cents.22 Attempts to garner surplus wealth from the pumpkin never materialized . In 1819, after a visit to a German farmer in Indiana, one entrepreneur proposed marketing pumpkin seed oil. “Instead of throwing away or giving to the pigs the seeds of their pumpkins,” he suggested using them “for all the purposes of lamp oil and olive [oil].”23 A year later a British man wrote that he found pumpkin oil “good to use on the axletrees of carriages . . . to prevent friction” and good as a lamp oil because it produced a nice light.24 Although the entrepreneur projected that “two millions of gallons of such oil could be made annually in the United States,” few American farmers, if any, seem to have taken his hook and produced pumpkin oil “on a large scale and for economic uses.”25 Most references to pumpkin oil production appear in domestic advice books, which recommend making the oil as an economical substitute for other oils or as a remedy for tapeworms. The pumpkin’s best attribute was that it produced large yields with little effort. “I presume there is not a vegetable on the face of the earth more easily raised, or that is more productive, when it is considered that they will grow among corn, potatoes, or on any waste of ground, and that the seed of one pumpkin will produce cartloads of fruit,” remarked a farmer from New York.26 Farmers from such diverse states as Ohio, Massachusetts , California, Connecticut, Michigan, Tennessee, New York, Maryland, Maine, and Louisiana raised pumpkins. Many sang the pumpkin ’s praises for improving the color and quality of milk and butter and for fattening hogs and cows before the traditional fall slaughter. “For early Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 63 feed for hogs and milch cows they are excellent, contributing to the condition of the first and to the milk of the last in an eminent degree,” attested one grower.27 Others were less than enthusiastic. Some farmers believed pumpkins made poor fodder because they were too watery and insufficiently nutritious.28 Although distinctions between some varieties of pumpkins and squashes were still inexact, no one mistook the orange field pumpkin for a squash. The botanist Fearing Burr identified the qualities that made it the quintessential pumpkin: “The term ‘pumpkin’ . . . as popularly understood, includes only the few varieties of the Common New En­ gland Pumpkin that have been long grown in fields in an extensive but somewhat neglectful manner.”29 “Extensive” and “neglectful” describe both the natural proclivities of the field pumpkin and its diminished status as a crop. According to the 1843 edition of John Douglas’s seed catalog, the field pumpkin was the “greatest bearer” among all pumpkins and squashes and the poorest tasting of the lot.30 Farmers cultivated the variety beyond the colonial period less because it was a popular delicacy than because it was cheap, prolific, and required little effort to produce. It was, in other words, a “good, old-fashioned” pumpkin, according to the March 1850 American Agriculturist—a holdover from the past, the antithesis of innovation.31 The yellow field pumpkin became the pumpkin—the one artists would paint, poets would laud, and holiday rituals would honor— because it embodied a sense of natural exuberance and an archaic, rural way of life like no other. It defined pumpkinness, and its reputation crept into the names of other produce. An apple variety known as “Pumpkin Sweet,” for example, was “little valued, large and showy.”32 The field pumpkin’s natural productivity and lack of economic worth affected the way farmers handled it. In keeping with American Indian and colonial traditions, pumpkins were most commonly propagated in a field of corn or other crops.33 Farmers probably interplanted pumpkins with other crops because land was too valuable and the return on pumpkins too small to devote an entire field to their production. Some farmers, however, created separate one- to two-acre pumpkin patches, because of their misgivings that the pumpkin plants might disturb the more valuable grains and produce.34 One farmer mentioned that the pumpkin interfered with his plow and was a nuisance to any sort of mechanized farming.35 Another planted his pumpkins in areas “so full of grubs and roots as not 64 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin to admit the plough.”36 Farmers continued to propagate pumpkins in compost and manure heaps, bringing some usefulness to otherwise idle dumps. The seed seller John Douglas used this as a selling point, advertising the fact that pumpkins were “well-adapted for raising on wastelands .”37 This tradition only exacerbated the pumpkin’s lowly reputation. Because the pumpkin grew almost free of labor in fields cultivated for other purposes, some farmers called it a “stolen crop.”38 Many wrote to journals with testimonies to the pumpkin’s prolific production rate and volume of output, telling how hundreds of fruits had developed from a seed dropped “accidentally” in a field and how plants had produced great quantities of fruit “without any particular care” or “with no attention whatsoever.”39 “I happened to be hoeing round a pumpkin vine,” explained one character in a story published in New En­gland Farmer, “and was about to dig it up, when the old man said, ‘Stephen, don’t dig it up, my son, let it grow, and see what it will eventually become.’ I obeyed, of course, yet could see nothing so very wonderful about it.”40 The young man’s antipathy toward the pumpkin’s ability to grow like a weed, and the old man’s enthusiasm for the same trait, communicates the idea that the pumpkin was a thing of the past and not fully domesticated. The almost unbelievable testimonials to the pumpkin’s production make vivid why people were fascinated with the vegetable and why it gained such symbolic import. One farmer reported that four acres planted with pumpkins yielded “thirty-three ox cart and wagon loads, containing 4427 large pumpkins, and one wagon load of small and broken ones.”41 Another extolled, “On gathering the crop, I counted 1076 sound pumpkins . . . making 53,858 lbs. per acre.”42 Under the heading “Enormous Product,” an article in New En­ gland Farmer reported, “Mr. Moses Holden, of Barre, raised, this season, from a single seed, 34 pumpkins, weighing 653 lbs. that the aggregate length of the different branches of the vine was 636 feet.”43 Although most farmers corresponding with American Farmer measured their pumpkin crops by the size of a plant’s entire production, the most talked-about marvel was the mammoth variety, which produced fruits weighing more than one hundred pounds. Although its weight and girth meant that one mammoth alone could feed practically a herd of cattle, the variety served little purpose beyond giving a farmer bragging rights. A mammoth was, as one seed catalog noted, “cultivated as a matter Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 65 of curiosity more than from its