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Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste

Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia

Bill Best

Foreword by Howard L. Sacks

Ohio University Press Athens

Foreword

Howard L. Sacks

A colleague of mine recently shared an eyebrow-raising story involving her college course “Botany and Botanical Arts.” In an “unknown plant” assignment, students were given different “mystery” seeds that they were challenged to cultivate, observe, and identify. One day my colleague discovered a student in the greenhouse who was at a loss over how much to water the plants; the exasperated student explained that she had never before planted a seed.

How removed we have become from an act so fundamental to human civilization! Planting a seed—horticulture—prompted our early ancestors to abandon a nomadic life of foraging to take up a more sedentary existence. The newfound dependability of the food supply enabled populations to grow. Individuals could accumulate more possessions, because they were no longer required to carry everything with them from one food source to the next. Differences of wealth emerged, and with that, differences of power. Humans grew increasingly territorial, and hostilities became more commonplace as groups sought to protect their cropland. All this, from the planting of a seed.

Not so long ago, most Americans still planted a few seeds. I grew up in postwar Philadelphia during the first wave of the new American idyll known as suburbia. On my street, partially prefabricated identical homes were perched like so many Monopoly plastic houses on deforested land. Visitors to our place were directed to “the sixth new house on the right.” The joke was that a drunken husband might walk into the wrong house at night.

But my mother had grown up in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where houses had been hand built of brick and stone and wood, and the countryside had not seemed far removed from town life. Yet housewives like her and their businessman or professional husbands could not sign up quickly enough for this spot of perfection bearing the fatuous title of “Westgate Hills” (no gates, no hills, but indeed west of the city). Something, though, pulled at my mother, because from my earliest memory she had always planted a few tomatoes against the foundation of our split-level house so that we could taste something fresh. Fresh—the word itself is radical, given the change in the American diet to canned and frozen foods. Peering down from my bedroom window to see my neighbor scratching the dirt in his own makeshift backyard garden, and paying attention to my mother and her fondness for these optimistic young tomato plants, I saw that things could live and grow, in opposition to a profoundly denatured landscape.

Then, as now, we knew no more about the source of the seeds we planted than about the origins of the food we purchased from the supermarket shelves. Both seeds and foods were identifiable to us by their corporate names, whether Burpee, Gerber, or Heinz. It wasn’t always that way, of course. Our collective ignorance can be traced to the mid-twentieth-century revolution in agriculture that transformed a diffuse, regionally based system of growing food to a highly centralized system of commodity production for a global market. By the late 1940s, tractors and combines had largely replaced machinery drawn by mules and horses, enabling farmers to cultivate more land with less reliance on their neighbors at planting and harvest time. In the following decades, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were promoted and adopted as the saviors for increased productivity and crop yield—their environmental costs left unquestioned in this campaign directed toward farmers. Most recently, genetic seed modification has enabled new varieties of fruits and vegetables designed specifically for global transport and marketing.

These technological breakthroughs complemented government policy and corporate interests. In the 1970s, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz admonished farmers to “get big or get out,” and low-interest bank loans enabled many farmers to buy more land and new equipment to produce a single commodity for sale on the global market. Agriculture schools at land-grant universities spearheaded research to develop new chemical and biological innovations, often financed by the very companies that would reap the profits as farmers became increasingly reliant on their products. Promises of an ever-expanding global demand for American agricultural commodities fueled agricultural speculation, and for a short time many American farmers did just fine. Tragically, the bubble eventually burst, and the reverberations have been both devastating and long-lasting. In the short term it meant the wholesale loss of farms and the decline of rural communities, and the farm crisis anticipated the recent housing market collapse that severely battered the American economy.

In the late twentieth century, American consumers were invited to understand modern agriculture as an unmitigated good. On television, in magazines, in the school systems, and at the university ag program level, the discourse was nearly exclusively that our food supply was abundant, affordable, and convenient. But a growing number of families have begun to question the wisdom and sustainability of handing over our dinner plates to industrial farming enterprises. People are again asking questions about the sources of their food. For some, the issue is health—childhood diabetes, adolescent eating disorders, heart disease, and other diet-related concerns. Others bring agricultural practice under closer scrutiny over food safety, as E. coli, salmonella, and mad cow disease enter our everyday lexicon. And concern about fossil fuels focuses the lens on the degree to which our food supply depends on oil: gas for the combine, petroleum-based fertilizers, and the cost of long-distance transportation, with their corresponding impact on food prices.

And then there is the matter of taste. Tomato varieties designed for resistance to bruising during cross-country transport and extended shelf life just do not taste very good, particularly when compared with homegrown varieties. Eggs from chickens raised under megafarm confinement conditions often have about as much taste as the cardboard containers in which they are packaged. And while supermarkets contain an astonishing array of products, the apples or greens in those bins actually represent just a few varieties chosen for their consistent, blemish-free appearance. As the song goes, “All made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.” When you take the time to think about it, it is no coincidence that suburbanized uniformity shows up in our food system.

But consider an alternative world, one in which it is not only professionals who dictate the colors and textures on our plates, and in which memory and local culture go into every child’s lunchbox. This is the world of the seed savers of the Southern Appalachians. From the men and women who practice seed conservation as part of daily life, we can learn important lessons about eating wholesomely and living more holistically.

