ISSUE 76, OATS, Part 1: White Oats
White Oats
As a general rule gray and colored oat varieties were employed as feed, white oats for human food. Aesthetics rather than necessity dictated this preference. Oats are much less subject to ergot and other fungal diseases than rye, barley, or wheat. So the white color was not really needed to detect spoilage and infestation. White oats when cooked as oat porridge/oat meal looked cleaner and more inviting than, say red “rust-free oats” or the grey Virginia Winter Turf Oat.
Americans favored a half dozen white oats from the late 18th century well into the 20th century: The Common White Oat, the oldest landrace brought with the first colonists, which had long and short forms and bearded and naked variations. It had stiff straw and was reckoned rather productive. This variety would in the 19th century shown to be vulnerable to rust fungus. More robust, perhaps because of its leathery hull and spikey bear, the White Barley Oat, had coarse stems not greatly favored as oat straw, and plump grains. The Russian or Ruffled Oat was reckoned to yield well, but never won a large following because it matured two weeks later than the Common White Oat. Georgian Oats produced large white grains, but yield generously only on rich soil. It performed substantially less well on soil of average fertility. [“Oats Varieties,” Dollar Newspaper (May 19, 1858), 4]. Of all of the white Oat varieties, the two that won the greatest following in the 19th century were the Poland (or Dutch) Oat and the White Potato Oat. I’ve written about the latter in Issue 5, part 1. I’ll discuss the now extinct Poland Oat here, since it is one of the most desired lost grains.
The Poland Oat was in cultivation in Coventry in England in the 1760s. It was grown in Wicklow in Ireland in the 1790s and is first advertised for sale in the United states in the March 16, 1801 issue of the Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser. Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania were the first states to grow the oat. The features of the oat that attracted American farmers are well conveyed by a report by George Farley of Chesterfield County Virginia in December of 1820. One seed grain of Poland Oats generated “16 branches or stalks, 5 ½ feet in length, longest head 23 ¾’s inch, shortest head 22 ½ inches.” [American Farmer (December 22, 1820), 312. The stalks (oat straw) was “firm, tough, and bright.” The numbers of grains per stalk ranged between 96 and 125 if we are to trust reports such as that contained in the Kalamazoo Gazette in 1854 (December 24), p. 4. One agriculturist observed “The Poland Oats, sometimes called the Dutch Poland Spring Oats, which has a short and stiff stem and ripens early and yields very well and bears small but very solid and heavy white grains with thick white husks or skins and awnless or beardless chaff” [“Oat Varieties,” 4]. One version of the Poland Oat had doubled grains and thin skins—these tended to be called “Dutch Oats.”
No grain was more subject to fads and fashions than oats. Periodically Oat Fever seized sections of the farming community as this or that new variety seemed the key to quick fortune. Indeed farmers would tire of old names—and the Poland became rebranded as the Surprise Oat in the 1870s. It would be supplanted in the market by another oat with a spiffier name but only a marginally better field performance, the Excelsior Oat. The Poland/Surprise faded from the grain catalogs in the later 1870s. Now it is functionally extinct. If you have a Poland or Surprise oat, call me! There is a small community seeking it.