merit.”44 These monstrous vegetables supposedly date back to Mayan times, and they began to appear regularly in seed catalogs in the nineteenth century. In 1822 Samuel Deane, in his book New En­ gland Farmer, noted that “a new and very large species of pumpkin has lately been introduced into this country, of which it is said more than five hundred pounds can be raised from a single seed”—which suggests that the mammoth pumpkin started to become popular in the early 1800s.45 The propagation of the mammoth moved the pumpkin toward its identity as a show crop, a visual wonder more than a meaty morsel. Classified botanically in the genus C. maxima, the type was called variously the “mammoth pumpkin,” “mammoth squash,” “big pumpkin,” and “largest squash yet.”46 Perhaps because farmers specified no distinct purpose for the mammoth variety for either livestock feed or dinner fare, nor identified any viable botanical trait to distinguish it as a pumpkin or a squash, early nineteenth-century sources were not concerned about classifying it as one or the other, as later generations of giant pumpkin growers would be. The mammoth epitomizes the pumpkin’s awesome nature. “This is, indeed, a huge and ponderous vegetable,” exclaimed an article about a 116-pounder.47 Farm journals and seed catalogs endlessly reported stories about the enormous weight and size of mammoths. The October 19, 1813, Commercial Advertiser carried an advertisement for “a pumpkin weighing two hundred and twenty-six pounds, and measuring seven feet five inches in circumference. It is one of eight pumpkins produced from two seeds, whose weights, added together, amount to one thousand and seventeen pounds. It was raised on the place of D. Gelston, Esq., in the neighborhood of this city [New York].”48 New En­ gland Farmer reported that “a Pumpkin, of unusual size, grew on the farm of John Reynolds, Esq., a few miles from Clarksburgh, Virginia, this season; it weighed 320 pounds and measured around the middle six feet.”49 Farm journals chronicled many types of oversize produce, but the mammoths drew the greatest attention. A twenty-ounce apple is impressive, but it cannot compete with a 128pound pumpkin.50 Comstock, Ferre and Company’s concern that the huge pumpkins were “always coarse grained and watery” and the Horticulturalist’s criticism ,“Theydonotkeepwellafterbeingcutopen,smallerkindsaregreatly preferable,” missed the point.51 The quality of the variety’s meat and its 66 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin practical applications were irrelevant in the face of its visual spectacle. These “Extravagances of Nature,” as an 1819 edition of the Boston Gazette called them, were natural marvels with the power to amaze.52 Although Comstock, Ferre and Company’s The Gardener’s Almanac announced in 1856 that “the rage for mammoth squash we hope has gone by,” the hope proved out of touch with popular opinion.53 The mammoth’s popularity was only in its infancy. An American visiting Paris in 1852 bragged that “France can not boast of a Niagara or the biggest pumpkin,” thereby equating the pumpkin with one of the nation’s most famous natural wonders .54 Farmers and horticulturists competed to produce larger specimens with every passing year. In 1893 a grower exhibited a 469-pound specimen at the Chicago World’s Fair, and mammoths weighing more than 1,800 pounds would win contests in the early 2000s. Unlike Niagara Falls, which Americans revered, the pumpkin inspired jokes. The animated quality of the pumpkin’s growth and its great size were the inspiration for folktales that exaggerated every feature of the naturally enormous plant into hilarious proportions. A pumpkin plant had “leaves as large as a dining table, and a stem as large round as a hoehandle .”55 A pumpkin vine grew “over the north end of the garden wall . . . passed right under [a] sled, thence over another wall, thence through a cabbage patch and orchard, thence over a piece of meadow a hundred and fifty yards wide, thence down a long hill, and at last crossed a stream of water four rods wide.”56 Pumpkins grew as big as houses, “approaching the size of young mountains.”57 Others were so large that “a stone boat, two oxen and a horse [were] needed to move it from the field.”58 Many tales imagined the pumpkin as more animal than plant. In one, a quick-growing pumpkin vine chases a farmer.59 Wrestling with the giant vine, the man finally releases himself from its grip by cutting the vine with a knife. In another, a farmer is so frightened by a creaking and clattering pumpkin “of monstrous size” that he seeks assistance from his neighbors. “They armed themselves with axes, clubs, and pitchforks, and accompanied him to the spot,” as if they were about to face a grizzly bear or a mountain lion.60 The story ends with the farmers’ discovery of a sow and her piglets inside the giant pumpkin, a common folkloric motif that makes the vegetable more akin to four-legged than to one-rooted creatures . The pumpkin is as awesome and fearsome as a wild animal, beyond the farmer’s control and the confines of the field. Yet it is a silly adversary Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 67 as well. The pumpkin was a powerful symbol of nature and of agrarian prowess, to be sure, but it also represented an archaic, rural way of life— the life of the country bumpkin—that was the antithesis of the changing times. Almost the only people who stuck to the tradition of eating pumpkin instead of feeding it to their cattle were “old folks,” as Southern Planter noted, as well as settlers on the western prairie.61 “Baked pumpkin and milk, pumpkin-sauce, and dried pumpkin for winter use have had their day and gone out of fashion . . . except for some of the old folks who still prefer baked pumpkin in a milk pan without any pastry,” wrote David Wells in his 1855 agricultural yearbook.62 Nineteenth-century pioneer families in the Appalachians and on the Great Plains relied on the pumpkin just as their colonial predecessors had, to carry them through the first difficult years of settlement.63 Farm families used pumpkin to stretch out the grain supply and relied on it as a supplement for breads and stews.64 “To save meal,” recalled an Ohio settler, “we often used pumpkin bread, in which, when meal was scarce, the pumpkin was so predominant as to render it next to impossible to tell our bread from that article.”65 An 1819 journal claimed that pumpkin bread was as ubiquitous at the table in Kentucky as pumpkin pie was in New En­ gland.66 Some people preached the virtues of pumpkin as a sweetener for those living on homesteads isolated from commercial markets and access to more refined sugar. William Kenrick, in his book The New American Orchardist, wrote, “In places remote from the seaboard, the making of sugar from pumpkin will probably obtain a preference over that of the beet root; so easily is the pumpkin raised.”67 In Pioneer History of Ingham County [Michigan], a local historian