ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 1: Benjamin K Bliss, America's Spud Broker
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Bliss’s Triumph Potato, published in Backwoods Home Magazine
America’s Greatest Potato Broker, Benjamin K. Bliss (1818-1899).
The great seed companies of the 19th century were led by individuals who combined sharp business acumen with a grower’s sense of a useful and beautiful plant. Few people combined the commercial skill with a breeder’s intuition. Benjamin K. Bliss was one. He would establish popularize three classic vegetables: the the Early Rose Potato, and Bliss’s Triumph Potato, and the American Wonder Pea. He was equally interested in floriculture and popularized the Auratum, Hansoni, and Krameri lilies. It also introduced in the late 1860s the Japanese flint corn with striped foliage that became a flash in the pan horticultural craze, “Japanese Maize”.
His landmark potatoes were created by New England breeders. The early rose, a lovely red potato that is parent to many American russets, including Burbank, may have been the most popular American potato in the latter half of the 19th century. Albert Breese of Hubbardton Vermont was its first grower, introducing the potato in 1861. It was a seedling variant of the Garnet Chili. It had an oval shape, pinkish red smooth skin, and creamy flesh. By the end of the Civil War Bliss had made it the sensation of northern fields. It requires cool temperatures, so was cultivated in the South during winter.
Bliss’s Triumph Potato derived from the early rose, crossing it with another derivative of the Garnet Chili, the Peerless, albeit larger, more productive, more regular in shape, more uniform in size (middling proportions), more finely grained in its flesh, and more flavorful. Next to the Mercer potato, it had the finest reputation for flavor, particularly creamed or steamed, of any American commodity potato if the post-Civil War era. Its originator was a Connecticut farmer, and the original strain was more pronouncedly red that most of the surviving lines today. William Woys Weaver has noted that in the South a white skinned version of the Triumph was marketed under the name stray beauty. It was a winter grown market crop in Florida early in the 20th century, and in Bermuda. Its susceptibility to blight has caused numbers of farmers in warm weather areas to abandon it for other heirloom strains.
The American Wonder Pea was one of the very few market garden pea varieties bred in the United States. Seedsman Charles Arnold of Ontario crossed the Little Gem Pea with the Champion of England, engendering a pea with the dwarf stature of the former and the productivity and culinary quality of the latter. B. K. Bliss & Sons purchased Arnold’s entire stock of plants and seed in the late 1870s, making it a lynchpin of the Bliss catalog. The American Wonder’s small stature (about 10 inches high on bushy vines), its early flowering, its minty taste, and its dozen pods per vine made it immensely popular—indeed, an international hit. Other heirloom strains are more productive, but lack the Wonder’s culinary quality.
B. K. Bliss began his career as a clerk in an apothecary in Boston, selling notions and drugs from 1834 until 1842. He returned to his native Springfield, entered into a partnership to operate a grocery and drug store, the business devolving wholly on his shoulders in 1845 when the senior partner died. At this juncture he entered the seed and nursery business. He became in 1853 the first seedsmen to post flower seeds through the mails—the American originator of the mail order seed business. Bliss remained headquartered in Springfield until 1867 when he removed to Manhattan (41 Park Row), joined with his sons Samuel and Elijah, and became the foremost breeder of potatoes in the United States, maintaining farms in VT, MA, and NY. He realized that the seed catalog would be a stimulus to desire, and was the first seedsman to color chromolithograph illustrations to heighten their impact. His were the pinnacle of illustrated catalogs in the 1860s-1880s, possessing splendid typography, fine engravings, and cutting edge layout. They were kept by recipients as imagination troves. In his later years he published American Garden magazine. The financial collapse of 1885 drove Bliss to bankruptcy. He retired to Brookline, MA at age 67.
Sources: Charles Wells Chapin, History of the Old High School on School Street, Springfield Massachusetts (Springfield, 1890), 45. “The Popular Seed House of B. K. Bliss and Sons,” Scribner’s MONTHLY Magazine 5 (1872), 8.
ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 1: Benjamin K Bliss, America's Spud Broker
ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 1: Benjamin K Bliss, America's Spud Broker
ISSUE 28, POTATOES, Part 1: Benjamin K Bliss, America's Spud Broker
Bliss’s Triumph Potato, published in Backwoods Home Magazine
America’s Greatest Potato Broker, Benjamin K. Bliss (1818-1899).
The great seed companies of the 19th century were led by individuals who combined sharp business acumen with a grower’s sense of a useful and beautiful plant. Few people combined the commercial skill with a breeder’s intuition. Benjamin K. Bliss was one. He would establish popularize three classic vegetables: the the Early Rose Potato, and Bliss’s Triumph Potato, and the American Wonder Pea. He was equally interested in floriculture and popularized the Auratum, Hansoni, and Krameri lilies. It also introduced in the late 1860s the Japanese flint corn with striped foliage that became a flash in the pan horticultural craze, “Japanese Maize”.
His landmark potatoes were created by New England breeders. The early rose, a lovely red potato that is parent to many American russets, including Burbank, may have been the most popular American potato in the latter half of the 19th century. Albert Breese of Hubbardton Vermont was its first grower, introducing the potato in 1861. It was a seedling variant of the Garnet Chili. It had an oval shape, pinkish red smooth skin, and creamy flesh. By the end of the Civil War Bliss had made it the sensation of northern fields. It requires cool temperatures, so was cultivated in the South during winter.
Bliss’s Triumph Potato derived from the early rose, crossing it with another derivative of the Garnet Chili, the Peerless, albeit larger, more productive, more regular in shape, more uniform in size (middling proportions), more finely grained in its flesh, and more flavorful. Next to the Mercer potato, it had the finest reputation for flavor, particularly creamed or steamed, of any American commodity potato if the post-Civil War era. Its originator was a Connecticut farmer, and the original strain was more pronouncedly red that most of the surviving lines today. William Woys Weaver has noted that in the South a white skinned version of the Triumph was marketed under the name stray beauty. It was a winter grown market crop in Florida early in the 20th century, and in Bermuda. Its susceptibility to blight has caused numbers of farmers in warm weather areas to abandon it for other heirloom strains.
The American Wonder Pea was one of the very few market garden pea varieties bred in the United States. Seedsman Charles Arnold of Ontario crossed the Little Gem Pea with the Champion of England, engendering a pea with the dwarf stature of the former and the productivity and culinary quality of the latter. B. K. Bliss & Sons purchased Arnold’s entire stock of plants and seed in the late 1870s, making it a lynchpin of the Bliss catalog. The American Wonder’s small stature (about 10 inches high on bushy vines), its early flowering, its minty taste, and its dozen pods per vine made it immensely popular—indeed, an international hit. Other heirloom strains are more productive, but lack the Wonder’s culinary quality.
B. K. Bliss began his career as a clerk in an apothecary in Boston, selling notions and drugs from 1834 until 1842. He returned to his native Springfield, entered into a partnership to operate a grocery and drug store, the business devolving wholly on his shoulders in 1845 when the senior partner died. At this juncture he entered the seed and nursery business. He became in 1853 the first seedsmen to post flower seeds through the mails—the American originator of the mail order seed business. Bliss remained headquartered in Springfield until 1867 when he removed to Manhattan (41 Park Row), joined with his sons Samuel and Elijah, and became the foremost breeder of potatoes in the United States, maintaining farms in VT, MA, and NY. He realized that the seed catalog would be a stimulus to desire, and was the first seedsman to color chromolithograph illustrations to heighten their impact. His were the pinnacle of illustrated catalogs in the 1860s-1880s, possessing splendid typography, fine engravings, and cutting edge layout. They were kept by recipients as imagination troves. In his later years he published American Garden magazine. The financial collapse of 1885 drove Bliss to bankruptcy. He retired to Brookline, MA at age 67.
Sources: Charles Wells Chapin, History of the Old High School on School Street, Springfield Massachusetts (Springfield, 1890), 45. “The Popular Seed House of B. K. Bliss and Sons,” Scribner’s MONTHLY Magazine 5 (1872), 8.