ISSUE 84, SOUTHERN LANDRACE & HEIRLOOM CORN, Part 1: Introduction
Introduction to a Series
Over the past decade I have collected notes on numbers of old varieties of southern flint, flour, dent, an sweet corn in connection with the crop restorations performed by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation and the documentation of varieties nominated to Slow Food’s global Ark of Taste. That information has been assembled here in a style readable to a general reader. The guide is presented as an alphabetical survey of varieties, each type of corn having its own illustrated profile. If the variety is found in the USDA’s germ plasm collection, its PI number and a link appears in the profiles. There are some corn varieties here that are not contained in the national collection of maize. All of the corn varieties here became items of commerce. I do not include varieties retained exclusively by Native Peoples of the Southeast. Yet if a Native variety became a settler corn, it likely will appear here. This series will appear in daily installments through the month of January 2024.
Maze was a creation of Native plant breeders in Central America. Its spread into North America took place by land out of northern Mexico into the West and then eastward. It did not become a staple of Native diet in the Southeast until about 800 CE. By that time additional plant material moved via the West Indies into the Southeast of the Continent. The corn grown by Natives in the Southeast differed from those grown in the North where the growing season was shorter. Fast maturing 8 row flint corns, some of which mutated into sweet corns, dominated northern fields. Northern flints usually bore a single ear per stalk, sometimes two, and that ear contained round capped kernels densely filled with starch and rather hard when dried down. The Flour corns kernels were round capped as well, filled with softer, easily millable starch. They were often multi-colored.
The southern United States because of its semi-tropical climate enabled long season corn varieties to grow—so several kinds of Mexican maize found their way into fields and adapted into local variants: the slender cobbed many rowed gourd seed corns, the broader kernelled horse tooth corns (12-14 rows), and flour corn (white kerneled and polycolored).
These Native landraces (farmer improved distinct strains) were blessed with a degree of genetic diversity that enabled them to adapt to different growing conditions than found in Central America. They adapted into new forms of old plants. Yet all of these landraces tended not to be prolific. Each landrace corn variety has shaped with a distinct purpose in mind. The Native aesthetics of corn-breeding had as much to do with spiritual goals and medicinal effects than wholesomeness or good performance in the field. The colors of corn, or the figuration of the kernels were immensely meaningful to the Cherokee, the Muskogee, the Choctaw, the Catawba, and the Shawnee. In the 1980s the Cherokee traditionalist Carl Barnes, lamenting the fact that the totemic signatures that had disappeared over the course of the 19th century, rebred White Eagle corn so that the eagle shaped white blazon on the kernel reemerged on the blue seed coats. He was attempting to do the same with dove corn and buffalo corn when he died.
Environmental conditions also shaped the presence of certain corn landraces in the South. Corn weevils thrive along the coastal plains of the Gulf and Lowcountry. They devour soft meal corns readily. Only the tough caps of flint corn varieties resist the penetration of the insects feeding apparatus. Numbers of these semi-translucent, round capped, dense flint corn landraces survive: descendants of West Indian Tropical Island Flint such as Yellow Creole Corn, and Guinea Flint, descendants of Mexican long eared flints such as Creek Indian Flint and Sea Island White Flint, and even descendants of long slender northern 8 row flint such as Brittain Yellow Flint.
We have lost numbers of the early proto-dent corns from the South. The Cherokee Red Groudseed corn has vanished. But several of the slender cobbed multi rose slender kernelled corns, yellow, white, and orange remain. Settlers who obtained corn from Native groups in the Southeast began growing different varieties together. In the upper South crosses between northern 8 row flint corns and southern gourdseed or horsetooth corns produced the southern dents—tall growing, prolific, and many noded. These were first intentionally bred in the late 1820s through the 1840s. At the same time farmers used massed selection to move varieties toward certain ideals of configuration. Tapered ears becam more cylindrical, kernel size less gradated and more uniform, ears placed less high on the stalk, husks tighter.
The white gourdseed and horsetooth corn varieties were immensely influential in shaping early dent corns—Cocke’s Prolific, Carswell White, Johnson County White, Trucker’s Favorite, Boone County White. The yellow gourdseed corn varieties of TN, KY, VA, and OH would historically be the most important in terms of American agricultural history. Also distilling. 19th-century bourbon favored yellow gourdseed early in the 19th century, then two yellow dents bred bout of yellow gourdseed: Leaming Yellow and Reid’s Yellow Dent. These became the basis of the yellow corn belt dents—American commodity corn.
Sweet corn did not originate in the South. The most famous early sweet corn strain—Papoon Corn—was seized as a spoil of war from the Six Nations in 1779 in the midst of the American Revolution. It would be the basis for the white sweet corns—Old Colony, Stowell’s Evergreen, Country Gentleman, down to Silver Queen. There was a red sweet corn landrace from the Midwest that eventually found its way into Virginia. Sweet corn did not get planted in the South until the late 1830s.
Of all the old corn varieties, perhaps the one that inspires the greatest disparity in terms of revival are the landrace flour corns. Native peoples cherish these old round capped super soft corn varieties—and they are central to current rematriation projects. Yet in terms of commercial corn growers seeking heirloom material to bring to market, they rank least on the list of the items found below. Yet their culinary quality is superb and their aesthetics splendid.
I have not included pop corn varieties below, though the Rice variety pop corn was widely planted in the region at one time. At the end of the collection I have supplied a link list of other southern heirloom corn varieties in the USDA GRIN germ plasm record system.