The Nancy Hall Sweet Potato
The Nancy Hall sweet potato is a 10 - 20 cm long, oblong shaped sweet potato with a tan to golden or slightly pinkish colored skin. The flesh is yellow. It is described as having a moist, yet firm flesh with a good flavor.
How this heirloom yellow yam came to be is shrouded in legend. There is a nonsensical letter from 1896 claiming that one Nancy hall crossed a sweet potato with some flower seed. What can be stated with some certainty is that within the well-established southern category of yellow sweet potatoes—a group that included the pumpkin yam, the Providence sweet potato, the Puerto Rico, and the Golden Beauty in over the 1900 and 1901 growing seasons—a new and distinct yam, the Nancy Hall appeared and became quickly popular. It was distinguished by its lack of fibrous strings in the flesh, its fat rather than long tubers, and its smooth texture when baked.
By 1919, advertisements described the Nancy Hall variety as one of the most popular varieties in the Southern US and Puerto Rico. The variety was so popular that a 'Nancy Hall Sweet Potato Jubilee' was celebrated in Paris, Tennessee in 1939. During the 1930s and 40s, according to George Dellinger from George's Plant Farm in Martin, TN, '[i]t was the ONLY sweet potato available.' It did however have some vulnerabilities. It tended to suffer from Yellow Blight. It dwindled during years with low rainfall. If the greens were cut for livestock fodder, the foliage sometimes would grow back weakly. Other potatoes came and took over the acreage once dominated by the Nancy Hall, yet not before Chinese agronomists collected in during the late 1940s to use as breeding stock for their effort to make sweet potatoes the base of their feed system for hogs.
The Beauregard sweet potato, introduced by the University of Louisiana in 1987, and later the Covington sweet potato from North Carolina State University in 2005, quickly replaced Nancy Hall sweet potatoes on the commercial market. While both universities are working to preserve the Nancy Hall variety and other heritage breeds in order to maintain their genetics, this heirloom breed has become quite rare today. Today, Nancy Hall is grown exclusively by home gardeners and small specialty growers. This means that this variety is planted, purchased, and consumed less, and the knowledge, tastes, and traditions associated with it are not being transmitted to future generations.
Its greatest repute was as a baking and pie potato, but it also enjoyed great favor as a feed potato for hogs, and the greens were harvested as silage for fowls.
This variety is well suited to being grown with organic methods. Historically, production has been greatest in the southeastern United States in Rutherford County, North Carolina; Marietta, Georgia; and Paris, Tennessee. Traditionally, Nancy Hall Sweet Potatoes were cured for several weeks in curing sheds, meaning that after the harvest, sweet potatoes would be left in a warm and humid environment for several weeks to develop their flavor and sweetness. Farmers would pay to house and store their sweet potatoes in hot houses, typically heated by kerosene or wood stoves. This was a once common practice in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.