Until the advent of commercially available seed stock, the practice of saving harvested seeds for future planting was born of necessity; sustainability of the food supply was an immediate, ever-present concern. The European pioneers who settled in western North Carolina and Kentucky brought seeds from their homelands and the eastern colonies, obtaining others from the indigenous Native people who had long planted varieties of corn.

The varieties that flourished in the upper South were carefully preserved, and new strains that proved desirable—created through natural mutation or deliberately, by crossbreeding experimentation —were added to the local seed stock. This approach has yielded a diverse array of beans, corn, tomatoes, apples, and other fruits and vegetables prized for their flavor, texture, productivity, suita-bility for preserving, and eye appeal. In short, they both taste good and work well in the locale.

This localized method of creating, disseminating, and preserving varieties stands in sharp contrast to the commercial system of genetic modification, corporate patents, and global marketing. As the stories in this volume reveal, the preservation of a particular variety of bean can often be traced to the dedicated efforts of a single individual over many years, experimenting with a new variety or simply planting, harvesting, and preserving seeds to ensure that a longtime favorite makes it into succeeding generations. Seed sharing follows the contours of traditional community life, as gardeners distribute a variety to family members, friends, and neighbors. Some growers freely share a prized bean with anyone likely to cultivate it, in order to ensure its preservation. Others more proprietary by nature might hoard their stock, prompting a neighbor to raid a garden late at night in an act of seed liberation. Even today some rural communities continue the barter system of acquiring goods and services, and seeds play a role in such exchanges: they may be traded for supplies, slipped across the table at a church picnic, or offered to entice support for a political candidate. Exchanging seeds clearly produces more than food; it is an act of profound social meaning, nurturing community and family bonds.

At the hardware store, the church supper, or the family reunion, telling stories about seeds and the giving of seeds constitute a distinct type of knowledge exchange. This system of knowledge creation and transmission challenges the dominant narrative about who is an authority and whose knowledge prevails in society. Unlike academic and corporate professionals, who tend to speak mainly to their peers in journal articles and who see seeds as commodities for patent protection, the experts in the world of seed saving are imbedded in their communities, and they have built their knowledge base—and, frankly, their passion—through a lifetime of in-the-field experience and careful observation. The displacement of just this sort of local knowledge is what marked the transition to modern agriculture, with the advent of university-trained agriculture experts selling their version of a brighter future at rural farmers’ institutes and extension offices. The speakers in this volume return us to the once-prevalent, surprisingly persistent world of neighbors with brains worth picking.

Author Bill Best brings alive a range of keepers, many with specialized knowledge. We meet, for example, an expert in tree grafting, a critical skill for preserving heirloom fruits. Many varieties of beans are named after the women who developed and preserved them, affirming the primary role of women as knowledge bearers. At the same time, the author demonstrates how the modern seed-saver network actively incorporates the Internet, providing an interesting case study of the interplay of orally transmitted traditional knowledge and modern technology.

The author’s stories about gardening convey a deep sense of regional history and folklore. We learn about Daniel Boone’s pioneer exploits, the Trail of Tears that removed Cherokees from their homeland, methods of tobacco cultivation, local politics, and the recent migrations that have shaped the transmission of seeds across space and time.

Beyond the obvious functional impact of seed saving, seeds and plants feature significantly in Appalachian expressive culture. As Best notes, one need look no further to appreciate the cultural significance of beans than “Jack and the Bean Stalk” and the other Jack tales, stories famous in western North Carolina and eastern Kentucky, where the author has spent his life. Among the seed savers mentioned is Letha Hicks, drawing us to note the connection of saving seeds and saving stories. Jack tales, of European and Celtic origin, were preserved in America principally by the Hicks family of the Beech Mountain region of western North Carolina. Ray Hicks, who in 1983 received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts as a teller of these tales, learned them as a boy from his elders, who told the stories while canning or drying apples. In a region where beans are a staple of necessity and hardship presents many obstacles, it is easy to understand the appeal of stories in which magical beans and individual pluck enable success.

One of the most popular fiddle tunes of the Southern Appalachians is “Leather Britches,” a title that refers to a way of preserving long beans. Before the widespread use of freezing or canning, people would string mature beans together and air-dry them for several weeks, preserving these “leather breeches” (britches) for later rehydration and cooking.

In the broadest sense, seed saving is an act of connection to place. Heirloom varieties bear the names of the people, animals, materials, and motivations that define local life. When we read of Ora’s Speckled Bean, Brown Goose, White Case Knife, and Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, we have a sense of a story behind each one. The community that sustains these heirloom fruits and vegetables stands as a telling counterpoint to the contemporary notion that rapid mobility and separation from friends and family are what life is and should be—the uncritically accepted norm. A poignant reminder of seeds as a connection to place is the effort of those who have left Appalachia to secure and cultivate the varieties they knew back home.

Again in contrast to the big and the uniform in agriculture, Best refocuses our attention to an intimate scale. He invites us to notice the distinctive texture of a greasy bean, the compactness of beans in a pod, or how a tomato seems to taste better when accompanied by the smell of field tobacco.