noted that “pumpkin molasses was their usual sweetening.”68 These testimonies about the pumpkin’s ability to sustain American pioneers echo those found in colonial stories, in which the pumpkin was known as “the food provided by the Lord until the corn and cattle increased.”69 Its ties to a rustic and primitive way of life continued, even as the stories moved forward in time. These homesteading stories made prime seasoning for the pumpkin’s iconic representation of American agrarianism—at least in some parts of the country. The pumpkin continued to be a feature of southern ways of life, appearing in newspaper accounts of record-setting pumpkin crops in North Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana; in southern cookbooks and 68 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin newspapers, which carried both savory and sweet pumpkin pie recipes; and in the names of towns such as Pumpkin, Virginia; Pumpkin Pile, Georgia; and Pumpkintown, South Carolina.70 A man traveling through Georgia in the 1850s was impressed by one woman’s “magical art in the mazes of cookery—being able to set up a pumpkin in as many forms as there are days in the week.”71 Yet for most southerners, pumpkin still meant little beyond being able to satisfy hunger in versatile ways. Incontrast,NewEn­ glanders’identitywassynonymouswithpumpkins. A letter to the editor in the January 11, 1833, American Farmer stated, “Having recently traveled through the ‘Land of Steady Habits,’ or ‘Pumpkin Dominion’ (I mean the New En­ gland States), there was scarcely a family but what, in the article of diet, when forthcoming at stated periods, would bring up the rear with a company or platoon of pumpkin pies.”72 With a bit of jest, a biographer of Horace Greeley identified the abolitionist as “a genuine product of New En­ gland soil. He belongs by birthright to the nasal, angular, psalm-singing, pumpkin-growing generation.”73 Another source observed, “One or two dishes are peculiar to New En­ gland, and always on the table, toast dipped in cream and pumpkin pie.”74 Sweet pumpkin pie originated in New En­ gland in the late eighteenth century, and nineteenth-century pie recipes mimic those in Amelia Simmons ’s American Cookery, with only minor adjustments in the quantities of ingredients or types of sweeteners used. Bakers might even make pumpkin pie with the sweeter-tasting winter squash, but they still called it pumpkin pie. As the November 1834 edition of American Farmer explained, “If Thanksgiving in Massachusetts go not off with éclat, it will neither be for the want of a good proclamation . . . nor for lack of squashes, which every body knows are converted into what is by a figure of speech called pumpkin pie.”75 Pumpkin pie recipes published outside New En­ gland often labeled the concoction “New En­ gland pumpkin pie,” affirming its regional affiliation. Cookbooks provide some clues to its spread beyond the Northeast. For example, the fifty-fourth edition of Miss Leslie’s Complete Cookery, published in Philadelphia in 1854, was the first to include a recipe for “New En­ gland Pumpkin Pie,” although stewed pumpkin was present from the first issue in 1800. Reflecting on New En­ glanders’ particular appetite for pumpkin pie, Susan Fenimore Cooper wrote in Rural Hours, “In this part of the world, not only cattle, but men, women, and children—we all eat pumpkins. Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 69 Yesterday, the first pumpkin-pie of the season made its appearance on the table. It seems rather strange, at first glance, that in a country where apples, and plums, and peaches, and cranberries abound, the pumpkin should be held in high favor for pies.”76 Cooper hit on the very essence of New En­ glanders’ hunger for pumpkins. It was not exactly logical. Southerners produced and ate plenty of pumpkins, but they did not give them an honored place at the dinner table as their neighbors to the north did. Although Cooper speculated that “this is a taste which may probably be traced back to the early colonists,” celebrating baked squash would in fact have been more consistent with colonial food traditions. And yet New En­ glanders yearned for pumpkin pie, even if the recipe recommended squash. The extensive use of pumpkins in New En­ gland’s growing dairy industry might offer a practical reason for the tying of the region’s name and reputation to the pumpkin, but it hardly explains why people relished food they used as livestock fodder as a treat for themselves. The full explanation leads back to the complicated ways in which Americans have used and thought about nature, rural life, and their relationships to those things. It leads back, too, to growing cultural and political divisions in the United States at the time. New En­ glanders came to value the pumpkin more for its meanings than for its meat. Although pumpkin stories may seem more esoteric than market reports, agricultural practices, and culinary habits, they have often powerfully influenced the American environment and economy— and Americans’ sense of identity. In the early nineteenth century, many Americans began to reimagine the wild land beyond a community’s borders less as a threat and more as a refuge. They began to think of nature as a “place apart” from the place where they worked and lived, an antidote to the hectic pace and crowded confines of the rising industrial centers.77 Frederic Church’s Hudson River School paintings of sublime mountaintop sunsets—paintings that celebrated nature as divine inspiration for the new nation—both influenced and expressed these new attitudes toward nature.78 The rising popularity of wilderness vacations and of Niagara Falls as a tourist attraction manifested the same way of thinking. In this era, such excursions were accessible only to the wealthier classes, and vacationers self-consciously interpreted their nature trips and romantic sentiments in class terms. 70 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin Americans’ changing appetite for pumpkins owed much to this larger cultural shift toward viewing nature as someplace beyond town and city borders. The new distinction that many Americans made between a pumpkin and a squash aligned with new ways of imagining rural versus urban places and old-fashioned versus modern ways of life. The status of squash as an urban market crop obscured squash’s ties to the countryside .79 Although consumers were undoubtedly aware of its origins, the vegetable lost its power as a sign of nature because it was so much a part of their daily lives. Nature, as they conceived of it, was out in the country. Farm families embraced these sentiments toward squash just as readily, suggesting that they were equally modern in their outlook. Squash’s flavor, commodity status, and affiliation with the modern world encouraged Americans to think of it as just another table vegetable instead of a totem of rusticity. The pumpkin was gaining considerable cultural status