ISSUE 84, SOUTHERN LANDRACE & HEIRLOOM CORN, Part 13: Leaming Yellow Dent
Leaming Yellow Dent
The preferred Bourbon corn of the 3rd quarter of the nineteenth century, Leaming Dent was an improved Native landrace called “Little Yellow” hailing from Bull Skin Creek on the Ohio River (50 miles above Cincinnati) collected by Christopher Leaming. By mass selection from 1820 to 1850, he changed the configuration of the ear giving it regularity, size, and uniformity of color, a dark yellow orange on a red cob. Christopher’s son Joseph took the corn with him to Clinton County in Ohio where he shared seed and promoted its qualities. During the 1850s and 1860s the variety would be known as Clinton Corn.
John Klippert in 1860 reported that “Each stalk bears one or two ears with twelve or fourteen rows. It is from medium to large size, dark yellow color, early, and is a soft variety” [“The Corn Plant,” The Wheat Plant, 668]. In the later 1860s the variety came to be called “Leaming Yellow.” Leaming and another yellow dent developed out of “Little Yellow”, Reid’s Yellow Dent, are the main varieties from which the commodity corn belt dents were developed. This was the preferred bourbon corn in the final decades of the 19th century and has been revived by Midwestern growers for distillers in the last four years. Jon Branstrator of Clarksville, OH, provided the corn depicted in the image above.