Today, local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national movement. Seed swaps among neighbors at the local store have given way to a network of enthusiasts, regional educators, and nonprofit groups exchanging on the Internet. “Local” is harder to define these days, surely. Yet it is fair to say that these savers constitute an alternative agricultural world, one that operates on assumptions and values that sharply contrast with those of global agribusiness.

There is undeniably an element of the romantic in tending to seeds as if life depends on them. But it is only modern rationality, with its devotion to finding a technical solution to any problem, that prompts us to reject the romantic as superfluous. Perhaps there is inherent value in the dirty fingernails and slightly aching spine, and the curiosity and dedication that people bring to toiling in a small garden and helping plants grow. These stories offer a critical perspective on our own lives, beginning with what we sit down to eat at the dinner table. All this, from the planting of a seed.

Howard L. Sacks teaches sociology at Kenyon College, where he directs the Rural Life Center. For the past fifteen years, he has led an initiative to build a sustainable local food system in Knox County, Ohio. He and his wife, Judy, raise sheep on their farm near Gambier.

Dedication

My mother, Margaret Sanford Best, was an old-time seed saver who took her seed saving very seriously. Born over a hundred years ago in 1911, at the time of her death in 1994, just four weeks before her eighty-third birthday, she was still busy trading seeds with extended family members and other people in the Upper Crabtree community in Haywood County, North Carolina. Having said frequently that she would wear out rather than rust out, Mother had kept gardening as long as possible, always saving seeds for the next season and making sure she had plenty to share.

One of my earliest memories is picking colorful cornfield beans with her and learning how to avoid the equally colorful saddleback caterpillars and other stinging “worms” that could leave painful welts on bare skin. Mother picked the beans higher up the cornstalks, and I picked those close to the bottom. That I had helped pick the beans I ate for supper that night made me feel very much a part of the family life and farm life in which I was a participant. I was about three years old at the time.

I had my first garden of my own in 1963, after my wife and I had started working at Berea College. As soon as we had arrived in Kentucky, we had bought a farm in Jackson County, and I ordered seeds from catalogs, mistakenly assuming that they would be like the beans and tomatoes I had grown up with. I was quite disappointed, to put it mildly. While visiting family in North Carolina that fall, I mentioned my disappointment with commercial beans, and Mother quickly went to her can house and handed me bags of several of her varieties of beans, which were beginning to be called heirlooms. I have never looked back.

Mother realized early that the commercial seed companies had stopped selling the beans that had flavor and texture worthy of the name bean. She intensified her seed-saving activities as she got older, seemingly aware that her efforts would be a legacy worth leaving to her descendants and any others who might like to grow and eat these beans.

Ten years after her death, my youngest sister, Janet, who lives with her husband in the house all five children in our family were raised in, asked me to check Mother’s freezer, since it appeared that several of her bean containers full of bean seeds were still in the freezer. I discovered thirteen varieties of beans still in her freezer, untouched since the day she died. The following summer I grew some of all thirteen varieties, with all thirteen having good germination.

Seven years later, in 2010, Janet cleaned out the entire freezer and defrosted it, only to find several more packages of beans dating back to 1978. She spilled some of the 1978 beans and discovered three days later that they had germinated in the water left by the melting ice. Most exciting to Mother’s five children was to find some cut-short beans that all of us had remembered from our growing up.

For the reasons listed and many others, I am dedicating this book to my mother and hope that I can make a contribution to other people as she made to me and others with her hard farming and gardening work and her sage advice.

Preface

A few years ago, savers of heirloom seeds were thought to be a little bit eccentric or worse. After all, everyone knew that the many seed companies peddling their wares were looking out for America’s gardeners and maintaining an abundance of varieties for each and every purpose and growing condition.

Gardening fell out of favor with many Americans as “Super” markets made available more selections than most people had ever known. The United States pursued a cheap food policy, with land grant universities leading the charge to make food available as cheaply as possible, and with the government also making surplus foods available to public schools and other agencies.

But somewhere along the food superhighway, there came to be a few bumps in the road. Small seed companies were swallowed up by larger seed companies, and larger seed companies were swallowed up by international food, feed, seed, and chemical conglomerates that tended not to take very seriously their responsibilities in maintaining genetic diversity and producing quality foods.

Food plants were genetically modified to make mechanical harvesting and long-distance shipping over great distances easier. Vegetables were toughened up and made more uniform so that they could be harvested by machine with one pass at one time. American food production left the “Garden State” and other states close to population centers and moved to California and Florida, if not as far afield as Mexico, South America, and even Europe and Asia.

Genetic engineering replaced the preservation of genetic diversity, and companies ridded themselves of thousands of varieties that had been maintained by the smaller companies that were cannibalized during the consolidation process. This even included many of the early hybrids that were bred for flavor, texture, and nutrition. Suddenly toughness was the byword for all things fruit and vegetable.

But a funny thing happened on the way to modernity. Many people started having doubts about the brave new world of genetic engineering, food-borne diseases, childhood obesity, adult-onset diabetes in young children, and food companies using the courts to squeeze out the small farmers by patenting the pollen in the air. Suddenly a collective “Enough!” was heard from sea to shining sea.