despite its low economic standing. This seemingly contradictory development makes sense only when seen within the vast social and cultural transformations of the nineteenth century and the concomitant opportunities and anxieties they produced. Henry David Thoreau, no less, called on the pumpkin to articulate the difference and distance between rural and urban life. In Walden he claimed, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.”80 For Thoreau, the pumpkin was an icon of nature, the reverse of all that modern America stood for. Its earthiness and simple wholesomeness represented a place where one might discover oneself, the meaning of life, and, in the case of some New En­ glanders, a cultural heritage. Yet modern, urbane America inspired mixed reactions, even in Thoreau. Simple and natural could also mean backward and ignorant. By figuratively sitting on a pumpkin rather than harvesting pumpkins, Thoreau set himself apart from farmers in important ways. His imagined act was one of contemplation, not of work, and his appreciation of nature was a reflection of sensibilities that he believed local country inhabitants did not share. “There is something vulgar and foul in [the gardener’s] closeness to his mistress,” he bluntly stated.81 So while he and others like him idealized farming as a virtuous means of communing with nature, they nevertheless looked with disdain on people who made a living off Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 71 the land, and saw them as socially inferior.82 As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote disparagingly in his essay “Nature,” one “cannot freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are digging in the field hard by.”83 In his essay “Farming,” he opined about the nature of farm labor: “This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, not readers of Tennyson; by men of ­ endurance— deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely.”84 Emerson characterized the farmer as primitive, “as being really a piece of old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of Nature as much as these. That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young children belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor—the man who lives in the presence of Nature.”85 And this kind of man, the prototypical rustic inhabitant, was often depicted as a pumpkin farmer. Nineteenth-century literature is rich with pumpkin farmers and pumpkin-headed men, who represent Emerson’s and Thoreau’s backward and unsophisticated rural type. As in times past, storytellers used the pumpkin to define personal character traits, the kind of wild natural instincts Emerson described. Because of the pumpkin’s minimal economic value, its somewhat disreputable status as cheap cattle feed, its reputation as a subsistence crop tied to working for oneself instead of for profit, and its historic wild associations, writers embraced the pumpkin as a ready object with which to define a primitive, natural way of life. Pumpkin farmers were objects of fun and ridicule because they represented so fully the naive and old-fashioned values, habits, and places that seemed so antithetical to those that flourished in the busy metropolises. On another level, pumpkin tales expressed condescension toward American culture in general, and the nagging self-consciousness that North America might still remain culturally inferior to Europe. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the 1850 tale of adultery in colonial New En­ gland, made the pumpkin a metaphor for the supposed boorishness and lack of sophistication of American culture. Hawthorne describedthegardenofthefictionalMassachusettsGovernorBellingham: Pearl, accordingly, ran to the bow-window, at the farther end of the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden-walk, carpeted with closely haven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. 72 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in the hard soil and amid the slow struggle for subsistence, the native En­ glish taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall-window; as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New En­ gland earth would offer him.86 Hawthorne equated the ragged, disheveled condition of the governor’s garden with the primitive, backward state of affairs in colonial America. The pumpkin, along with the parochial cabbage, epitomizes the primitive and poor conditions. For Hawthorne, the pumpkin, with its meandering , tangled vines, was antithetical to the En­ glish ornamental garden, which was a sign of wealth and refined taste, and which many American elites emulated on their riverfront estates. The passage ends with a succinct description of the pumpkin as both an animated piece of nature not under human control and a sign of false affluence exemplifying American crassness. The pumpkin is a “lump,” a cheap substitute for gold, and the only kind of wealth one could hope to acquire. Although ostensibly pertaining to the world of plants and gardening, A. H. Hovey’s and several other horticulturists’ descriptions of the pumpkin sound peculiarly like Hawthorne’s. “We cannot think of admitting this vegetable into the precincts of the garden where there are cucumbers, melons, etc.,” wrote Hovey, for “they would mix and contaminate the quality of the more valuable sorts.”87 An article in an 1854 issue of American Farmer concurred that the pumpkin was “of course an ugly concern and if planted in a garden but serves to mar its effect and expression.”88 New En­ gland Farmer stated, “The summer and winter squashes, if they flower near together, will degenerate; and the neighborhood of the pumpkin will deteriorate the future progeny of both.”89 Finally, an agricultural and literary journal declared that the pumpkin “had no business among flowers.”90 These writers offered practical and aesthetic considerations for plant cultivation, yet their statements seem to veer toward class and cultural commentary. Hovey’s fear that the pumpkin might interbreed with the more esteemed squash varieties and New En­gland Farmer’s use of the word Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 73 neighborhood and the phrase “deteriorate the future progeny” might easily have alluded to broader social relations, not just to garden culture. The farming almanacs might have been reiterating Emerson’s and Thoreau ’s embrace of American class hierarchies by implying that provincial or poor rural Americans, as represented by the native pumpkin, did not belong among the more sophisticated and superior, well-bred classes— the cucumbers and melons. Perhaps the American Farmer editors saw wild, wide-ranging, and undulating pumpkin vines as a metaphor for uncivilized living and therefore as a nemesis to the ordered symmetry of most vegetable gardens, here signs of civilization and refinement. To assume that no correlation exists between the agriculturalists and the literary icons is to