Watercress
Watercress is like that short kid in your class whose sassiness made you grin. It is more blessedly alive than other greens. Its dance in your mouth is blessedly peppery, not fiery and satanic like fresh mustard. In a salad it compensates for the insipidness of lettuce. Pureed in a soup it is tonic and vivid, not medicinally bitter like sorrel. It has redeemed many a bland sandwich. I suspect its sparking freshness on the tongue served as a model for the inventors of pop rocks.
Up until the 1905 much of the commercial farming of watercress in the eastern United States took place in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, two states where clean rushing streams abounded, and beds could be grown during summer without great difficulty. For a number of reasons peppery watercress (Nasturtium officinale) underwent a boom during the American Gilded Age—the watercress sandwich became a favorite women’s club luncheon item—watercress stuffed breast of veal standard fare in Gentlemen’s Club dining rooms. As demand burgeoned, growers began looking southward prospecting for streams that could grow cress in the winter.
In South Carolina watercress seed (imported from London) was first advertised in 1819 by C. Douglas at 77 Meeting Street, Charleston. The plant quickly naturalized and became something of a weed in the Carolina interior. It was one of a battery of cressy greens cultivated for salads. In the 1880s southern fish and game officials recommended its cultivation in ponds as food for fish. In truth watercress thrives in moving water, particularly with gravel beds. In South Carolina articles about growing watercress for the market began appearing in upstate papers in the 1890s. It first became a cultivated market crop around Edgefield, SC in 1908. But Carolina’s cultivation efforts were a day late and a dollar short. Perhaps part of the problem was that it was so common it could be foraged by most of the citizenry living close to non-tidal streams.
One man built the southern watercress industry in the early 20th century--Frank Dennis. A native of West Long Branch, NJ, he began planting cress there in 1874, but his major plantings were located in Martinsburg, West Virginia and Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Dennis realized that the winter cultivation of watercress in the South would give him a supply in the winter social season when hotel and restaurant demand peaked. Dennis came to Florida in 1904 at the behest of William Mickler, who wanted to service the burgeoning world of resort hotels. Dennis erected the first farm five miles southwest of Miami—the winter grown Florida watercress would remain a produce staple through the 20th century. In 1908 Dennis erected two watercress farms near Adairsville Georgia and began buying water sites near Huntsville, Alabama. In 1915 he decided that Huntsville, Alabama, would become the watercress capital of the United States. Dennis Water Cress Co. would eventually process 500,000 bunches of cress annually drawn from eight farms spread across Madison County. Dennis died in 1922 and his son Charles Edward Dennis (1898-1951) took over the watercress empire. In the year following Frank Dennis’s death Huntsville was declared the “Watercress Capital” of America. C. E. Dennis would become America’s King of Watercress The Huntsville plant flourished until 1969 when increasingly cold winters and faltering rail service caused its closure. The Dennis operations I Florida continued unabated until bought out in 1973.
In the late 20th century watercress became one of the ingredients that food editors recycled into a hot dish: in the late 1970s Watercress dip, in the early 1980s Watercress sauce, in the late 1980s Edna Lewis’s Watercress Soup, in the early 1990s watercress on pizza. One constant over the decades was the use of watercress as a green zest in salads.
The latter part of the 20th century saw the development of hydroponic cultivation of watercress. Since Nasturtium officinale is a perennial plant, it can be ratooned (the top greens cut off and stems left to regrow on the roots) or seeded annually. There has not been much attention paid to breeding new strains of watercress—the green landrace that has naturalized in much of the eastern United States was used in many cultivation settings, the German Erfurt was used by Dennis in his West Virginia plantings. Most seed companies offer seed under the general heading “green watercress” perhaps to distinguish it from the red watercress, a rarer home grower variety.
Sources: “Growing Watercress for market,” Edgefield Advertiser (July 12, 1899), 5. “Watercress Farm, a Florida Enterprise,” Miami Herald (October 27, 1904), 1. “Want to Plant Watercress,” The State (March 3, 1905), 5. James Hightower, “Huntsville Watercress Era Ends,” Huntsville Times (July 10, 1969), 1. Christopher Lang. "Dennis Water Cress in Huntsville." Alabama Heritage 66 (Fall 2002): 44-48. Christopher Lang, “Dennis Water Cress,” Cornbread Nation IV, John T. Edge, ed. (Athens: Univ. of Geogia Press, 2008), 285-87.