This book is about a small part of that “Enough!” We eccentrics are now being heard.

An Introduction to Heritage and Heirloom Seed Saving

I grew up believing that the Goose Bean was discovered by my great-grandfather Sanford. My mother had told me that he had shot a wild goose and her grandmother had discovered some bean seeds in its craw as she was dressing it for a meal. The beans were planted, grew to maturity, had a good flavor, and became one of many varieties of beans kept by our family.

Years later I discovered that many children in the Southern Appalachians had been told the same story by their parents. Essentially the same tale was also told about the Turkey Craw Bean: a wild turkey had been shot for food, bean seeds were found in its craw, and the seeds had been planted and found to be among the best beans around.

The Goose Bean is also known as the Goose Craw Bean and in some areas as the Goose Neck Bean. The Turkey Craw Bean is sometimes just called the Turkey Bean. Both beans are among the favorites of thousands of families in the Southern Appalachians and in other parts of the country where many Appalachian families have migrated.

As is true of many other families in our community, beans were very important to us. When we visited my grandmother Sanford most Sunday afternoons, as a very young child I followed her and my mother to Grandma’s garden. They talked gardening while I explored and sometimes listened to their conversations. I later realized that Grandma Sanford was continuing to pass on her gardening traditions to Mother, who was later to pass them on to me. And Grandma Sanford was passing on traditions she had learned from her family decades earlier. Perhaps the most important tradition being passed on was seed saving.

What is important here is the fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of heirloom bean varieties maintained by gardeners in the Southern Appalachians. They are also preserved, often in their purest forms, by Appalachian migrants to other parts of the country. Many people migrated to places as far away as Washington State and took their beans with them. For example, there is a bean in Washington State that is called the Tarheel Bean, which, I have been told by several people, was taken from the Jackson/Haywood County area of North Carolina. (My mother’s oldest, and only, sister migrated with her husband from Haywood County to Kelso, Washington, in 1918 to work in the timber industry.) Another bean variety now in Washington State was sent to me by a retired Forest Service employee who had taken it with him from West Virginia when he retired. And, of course, there is the famous Trail of Tears Bean, taken from western North Carolina and northern Georgia by the Cherokees when they were forced out of the Southern Appalachians into the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) by the federal government in the 1830s.

Until I was in my midtwenties and going to college and graduate school and then serving in the army, I helped my family with its gardens and other crops when I was home during the summers. After starting college I was rarely there for bean plantings, but on those occasions I was conscious that we still planted beans that my mother had saved from previous years. By that time I knew that bean seeds could be bought from farm stores and from seed catalogues as well, but there was no point in doing so. There were so many varieties in the general area that it was pointless to pay good (and scarce) money for seeds.

However, when I was in my late twenties and starting to garden on my own with my young family, I purchased some seeds from commercial sources. My wife and I had bought a farm in Kentucky that had land similar to that of my home in Haywood County, North Carolina, with basically the same growing season. Our land had a garden plot that had been used for generations, and the soil was exceptionally fertile.

That first summer we had a bumper crop of good tomatoes, sweet corn, okra, and potatoes, but I was in for a rude awakening because of the toughness of the beans we were growing. It had not occurred to me that beans might become inedible because of the toughness of their hulls at any stage of their development. I certainly did not think that a lot of time and money had been spent by seed companies and universities to create tough beans that would not break during mechanical harvest.

When we visited my parents that following Thanksgiving, I told my mother about our bean experience, and she promptly gave me some of her seeds, which had not been contaminated by the tough gene being used almost universally in commercial beans by that time. Unfortunately, I neglected to put her seeds in our freezer, and the beans had holes in them from bean weevils by the time I got ready to plant them in our garden the following summer.

That was lesson number two: always keep bean seeds in airtight containers and refrigerated or frozen until time to plant them. The first lesson, of course, was to stay away from commercial beans entirely. Before Mother had refrigeration (which she got about the time I left for college), she had put mothballs or hot peppers in her bean containers; that kept the weevils at bay but also gave the beans a bad smell—and your hands, too, when planting them.

When I started selling heirloom beans at the Lexington Farmers Market in the early 1970s, I charged more per pound for them than did vendors selling commercial machine-harvested beans that they had purchased for resale. Not long afterward, I noticed something about the buying habits of many customers: they would buy several pounds of commercial, stringless beans from other vendors and then buy a pound or two of “full” beans from me.

When I finally asked why this was so, my customers told me that they were buying my beans “to flavor” the ones they had already bought. As I came to know more of my customers, I realized that most of the ones who bought my beans to flavor the others were migrants to Lexington from eastern Kentucky or mountain counties in other states. They liked the cheap prices of the commercial beans but also wanted taste and texture if possible. They also liked having a few “real” beans mixed in with the commercial beans, which consisted almost entirely of hulls.

As vendors selling commercial beans, usually bought from produce terminals, started raising their prices to have a higher profit margin and their prices became closer to those of heirloom beans, many, if not most, of the heirloom bean lovers started buying only heirloom beans when they were available. They decided that quality was worth the price, especially if there was little difference between the prices. As more eastern Kentucky transplants started coming to the market, many of them shared some of their family beans with the vendors who were interested in growing them for the market.