miss the larger point that cultural ideas, science, and economics mutually influence each other, and never operate independently. One of the most famous pumpkins is the one attached to Cinderella . Over hundreds of years, the fairy tale has taken many forms across many cultures.91 Charles Perrault’s version, published in French in 1697, was probably the first to incorporate a pumpkin into the story.92 The first En­ glish translation, which was available to many American readers, appeared in En­ gland in 1729, and an 1811 version may be the earliest one published in the United States.93 As in most contemporary versions of the tale, in Perrault’s rendition a poor, good-hearted young country girl is abused by her stepmother and stepsisters. She is rescued by a fairy godmother who helps get Cinderella to a royal ball to meet a handsome prince. The fairy transforms barnyard animals and objects, including a pumpkin, into elegant and sophisticated finery and accouterments, with the warning that they will revert to their former selves at the strike of midnight. The 1811 edition: “Then [the fairy godmother] said to [Cinderella], run into the garden and bring me a pompion . Cinderella went immediately to gather the finest she could get, and brought it to her godmother, not being able to image how this pompion could make her go to the ball. Her godmother scooped out all the insides of it, having left nothing but the rind, which done she struck it with her wand and the pompion was instantly turned into a fine coach, gilded all over with gold.” After Cinderella hurried to leave the ball just past the prescribed hour, she looked for her carriage to carry her home, but in its place “all she saw was a large pompion lying upon the ground, and a rat, some mice and lizards running away.”94 The story concludes with the 74 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin prince rescuing Cinderella from her impoverished life on the farmstead and bringing her to his palace, where, of course, they live happily ever after. The pumpkin enjoys a pivotal role as the foil in this rags-to-riches story. Its commonness and lack of sophistication provide the ultimate contrast to the opulent life of the rich and urbane. Moreover, the pumpkin is not just a static symbol but also the vehicle, the carriage, that carries Cinderella to her new way of life. Unlike Cinderella, however, the pumpkin does not remain at the palace. Mimicking Hawthorne’s pumpkin , its golden color is less a sign of wealth and success than the opposite: a sign of a primal natural world untouched by cultural accouterments. By returning the pumpkin to the farmstead, the tale separates it from a genteel , cultured way of life. Later American readers would likely interpret the pumpkin’s transformation into a golden carriage as a glorification of the vegetable and the poor, hard-working way of life it embodies.95 Yet if other sources from this time period are a fair indication, the pumpkin was an ambiguous symbol, serving as a marker of both a rural abyss and rural virtue. “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,” a classic nursery rhyme, takes a more jocular approach but employs a similar motif, that of the pumpkin as a container for a woman. It also shares the theme of a woman striking out on her own, but with more scandalous overtones. The poem became popular when American publishers added it to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme book in 1825, and many Americans can still recite it today. Unlike other nursery rhymes, this one is believed to have originated in the United States.96 Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, Had a wife and couldn’t keep her, He put her in a pumpkin shell, And there he kept her very well. “Pumpkin eater,” or “pumpkin roller,” was a derogatory term for a poor, ignorant farmer.97 The rhyme hints at the man’s foolishness even as it notes the woman’s wandering ways. Perpetuating themes from sixteenth -century Dutch genre paintings, both the pumpkin and the wife embody unbounded sexuality. Some American folk songs, such as the Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 75 undated “Finger Ring,” played off the rhyme’s pumpkin imagery and its theme of women’s infidelity. The song goes, Wish I had a needle and thread, fine as I could sew, I’d stitch my true love to my side and on the road I’d go. Wish I had a pumpkin shell to put my true love in, Take her out and kiss her twice, then put her back again.98 The consistency of the pumpkin-and-woman motif over generations is striking. Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature, argued that the scientists and philosophers of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific revolution demoted the stature of both nature and women by reimagining a spirited Mother Nature as inert material and a machine to be controlled rationally instead of as a powerful force to be appeased.99 Yet Merchant’s chronology does not account for the startling continuity of tales about pumpkins and women. The advent of the Enlightenment and capitalism did not necessarily eradicate beliefs in nature and women’s power but reinforced old ideas in new contexts. These early nineteenth-century tales might have expressed men’s anxieties about young, single women leaving home on their own for the first time to take jobs in the textile factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, and other New En­ gland towns. The women textile workers’ powerful labor and reform organizations and successful strikes against male factory owners and managers might have exacerbated a sense of men’s loss of control. Putting a woman in a pumpkin meant keeping her tied to the farmstead or perhaps bound to the traditional rules and values of an older way of life that was slipping away. But in these tales, man’s ability to control her is not taken for granted. Still, in pumpkin iconography, men fared little better than women. An illustration in the book Memoirs of a Stomach is a good place to get a glimpse of the pumpkin’s early-nineteenth-century male incarnation.100 The print is a portrait of gluttony. In it, an androgynous figure sits with fat legs splayed, stomach bulged, and shirt buttons popped. The contents of his latest gorge surround him in nightmarish fashion. Fowl, hams, turtles , eggs, and bottles of spirits chaotically encircle him, as if they have come back to haunt him and his digestive system. And his crown, centrally placed on his head as a totem of his gluttonous ways, is a round field 76 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin pumpkin. Although corpulence in the nineteenth century could be a sign of affluence, in this case the figure looks more like Shakespeare’s Falstaff than President Taft. Many people apparently thought there was no truer or funnier way to express a man’s stupidity than to use a pumpkin. Like the Jonathan variety of pumpkin, numbskull tales conflate country bumpkins and pumpkins. One of