On This 250th Anniversary Of Our Country’s Founding, We Honor And Remember The Brave Pioneers Who Built This Land.
They climbed mountains, forded rivers and crossed a continent; bringing their faith, their determination and their dreams of freedom. They also brought their food. From the Mennonites’ wheat turning Kansas into the breadbasket of the country to the Pilgrims bringing cows that would one day pull wagons down the Oregon Trail, agriculture from around the world found a new home in America. And when these settlers found a new plant called corn they embraced its many varieties wholeheartedly, founding father and moonshiner alike. All these and many more make a part of the tapestry of food that helped feed Americans then and now.
These are varieties that were originally selected and grown by people who were concerned with how their food would taste and have stood the test of time. They endured through the Green Revolution of the 1950s but many of them date decades, if not centuries, older.
Our Heirloom Corns
- Bloody Butcher: A corn with blood red kernels traditionally popular with Appalachian moonshiners. Occasionally a white kernel with red speckles resembling blood on a butchers apron. A dent corn with a hard flint endosperm.
- Blue Hopi: A blue corn raised by the Hopi Indians of the American southwest for at least the past 600 years. Traditionally, each family would maintain their own line of corn, thus, over the centuries of individual family selection, there has become a lot of variability among corns called Blue Hopi. The line we maintain has a “floury” type starch with little or no hard (flint) endosperm and a somewhat sweet flavor. The floury type starch was/is the easiest to grind to meal by hand.
- Henry Moore: A yellow dent corn brought to Illinois from the Carolinas sometime around the American Civil War. Some claim it makes the best hominy in the world.
- Hickory King: An heirloom white dent corn appropriate to make into grits or cornmeal.
- Gourdseed Corn: An heirloom white corn thought to have been raised by both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. It gained popularity in the Ohio River Valley and was stone ground into cornmeal to make cornbread. It fell out of favor to dent corns which could be milled into either grits or cornmeal in the mid 1800s. It’s whole kernel cornmeal is a little bit like wheat flour and it makes a flavorful cornbread, with a texture that begins to feel almost like cake.
- Pennsylvania Dutch Butter Flavored Popcorn: A heirloom open pollinated white butterfly type popcorn apparently thought by Amish of old to have a butter taste. We have added nothing to these kernels. The best tasting popcorn variety we’ve found, though pops into “kernels” smaller than typical theatre popcorn. Considered hulless by many.
Our Heirloom Wheats
- Turkey Red Wheat: A HRW (All purpose type) wheat, originally from Turkey, brought from the nearby Ukraine in 1874 by Mennonites immigrating to Kansas to flee from Russia military service (many Mennonites are pacifist, Russia had taken control of Ukraine from the crumbling Ottoman Empire). This wheat transformed Kansas agriculture and the American flour industry. A Kansas museum and website have been established for it.
- Red Fife: A HRS (bread type wheat) wheat popular in Canada (also down into Wisconsin) around 1860 until the early 1900s, when it was replaced by better yielding varieties (though not better tasting). An heirloom variety that pre-dates the intensive breeding that occurred during the “green revolution” of the 1940s and 1950s. Red Fife has less gluten than our HRS (Glenn) variety, and is therefore harder to make into bread. However, it is heirloom, certified organic and I feel has a superior flavor. Legend claims someone in Scotland dropped his hat into a shipment of this wheat. When he retrieved his hat, some kernels where stuck in his hatband, which he then smuggled to his friend, David Fife, in Canada. Fife increased the seed in Canada, though lost all but three heads of the first crop to the family cow.
- Purple Straw wheat: A SRW wheat that is thought to be the secret ingredient to old time Southern biscuits. A variety of wheat pre-dating the Revolutionary War, was popular in the “South” until it was crowded out by better yielding modern wheat varieties in the 20th century. This variety was thought lost until 2015, when ½ pound of seed was found in a USDA seed bank and planted at Clemson University. We managed to obtain and plant ¼ pound in 2019, from the increased Clemson stock. (Sarah and I harvested the first year’s crop with a scissors) A small amount of Purple Straw wheat was also planted again at Mount Vernon (George Washington’s farm) in 2021 (possibly for the first time in 200 years).
Our Heirloom Meat
- Red Devon, also known as Ruby Red, are supposedly one of the oldest breeds in existence. Their name comes from their color and native home near Devon, Britain. Historical records show the Romans noted the red cattle when they occupied the area in 55 B.C. They were brought to New England by the Pilgrims in 1623 (in subsequent trips, not the first Mayflower trip) and were a popular tri-purpose breed (work-milk-meat) in the American colonies in the 1700s. They were also a popular choice to pull the wagons west on the Oregon Trail. The breed did not take part in the "feedlot madness" that happened in America after WWII and is still optimized for robust, rugged, healthy animals that naturally control diseases and parasites; making it easier to raise them organically on pasture alone and and not ever need a feedlot. Red Devons are recognized for producing some of the finest beef off pasture alone.