Another grower started selling heirloom beans about the same time I started, and we traded seeds with one another. By working together and making referrals to one another, we soon had a lot of customers buying heirloom beans—and not just those people who had grown and eaten such beans in their earlier years. Soon heirloom beans came to be in demand by people who had never eaten any beans other than the commercial, machine-harvested ones.

In 1988, freelance writer Judy Sizemore wrote an article about our small farming operation for The Rural Kentuckian (now Kentucky Living). In the article, she described the ways we had come to participate in the Lexington and Berea farmers’ markets and the fruits and vegetables we had been growing and selling for many years. She also described the heirloom beans and tomatoes we were growing, especially the greasy beans (so named because they have slick hulls and look as if they have a thin coat of grease on them).

Within a week after the article came out, I started getting phone calls and letters from people interested in purchasing some of our greasy beans. Almost without exception the phone calls and letters spoke of the superiority of heirloom beans when compared to commercial beans. Many customers wanted to purchase greasy beans to grow in their own gardens, while several proposed trading seeds with me. Others simply wished to send me beans that had been in their families for generations that they would like to see spread around.

One man from London, Kentucky, came by our house and brought an heirloom bean from Morgan County, Kentucky, called the Nickell Bean. I gave him some of our beans in return but unfortunately did not get his name and address, since I had not yet started formally collecting bean varieties and was unaware of the importance of documentation.

Over the next few months, things began to explode, because people were sending the magazine to friends and relatives within Kentucky and in other states. I received eighty-six letters from six states within six months. From those letters and the contacts involved, I became a collector, grower, and distributor of heirloom beans. But I was still working in a very informal way and not documenting enough. I certainly became aware that there were a lot more beans out there than I had thought.

Finally it dawned on me that I was on to something that would come to occupy a lot of my time and energy. I had been slow to realize that I was involved in an activity that dealt with a lot of history and culture and also tapped into widespread unhappiness with the state of the modern food supply—a food supply increasingly dominated by large corporate farms and multinational food/ feed/seed/chemical conglomerates. (And this was long before the outbreaks of mad cow disease and the more recent problems with tainted food from other countries and the problems with E. coli, salmonella, listeria, and other food-borne pathogens.)

I needed assistance from as many interested people as possible, so in cooperation with my youngest son, an agricultural economics professor, and several other people interested in heirloom fruits and vegetables and sustainable agriculture in general, we formed a not-for-profit corporation, the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, to develop a seed bank that would house the growing number of heirloom beans (and other vegetables) in my collection.

My son, Michael Best, directed the organization for its first three years and then went back to university teaching. I have directed it since that time, taking the position some years after my retirement from Berea College. Other members of the board come from three states and include retired college professors, a graduate school dean, an educational TV producer, and growers of heirloom fruits and vegetables.

When we set up our website, www.heirlooms.org, the organization became the focal point for many seed savers and others wishing to become involved with heirloom gardening. I started receiving Appalachian heirloom beans from people in many states and requests from hundreds of people.

Other growers also bought into the idea of growing and selling quality beans, and today heirloom beans could easily and quickly corner the market if enough were available. But because seeds must be saved and the beans must be picked by hand, there often is not enough supply to meet demand, even with prices at $3.00 to $4.00 or more per pound.

Part 1 Heritage fruit and Heirloom Seeds

Beans

Beans occupy an almost mythical status not only in the Southern Appalachians but also in other bean-growing parts of the world. They have been found in Indian burial mounds and in pyramids. When kept in airtight jars, they have been found to be viable after hundreds and even thousands of years.

Corn, of course, also occupies high status in many cultures, with corn and beans being the dominant foods. Together, and accompanied by pumpkins, they occupied a special status within many Indian tribes, who saw them as the Three Sisters, for their growth habits were symbiotic, with the cornstalks providing support for the beans; the beans providing nitrogen for the corn, winter squash, and pumpkins; and the squash and pumpkins providing ground cover to help control weeds.

Our Appalachian Beans Came from Where?

There are many ongoing discussions about where the beans of the Southern Appalachians originated. The debate has intensified with the coming of the Internet and numerous gardening forums where people swap information, sometimes misinformation, and questions. Seed-saving organizations also have sessions at their annual meetings and informal get-togethers.

I have come to believe that most of the beans found in the mountainous areas of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama can be traced to the Indians living in the area when Europeans first arrived from the flat and coastal areas of what would become the United States of America. Given the bean’s tendency to cross and mutate, most of the varieties that now exist in the mountains could have come from a far smaller suite of original beans than one might think.

At the annual meeting of the Kentucky Vegetable Grower’s Association in January 2005, the keynote speaker, Dr. Gwynn Henderson of the Kentucky Archeological Survey, gave a talk on the history and possible origins of many of the edible plants of the Southern Appalachians. During her presentation, she showed slides of beans taken from an Indian dump in Jessamine County, Kentucky, that had been discovered during a construction project. Carbon-dated at more than 1,000 years old, they were clearly cut-shorts, one of the dominant types of beans in the Southern Appalachians (called cut-shorts because the seeds are so crowded in the pods that they square off on the ends). Beans from another site in Mason County, Kentucky, were more than 1,400 years old.