many variations on these tales tells how the numbskull mistakes a pumpkin for a donkey or rabbit’s “egg.”101 In another, a numbskull ties a pumpkin to his leg in order to be able to distinguish himself from other men sleeping nearby when he wakes up. As he sleeps, someone moves the pumpkin to another person’s leg, a trick that confuses the numbskull about his own identity.102 Similarly, many satirical works, such as Samuel Warren’s 1842 Ten Thousand a Year and the 1857 poem “Iconoclastes: A Domestic Story,” which poke fun at country people, feature a character named Pumpkin.103 One of the best-known literary works in which a pumpkin stands in for a man’s foolishness is Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in 1848 and set in the rural countryside of New York’s Hudson River valley.104 As a central element of the tale, the pumpkin represents the area’s rusticity as well as the buffoonery of its main character, Ichabod Crane. In the story, Crane, a silly, gangly, itinerant schoolteacher, spends his idle hours spooking himself by reading local ghost stories, especially a notorious one about the Headless Horseman. According to the legend, the Horseman’s head was severed from his body during a Revolutionary War battle fought in the area, and he periodically rides again to reclaim it. One night, while returning home late from a party down an isolated country road, Crane, who is afraid of his own shadow, is chased by the Headless Horseman. As the apparition rides past Crane, the ghost throws a headlike object at him, terrifying the schoolmaster so profoundly that he runs away and is never heard from again. The end of the tale reveals that the ghoul was actually Brom Bones, Ichabod’s rival for the attention of a farmer’s attractive young daughter. The head was nothing but a pumpkin, accentuating the Crane character’s silliness and perpetuating this age-old association.105 About the time of the publication of Sleepy Hollow, the pumpkin first appeared in its incarnation as a jack-o’-lantern, although Halloween was not yet a part of Americans’ regular holiday calendar. The jack-o’-lantern Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 77 as a folk character originated in Ireland as a trickster forced to wander the netherworld after being banned from both heaven and hell for his ornery behavior.106 He had nothing to do with the pumpkin at all. Americans may have merged the Irish jack-o’-lantern with legends about supernatural pumpkins, but another source lay closer to home. In North America, “jack-o’-lantern” (or jack-ma-lantern among African Americans in the South) was another name for the will-o’-the-wisp— an unsettling and inexplicable light emanating from a darkened forest or dense swamp.107 A newspaper account published in October 1830 offers a good description: “Two gentlemen saw a globe of light or fire apparently twenty feet above the ground. The light resembled a large lamp, was in constant motion, slowly traveling on a light breeze. . . . This is the first ‘Will with a Whisp,’ or Jack o’ Lantern, of which we have had any credible information for many years.”108 Jack-o’-lantern personified the unknown, bewildering forces that seemingly occupied wild places. For some, it was not simply a spook. Like St. Pompion, it might lead people astray or lure them with its evil ways. “If the victim had an irresistible urge to follow the Jack-O’-Lantern,” explained one source, “it would be overcome only by ‘flinging [himself] down, shutting [his] eyes, holding [his] breath, and plugging up [his ears].’”109 By having a ghost hurl a pumpkin from the dark and sinister woods, Irving combined the pumpkin and the jack-o’-lantern legends, but the pumpkin in his story was not carved into a grinning jack-o’-lantern. One of the earliest examples of the pumpkin as jack-o’-lantern is an 1846 newspaper account called “The Jack o’Lantern,” about a young boy taking a pumpkin that a farmer did not “make any use of” and carving in it “the outline of three faces, with their eyes, and noses, and teeth.”110 The article made no mention of Halloween, however, and the story’s description of a man’s inquisitive reaction to the jack-o’-lantern pumpkin indicates that it was not yet a common phenomenon. Yet the connection made sense. Nathanial Hawthorne’s use of a pumpkin head for the main protagonist in his 1830 story “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” is another antecedent to the Halloween jack-o’-lantern.111 The tale also offers a strong social commentary on men’s character. Feathertop is a scarecrow resembling “a fine gentleman of the period” made by a bewitched New En­ gland farm woman. She uses a pumpkin for the head and cuts two holes for eyes and a slit for a mouth. On his head she places a wig and a hat with 78 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin a long rooster feather in it—hence the name. “I’ve seen worse [heads] on human shoulders,” she said, “and, many a fine gentleman has a pumpkin head, as well as my scarecrow.”112 As the narrator tells readers, “There was something wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape. . . . it appeared to shrivel its yellow surface into a grin—a funny kind of expression betwixt scorn and merriment, as if it understood itself to be a jest at mankind.”113 By puffing on a tobacco pipe, the scarecrow comes to life. Without the pipe, “instead of a gallant gentleman in a gold-laced coat, thou wilt be but a jumble of sticks and tattered clothes, and a bag of straw, and a withered pumpkin!” warns the witch.114 She sends Feathertop off to town to dazzle the locals. Many town folk notice a mysterious and magical quality to the man, but they take it to be an expression of his nobility. Only dogs and children, those ostensibly guided more by their natural senses than adults, are able to see the figure for what he really is. While visiting the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Feathertop accidentally reveals his true identity when his reflection is captured in a mirror. He runs back to the farm and never appears in public again. Hawthorne’s tale offers a commentary on charlatans, or good-for-nothing, empty-headed men who pretend to be more than they are. Like other storytellers, Hawthorne used the pumpkin as a tool to articulate social and class distinctions: between urban intellectuals, guided by culture, and rural workers, guided by nature. When New En­ glanders cast the pumpkin in terms of such class or social differences, their portraits were usually negative. Farmers were foolish, and rural men and women usually corrupt or immoral. The image of the pumpkin and of pumpkin farmers was much less condescending when New En­ glanders linked it to their past and adopted it as a symbol of their cultural roots.115 Many New En­ glanders embraced the pumpkin as a sign of virtue, finding a sense of heritage and comfort in the old-fashioned, rural way of life it embodied. John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1846 poem “The Pumpkin” was “written as receiving a gift of a Pumpkin Pie, By a Yankee.” In it, Whittier seamlessly united the jack-o’-lantern, Cinderella, and nature motifs in one vivid rustic scene. Absent is any trace of the demeaning tone found in the literature addressing class and superiority: Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! The old days recalling, When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling! Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 79 When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within! When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune, Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon. Telling the tales of the fairy who raveled like steam, In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!116 In this stanza, the poet imbued the pumpkin with nostalgic recollections of his youth, the natural rhythms of an idyllic farm life, and the magical and mystical qualities of nature. For many Americans in the industrial North, these themes were indelibly linked. The pumpkin evoked a way of life tied to childhood memories of the farm, a place where many northerners were raised but then left for opportunities elsewhere. One way they held onto that way of life was to indulge in pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. “The thought of keeping Thanksgiving without a pumpkin pie,” wrote a correspondent to American Farmer in 1833, “is surely almost insupportable.”117 Northerners served pumpkin pie on any and all occasions, but they came to identify it with Thanksgiving because it spoke to the holiday themes: a bountiful harvest, an idyllic past, and agrarian virtue. New En­ glanders clearly thought of Thanksgiving as more than just another holiday; they found in the celebration—and the pumpkin —a grand vision of regional identity. “Of all the holidays in the year which are generated among us New En­ gland people, there is, perhaps no day in the whole holiday vocabulary, that gives a more general source of satisfaction and joy, than . . . Thanksgiving,” explained a November 1825 edition of the Dedham, Massachusetts, Village Register.118 Celebrants customarily spent Thanksgiving mornings at church, where sermons recounted the blessings and good fortune of the preceding year. Yet family reunions and “universal stuffing,” as one contemporary source called it, were also hallmarks of the occasion: “The children and grandchildren return home at this season, to pay their respects and manifest their undiminished love and affection, not to the ‘old folks’ alone, but also to their roasted turkies and . . . that savory dish, peculiar to New En­ gland—that sine qua non of a Thanksgiving dinner—the well filled, deep and spacious pumpkin pie.”119 Someoftheregion’smostpopularandrespectedwriters—JohnGreenleaf Whittier among them—published quaint stories about Thanksgiving 80 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin homecomingssetintheNewEn­ glandcountryside.Thetalesalmostalways culminate with an irresistible pumpkin pie. Although authors cast the holiday in a golden hue, they nevertheless made an important distinction between being of the farm and briefly returning to the farm on holiday. Thanksgiving was not a rural holiday per se but a holiday that celebrated cultural ties to rural places and ways of life. New En­ glanders celebrated simple farm life more as a heritage than as an occupation. Emerson and Hawthorne prove, through their scorn of the region’s rural laborers, that “Yankee” was an ambivalent term of endearment. And since most New En­ gland farmers were businessmen in pursuit of profit, they enjoyed the holiday’s rustic imagery with as keen a sense of nostalgia as urbanites did. Urban and rural relations were only part of the Thanksgiving story in the early nineteenth century. The saccharine tales also disguised (sometimes poorly) strong political points of view. Some of the most popular storytellers were also ardent abolitionists who were engaged in sectional debates between the North and the South. In 1844, Lydia Maria Child was best known as the author of one of the most popular women’s domestic advice books, The American Frugal Housewife, when she published her still famous Thanksgiving poem, “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” now better known as “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The familiar verse, “Over the river and through the woods, to grandfather’s house we go. / The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh through the white and drifted snow,” follows the genre’s classic trope—a Thanksgiving visit to a bucolic family home.120 By ending the last verse with the line, “Hoorah for pumpkin pie!” Child echoed Whittier in “The Pumpkin.” Whittier concluded his poem with a pumpkin-inspired blessing that cast a glow on his Yankee homeland and its people: And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express, Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less, That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below, And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow, And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin Pie! Although Whittier delighted in the sensual pleasures of baked pumpkin pie, he also cast the vegetable as a sign of a life well lived, a good life Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 81 blessed with health, longevity, and good fortune. The pumpkin brought together food, farm, family, and New En­ glanders’ sense of place. The most influential Thanksgiving celebrant was Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877.121 Her 1827 novel Northwood: A Tale of New En­ gland included an entire chapter dedicated to Thanksgiving. She set the novel in a rural New Hampshire village “inhabited,” she wrote, “almost exclusively, by husbandmen, who tilled their own farms with their own hands. . . . [They] displayed, in their simplicity and purity of their manners and morals, a model . . . [of] what constituted a ‘happy society.’”122 To bring the image of the idyllic, yeoman New En­ gland farm community to full effect, she added, “Among this unsophisticated people, men are esteemed more for merit and usefulness, than rank and wealth.”123 They were a community of pumpkin farmers in the best and most romantic sense. In Northwood, Hale defined the quintessential Thanksgiving Day, when family members returned to the New En­ gland farm of their youth for a celebration of the blessings of country life and family. Pumpkin pie was “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving,” and among the roast beef, mutton, pork, chicken pie, plates of vegetables, gravies, and puff pastries both sweet and savory, “pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche.”124 Hale led a cohort of New En­ gland clergy, editors, and private citizens in advocating for states throughout the country to proclaim an annual Thanksgiving day and for the federal government