Separating the Jumbo Peanut from the Mumbo Jumbo
The Picture tells the story: the biggest peanut on the market at the beginning of the twentieth century was the one named for P T Barnum’s mammoth elephant—Jumbo. N T. Willet’s illustration to his seed catalogue laid out the four classes of peanut that mattered most in the market. On the extreme left, the smallest, the Spanish, was small, but in grew on a bunched or bushy vine, so were easy to harvest; they were also sweet, and favored for peanut butter. The Carolina, the ancestral peanut of the South, grew on a vine that lay on the ground (a runner peanut plant), and was famed for its oil quality and deep taste. It was also called the African, the Wilmington, or the Runner. It stopped be a crop peanut in the 1930s, until the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation revived it this year. The two peanuts to the right of the illustration have a peculiarly confused history.
In 1882 P T Barnum purchased Great Britain’s largest elephant, Jumbo, as a circus attraction. Concurrently, Salvatore Petroni, a candy vendor at Barnum’s circuses, at the time of the elephant’s short career (1882-1885), tackled the challenged of popularizing the peanut as a concession food. The myths about elephants loving peanuts--the attachment of an elephant’s name to the largest peanut—and the cry “hot roasted peanuts” all seem to have been the work of Petroni.
Jumbo was a grade of large peanuts sold to circuses and named after the biggest elephant in the hemisphere. So when did peanuts get big and how? After all, the ubiquitous peanut was the modest sized Carolina African runner that had been grown universally in the South since its importation with West African slaves in the colonial era. In the 1840s Dr. Harris, a Virginia horticultural experimenter, secured from South America (Bolivia?) peanuts noteworthy for their large size—this is the first item that would attract the name of Barnum’s elephant. Circumstances suggest that this original Jumbo peanut was not very prolific and somewhat difficult to grow. Frederic Haskin supplied Virginia’s peanut history declaring that Thomas B. Rowland undertook the improvement of the peanut in the decades after the Civil War.
“It was some years after the pioneer work of Rowland before the Jumbo peanut was introduced in Virginia. Many believed that this great goober would be an immense commercial success, but it appeared that the people cared no more for too large a peanut than they did for one too small. Long efforts failed to gain any popularity for the Jumbo as a food. The only man who ever made money out of it was a Coney island peddler, who bought a big allotment from the disgruntled peanut dealers, gilded them, and sold about twenty thousand dollars’ worth as souvenirs at five cents apiece. The Virginia peanut of commerce is a hybrid, evolved after much experiment, Jumbo in some degree with the prolific running quality of the old-time Virginia [Carolina African] peanut.” [New Orleans Times-Picayune (February 2, 1917), 8].
Haskin makes clear several things: (1) the Jumbo for various agronomic reasons failed as a crop peanut (2) that its combination with the modest sized but prolific Carolina-African Runner peanut gave rise to the Virginia, a peanut not so immense as the Jumbo, but having the vitality, productivity, and running habit of the South’s ancestral peanut.
After the turn of the twentieth century what the Jumbo was gets blurry—is it simply the grade of largest seeded Virginia peanuts (the biggest class of hybrids?). Or did it survive as a separate strain (non runner & difficult to grow without large output). The information from growers is all over the place. Here is was seedsman David Hardie of Dallas said of it in 1907: “The largest Peanut grown; are the favorite for parching. They are of a spreading habit, and are cultivated in ridges like sweet potatoes. In a favorable season they make a large yield” (Catalog, p37). In 1910 the Augusta Georgia seedsman and newspaper columnist N. L. Willets wrote, after a survey of Spanish, Carolina, and Virginia varieties, remarked “we have the Running Jumbo Peanut: immense in size, and for which there is a large demand. Then we have a new pea, extremely handsome and which will grow into large favor and use, namely the Bunch Jumbo Peanut” (Augusta Chronicle (May 8 1910), 30). Could it be that the new was actually the oldest form that had newly come into Willets’s hands?
Tait Seeds of Norfolk Virginia in the description of the seed for the Jumbo it sold made clear that the designation was becoming increasingly mumbo jumbo. Here is what the 1910 catalog observed: “Jumbo—The retail peanut trade—which, after all, absorbs the bulk of the peanuts, strange as it may seem when one considers the quantity annually produced—ranks this immense nut above all others on account of its showy attractiveness, and it is always the least affected by depressed markets, demand invariably exceeding the supply. It is especially adapted to light sandy soils, and under the best cultivation will often produce over one hundred and twenty-five bushels per acre. The seed we offer is Virginia grown, every nut picked from the roots by hand to avoid injury to the germ, and growers should really appreciate the opportunity to secure really fancy seed peanuts. We beg to caution our readers that so-called Jumbos very frequently prove to be only mixture of large-sized nuts picked out of perhaps a dozen kinds, some dwarf and some running. 22 lbs. to the bush. For an acre, 3 bushels. “
What is clear is the that the price commanded by the “Jumbo peanut” was greater than any other. Street corner grade Virginia peanuts (the smallest size) commanded 4 cents a packet. “The jumbo peanut, the biggest in the world . . . costs 7 ¼ cents. They sell jumbos at a few places, but only a few.” [Omaha World-Herald (May 29, 1910), 41.
Because it is difficult now to make sense of just what remains of the original Jumbo of the 19th century—parent of the Virginia—Dr. Brian Ward of Clemson is thinking of growing out the germ plasm collected by Dr. David Bradshaw, to add to the various Jumbo strains now offered by various heirloom seed brokers. This strikes me as a geneticist’s puzzle.