Cut-short beans take the shapes of squares, rectangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, and even triangles. Because of the high ratio of seed to hull, they are much higher in protein than other beans are and could have been prized by the Indians for that reason alone. They were also valued by the European settlers; today, they are still treasured by traditional gardeners and, increasingly, by farmers’ market customers.

Although the same beans have been in many mountain families for generations, determining where particular varieties originated is difficult. But one may safely assume that where certain varieties predominate, that says something about their development, if not their origin.

I was at a conference a few years ago, and during a discussion of traditional foods, someone mentioned a bean that had been in his family for generations; he still maintained that variety even though he lived in a city far removed from the rural area where we were meeting (on property that had belonged to his great-grandfather). Others present entered the conversation with stories about beans that had been in their families for generations as well, and this led to a discussion about family beans being a part of Appalachian culture, perhaps more so than in other regions, or at least longer.

Family Beans

I know of one bean that can be traced back to before the American Revolution. One of my college classmates, Don Fox from Madison County, North Carolina, was calling one of our mutual friends a few years ago. Intending to dial the number of the friend, he mistakenly called me instead. I took the opportunity to discuss his family bean, which he had shared with me a few years before, brought to me by our mutual friend, Ben Culbertson. (This is one of the ways Appalachian beans get around.)

Don’s ancestor, by the name of Banks, had migrated from Scotland to the colonies just as the Revolutionary War was beginning. He fought on the British side and, because he had been on the losing side, found himself in a quandary at the end of the war: he could go back to Scotland or into the mountains of what would be western North Carolina. He chose the mountains and ended up marrying a Cherokee woman. One of her contributions to the marriage was a greasy bean, and that bean has thus been in the Fox family since the early 1780s.

One variety has been in my family for at least 150 years, and within a few miles of where I was raised, there are beans that have been in other families for generations. This tradition of family beans marks one of the important ways Appalachian beans have been preserved and developed.

A lifetime of experience suggests to me that many, if not most, of such family beans came about by mutant beans, usually called “sports,” showing up in bean patches. On numerous occasions I have been told of a particular bean showing up in someone’s garden, usually a grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s, since most of the serious seed saving tended to be done by older women. Seeds would be saved from the mutant bean and grown the following summer to see whether they bred true and were tender and tasty. If they were of good eating quality, they became part of that family’s seed stock to be kept, even cherished, and shared with kinfolk and others in the community as well.

About twenty-five years ago I had such an experience with a sport myself. A man from Cincinnati stopped by the Lexington Farmers Market to buy some heirloom beans to take back to Cincinnati with him. Buyers of heirloom beans usually want to talk as well, rather than just buying and walking off, and he told me of a bean that he had taken with him from his home in Harlan County, Kentucky, to his more recent home in Cincinnati. He was so interested in what I was doing with heirloom beans that he made a trip back to Lexington the following Saturday to bring me a handful of his brown greasy beans.

Since it was late in the season but still early enough to plant beans and save them for seed, I planted the beans to develop my own seed stock of his beans. And because they were the last beans I planted that summer and at least three weeks later than any of my other beans, they grew in isolation, which rules out the possibility of their having crossed with other beans. To my surprise, one of the beans was two weeks earlier than the others and had hulls at least two to three times the length of all the others. In addition, it was a white bean while all the others were brown, just like the seed beans I had planted. And while all the others were greasy beans, the new bean had the fuzz of typical cornfield beans on the surface of the hulls.

I carefully gathered all of the beans from that one plant without even shelling them out, put them in an airtight plastic bag, and placed them in a freezer, where I kept them for eighteen years, postponing planting them. I finally decided I had to see what I had, but I chose a bad time, with a rainy period ensuing just after they had been planted. Of sixty-one planted seeds, only nineteen survived, while the others damped off. The nineteen plants produced enough beans for our family to have a good meal and enough seeds to plant a full three-hundred-foot row the following summer. The beans are very tasty and have a very tender texture.

In keeping with naming traditions for family beans, I named the new bean the Robe Mountain Bean, after the mountain behind our house. And for the past several years, I have made the seeds available to others through our website. I have great respect for family beans and see them as important contributions to the genetic diversity of beans. I also feel lucky to have been present when a new bean came into being. It gives new meaning to the phrase “God Given.”

Community Beans

Beyond family beans, there are many other beans that have come to predominate in a given community. Because people from several families often shared in the stringing and breaking of beans for canning or making dried beans, they would also swap stories about their own favorite beans. One thing would lead to another, and beans would be swapped to be grown by others in the next growing season.

More than ten years after my mother’s death in 1992, my youngest sister, who had moved back home from Charleston, South Carolina, to live in the house in which we were raised, suggested that I ought to look in Mother’s freezer, which was kept in our can house along with her jars of vegetables, fruits, and meats. In the freezer, we found thirteen varieties of beans, some of which she had been given by neighbors and cousins.