to declare it a national holiday. Every November beginning in 1846, she transformed Godey’s “Editor’s Table” into a platform to promote the nationalization of the holiday. Although her efforts would not succeed until 1863, the holiday began to catch on beyond New En­ gland’s borders. The publication of pumpkin pie recipes and poems in newspapers from Ohio to Nebraska documents the holiday’s spread to new settlement areas across the West. “Who that has ever lived in New En­ gland will-not heartily endorse the sentiment thus gratefully expressed?” wrote the editors of the Omaha Nebraskan in the preface to the nostalgic poem “Pumpkin Pies,” which declared, “I’m dwelling now ’neath other suns, / And bright are other skies, / Yet memory oft brings back again / the thought of pumpkin pies.”125 Whereas Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Louisiana had all proclaimed “fast days of thanksgiving, humiliation, and 82 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin prayer,” homegrown holiday rituals—the rural homecomings, the harvest themes, and pumpkin pie—were popularly known as New En­ gland traditions .126 The commemoration of rural virtue perhaps did not resonate the same way in the South, especially at a time when many northerners publicly questioned the morality of the southern plantation way of life based on slave labor. Some of the most strident critics of slavery were also some of the most prolific writers of pumpkin tales. Whittier was a public spokesman for the antislavery cause, a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and author of the 1833 pamphlet “Justice and Expediency; or, Slavery Considered with a View to Its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition,” and the 1834 poem “Our Countrymen in Chains!”127 Child was elected to the American Anti-Slavery Society’s executive committee in 1839, became editor of its Anti-Slavery Standard two years later, and wrote Appeal for the Class of Americans Called Africans, among many other antislavery texts.128 Although Hale was less politically active than Child and Whittier, Northwood was a forceful abolitionist tract. She renamed the novel Northwood; or Life North and South, Showing the True Color of Both in 1852 to emphasize the regions’ distinctions. The main character, Squire Romilly, sums up the author’s own attitudes about slavery: “I feel it is a stain on our national character, and none could more heartily rejoice to see the abomination removed. It will be, it must be; honor, justice, humanity and religion, are all violated in the system of slavery.”129 These three writers’ efforts to free slaves did not mean that they believed in the inherent equality of the races. Hale, for example, was a strong proponent of freed African Americans’ emigration to Liberia, because she could not conceive of them coexisting with Euroamericans.130 What bound pumpkins to abolitionism was the political economy. The writers interpreted agrarian ways of life or modes of production in social and political terms, imagining the small family farm as an antidote to the plantation. Rather than being determined to spread the agrarian way of life itself, they sought to spread the values and sense of morality they saw embedded in it and in themselves. Emerson, who was dismissive of actual farmers, expressed faith in the power of agrarian life to transform the political world: “If it be true that, not by votes of political parties but by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a slave state as fast as it is surrounded by free states, then the true abolitionist is Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin = 83 the farmer, who, needless of laws and constitutions stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and making a product with which no forced labor can compete.”131 Hale stated more directly, “I have no doubt many of the slaveholders would rejoice to have the southern states entirely freed from slaves, and cultivated in the same manner we Yankees do in the North.”132 Both writers infused the rural landscape with their political identity and cultural values, even as they saw their region’s future as lying in industry, not agriculture.133 Whittier, Child, and Hale, some of the most outspoken abolitionists, also wrote some of the period’s most popular and cherished pumpkin stories. To them, the pumpkin—and pumpkin farming—so completely embodied New En­ gland, as opposed to southern, values.134 The pumpkin was a naturally abundant crop that exemplified agrarian prowess, yet at the same time it was an unmarketable crop that stood for timeless agrarian values uncorrupted by the pursuit of profit. The quaint musings about pumpkins in the popular press also conveyed political sentiments. To communicate the larger political significance of a New Jersey man’s establishing an orchard in the new state of California, one woman correspondent wrote in 1851, “Who does the most good, the leader in wars and insurrections, or the public-spirited individual who benevolently adopts means to provide prosperity with the blessings of pumpkin-pies?”135 The pumpkin, for that writer, was an icon of a civil society. A southern visitor to Boston made a more direct association between abolitionism and pumpkins when he conceded the futility of enforcing the fugitive slave laws in the North: “As easily could a law prohibiting eating of codfish and pumpkin pies be enforced.”136 Eating pumpkin in the early nineteenth century had less to do with economic hardship than with identity politics, and regional distinctions in cuisine had more to do with cultural differences than with divergent climates or access to pumpkins. Amelia Simmons had already made pumpkin much more than simply a dessert to satisfy a sweet tooth. Hale built on this legacy, but she did not identify the colonists as her progenitors . Indeed, the Pilgrims were not even a focus in these early versions of Thanksgiving.137 Eating pumpkin was instead a way to affirm New En­ glanders’ identity through attachments to a place, a particular landscape , and the simple virtues of farm life. Pumpkin pie was a New En­ gland food because it represented New En­ gland values. Pumpkin tales suggest 84 < Thoreau Sits on a Pumpkin that urbanites and even many farmers ridiculed a preindustrial, rural way of life as backward and ignorant; that many believed it was bad for either men or women to follow their natural urges, though for different reasons; that men were insecure about women striking out on their own; and that New En­ glanders were nostalgic for a rustic farmstead in ways that selfconsciously set them apart from southerners. The cultural history of the pumpkin shows us that the ways in which people value nature depend not only on how they think and interact with the natural world but also on how they think about and act toward one another. With all this in mind, the answer to the question “Why the pumpkin?” becomes clearer, if far more complex. ...

Share