ISSUE 71, PEANUTS, Part 1: Tennessee Peanuts, Red & White
Tennessee Peanuts (Red & White)
The peanut belt in Tennessee historically girdled the Tennessee River. Posey, Humphrey, and Hickman Counties began planting peanuts intensively in the decades after the Civil War. 1869 was the first year a crop report was published in the Nashville papers. A commentator in the 1880s surveyed the kinds of Tennessee peanuts that came to market: “There are three different varieties of the peanut, viz: the white, with running vine and heavy foliage, the white, with erect vine and sparse foliage, and the red with erect vine and sparse foliage. The white peanut does best on weak lands with light sandy and gravelly soil which has been some time in cultivation. The red peanut does best on fresh creek lands with soil as described above for the white peanut. Neither the white nor the read does well on strong, rich soils, as they grow too much vine and foliage” [“Where Peanuts Grow,” Evansville Journal (May 13, 1883), 2].
The erect habit of two forms of the Tennessee Peanut point to a lineage. In the late 1860s the Spanish Peanut began to be imported from Valencia to Virginia and other parts South. The hallmark of the Spanish Peanut was that it grew as in a bush format rather than running on the ground as a mat like the Carolina African peanut, the ancestral Southern Peanut. The Tennessee was smaller than the Virginia, which in the 1870s emerged as the dominant roasting nut on the American market. The peanut skin had two colors. Obviously it crossed with the Carolina peanut, and certain of the White Tennessee Peanuts reverted to the old running configuration.
The Tennessee Peanuts became commodity produce by concentrating on Midwestern markets. The late 1870s and 1880s the chief depot for distribution of the peanut was Cincinnati. Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, and Pittsburg became subsidiary hubs.
When plants nurtured in one place, climate, and soil are transplanted to another locale and environment, the epigenetics of the plant (a set of chemical triggers that determines which genetic traits get turned off or on) alters its form. In Tennessee the Spanish peanut developed a tendency to produce three or four “nuts” in a pod, more than the standard two found in Carolina African or Virginia peanuts. An early newspaper blurb remarked this and noted one unattractive alteration: “The Tennessee Peanut has three meats but is ill flavored” [“Interesting Notes,” South Bend Weekly Tribune (April 13, 1872), 1]. It would take a decade of seed selection and care in soil selection to improve the flavor enough to compete head to head to Virginia peanuts in the market. Another thing: the skins on the peanuts (white and red) grew more adherent than the original Spanish. Confectioners prefer smaller nuts with easily stripped skins. The Tennessee had the former, but were not so tractable to processing as the Spanish. Hence the long lived retention of the Spanish/Red Valencia varieties in the South.
At the turn of the 20th century Tennessee Peanuts joined other items in masting schemes for hogs. In 1908 a Tennessee Peanut Association was formed. And in 1914 Tennessee Peanut Butter launched upon the market for grocery goods.