During the last three years of her life, she had not grown large gardens and had not planted all of the beans that had been given to her. One of the beans, the Lazy Daisy, in particular intrigued me, because it had come from my father’s first cousin, who would have been in his mideighties when he gave the variety to her. I already had two varieties of Lazy Wife Greasy beans from Madison County, North Carolina, acquired from the cousin of one of my first cousins on her mother’s side. (Extended families can be very helpful and also hard to keep up with.)

The following summer, I grew all thirteen varieties found in Mother’s freezer, and all thirteen did well. The Lazy Daisy was a beautiful, medium-sized greasy bean and one of the best-tasting varieties I had ever grown. All the varieties were in a freezer for over twelve years but remained viable. The Lazy Daisy beans might actually have been there for over fifteen years, since they were in the original container, which was still full.

The main point is that bean varieties such as these tend to circulate among people within a community who see one another at bean stringings, family reunions, church suppers, or dinners-on-the-ground. At all such events where meals are served, beans are an important part of the meal, served fresh, frozen, pickled, or as shuck beans. If the beans are good, many people within a given community will grow them.

County and Regional Beans

Seed swapping also extends beyond communities, and many beans tend to be swapped throughout a given county. Such events as court days, rural electric cooperative meetings, revivals, political get-togethers, farm tours, harvest festivals, and other all-county events become good places to swap seeds as well as fish tales. In my home county, farm store operators and hardware stores have also played a role in spreading beans around, especially by selling seed beans brought in by customers in trade for other items, a custom that is still active. For example, J. B. Mullins, a noted bean grower in Breathitt County, Kentucky, trades many varieties of beans to a local hardware store in exchange for many of his supplies for the upcoming summer. The store then sells his beans to its other customers until the supply runs out—always quickly.

Over many years, some beans have become so popular that they have jumped across county lines and have become favorites in much larger geographic areas. The Goose Bean, for example, is known throughout the Southern Appalachians. While the predominant Goose Bean is a deep beige, about six to eight inches long, and typically with a pink tip at maturity, other beans are called Goose Bean in scattered areas. But when most people talk of the Goose Bean, they mean the deep beige one.

Another regional bean, though it does not have quite the reach of the Goose Bean, is the Turkey Craw Bean. This bean is very popular within about a hundred-mile radius of Cumberland Gap (where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee meet). Turkey Craw Beans are especially popular from there to Kingsport, Tennessee, and throughout Lee County, Virginia, and Harlan and Letcher Counties in Kentucky. Most sources have the variety originating in southeastern Kentucky, but no one knows for sure.

Still another regional bean is the Paterge (Partridge) Head Bean in Albany, Kentucky, and Byrdstown, Tennessee, as well as surrounding areas. It is a large bean in comparison to the size of the hull and is good both as a green bean and for shelly and dried beans. It is a light brown color with darker stripes and grows to be about six inches long.

The Big John Bean is well known in the Knott/Perry/Letcher/Harlan County areas of southeastern Kentucky and is also in high demand among natives of the area who have migrated to Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and elsewhere in the north. The prices of such beans sometimes climb to $70.00 per bushel on the side of the road on summer Sunday afternoons in July and August when those heading back to their homes in other states stop to buy beans for eating fresh, canning, and drying. At the same time, some of the best strains of the Big John are grown in those same northern states by people who took their seeds with them when they migrated.

Other regional beans include the Logan Giant in southwestern West Virginia and the Mountain Climber in northwestern North Carolina and upper East Tennessee. Of course, there are several greasy beans that have been made very popular by the Western North Carolina Farmers Market in Asheville; many of those bean varieties originated in Madison County, North Carolina, but have become so popular that they are now grown in adjoining counties.

These well-known regional beans are probably among the oldest of the heirloom beans in the Southern Appalachians and have been around for generations, while those originating more recently from crosses or mutants, though no less tender or tasty, have not had time to spread much beyond where they originated, despite the mobility of our modern society. Contrary to the dominant academic opinion that the people of the Appalachians lived in geographic isolation, mountain folk did a lot of traveling and a lot of trading along the way, long before the advent of a cash economy and motorized transportation. It was nothing to take a trip of several hundred miles and be gone two or three months or longer at one time.

Two groups of widely traveled people, politicians and preachers, are given much of the credit for the early spreading of bean varieties, and there are several varieties of preacher beans (although I do not know of any being called “politician beans”). Appalachian scholar, storyteller, and humorist Loyal Jones tells a story that might explain the dissemination of many bean varieties in western North Carolina via politics:

Zebulon Vance, Civil War governor of North Carolina and later senator, as good a politician as there was, knew the importance of beans, and he used them in his political campaigns: He’d have his wife tie up a few seed beans in a packet, and when he went through the counties campaigning, stopping at houses along the way, he’d say to the woman of the house, “My wife wanted you to have some of her Lazy Wife beans, and she wondered if you could give her a few of your Goose Craw beans.” The woman would dutifully tie up a few of her beans, and he would take them to the next house and say, “My wife wanted you to have some of her Goose Craw beans. . .” And so on.

Trade was another mechanism for spreading bean varieties. For example, people going on periodic trips from the mountains to the coast to boil down seawater for salt might have taken beans with them to trade along their routes. I remember as a small child hearing some of the oldest men in the community where I grew up talking about their trips to the ocean to boil down salt. One might then say that a good collector of regional beans would be worth his salt. (An old saying in the mountains holds that someone who is motivated and productive is worth his salt or, if he is nonproductive or lazy, isn’t worth his salt.)

Some of the sons and even a few daughters from large Appalachian families became migrant farmworkers during the summers in the early decades of the twentieth century. They traveled on freight trains to Georgia or Florida and followed the harvest from there northward to Pennsylvania and New Jersey and then came back home to the mountains when the harvest was finished. At times, young couples would go work together as migrants and sometimes decide to stay on one of the farms where they did harvesting work. Some, including couples from my home community, made enough money to buy farms of their own in other states. Long before farmers became dependent on migrants from Mexico and other countries, there were sufficient internal migrants to take care of farm labor needs in the United States. My father was one such migrant for many years, spending a lot of time in the summers in New Jersey when it truly was the “Garden State.”

Types of Appalachian Heirloom Beans

Cornfield Beans

For some decades, many farm and hardware stores in the mountains have sold bean seeds labeled as “Genuine Cornfield Beans.” Such a label is merely a marketing ploy to attract those with little knowledge about beans, or as one might say, to attract buyers who “don’t know beans about beans.”

It is safe to say that well over 95 percent of Appalachian heirloom beans are genuine cornfield beans. This simply means that they are climbing beans, for which cornstalks historically served as poles for the beans to climb. Some of my most vivid early childhood memories involve going to our cornfields with my mother to pick the beans from the cornstalks when they were at their peak for canning and drying. I thought that the cornfield must be the closest thing imaginable to a jungle. I was fascinated by the many colors of bean hulls and the multicolored beans within them as well.

As hybrid varieties of corn with their shorter and weaker stalks entered the picture, many gardeners started using poles on which to grow their beans, often in teepee style to stabilize them during windy weather. Others would cut tree branches with many twigs to create a bean vine that looked something like a large fan; the bean would continue to send out new vines and be very productive over a long season. Cornfield beans thus became pole beans.

But not all gardeners switched over to poles to support their beans. Many still think that the older open-pollinated corn varieties with their taller and stronger stalks are the best supports for climbing beans. Many gardeners maintain their stock of open-pollinated corn for beans to climb and also for grinding into cornmeal, because in many areas hybrid corn is thought to produce inferior-flavored cornmeal. A popular open-pollinated corn still sold in farm stores is the Hickory Cane (sometimes called Hickory King) or Eight Row variety.

Many growers now grow their climbing beans on trellises supported by strong posts and wires. This is especially true for those growers who grow heirloom beans for farmers’ markets, which are springing up throughout the Appalachian region. Such trellises allow for the greatest amount of sunlight on the leaves of the beans and for drip irrigation, which has greatly assisted bean growth during the dry summers of the past few years. Some gardeners also use concrete-reinforcing wire stacked two rolls high and supported by steel posts to create strong trellises. Trellises are becoming increasingly popular with growers, and climbing beans might someday be called “trellis beans” as a more accurate descriptive name.

Runner and Half-Runner Beans

I am often asked this question: “What is the difference between a half-runner and a full runner bean?” My reply is, “About ten feet.” The answer is actually more complex, since running beans have runners of many heights. The Peanut Bean, also known as the Pink Half-Runner and sometimes as the Six Week Bean, has runners about three feet long. Some growers contend that the true Peanut Bean has no runners at all, but I have never seen one that completely lacked runners.

Other beans, commonly known as “half-runners,” have runners up to at least ten feet. Full runner beans have probably never been accurately measured. I have experimented with bean posts sixteen feet tall on which the bean vines went all the way to the top and back down partway, limited only by the end of the growing season. I have also had running beans, under optimal temperature and moisture conditions, grow more than a foot per day, by actual measurement. As some people have said, “Watch out or they will run over you.” But they are not quite like kudzu.

For many years, white half-runners were the dominant bean in many areas of the mountains. This development did not escape notice by commercial seed interests and farm stores, especially those managed by co-ops, which started selling half-runner bean seeds. For many years the seeds were of fairly high quality, and many gardeners stopped saving their own half-runner seeds, assuming that the commercial seed beans would continue to be of high quality.

However, as seed production became more centralized with fewer growers growing seeds for fewer companies, half-runners were contaminated by the tough gene that had been introduced into commercial bush beans so that they would not break during mechanical harvest. As a result, gardeners are having to discard more than half of their beans because the beans are too tough to be edible. I have been told by several farmers’ market customers that they stopped buying half-runner beans when they had to throw away more than half of them.

Fortunately, there are still several heirloom half-runner varieties in isolated locations, and many gardeners have sought them out and have started saving their seeds once again. I was given some half-runner seeds by a friend a few years ago. As is true of many heirloom varieties, this bean was a three-in-one bean, having three distinct half-runner variants. I have spent the past ten years stabilizing one of the variants, which I call the NT Half-Runner (NT standing for “non-tough”). I still have the other two variants to go but hope to stabilize them as well.

One of my friends has refused to give up on the commercial half-runner and patiently removes each of the tough beans when they first come up. He says that the tough beans have a slightly different leaf structure and can be pulled up easily soon after they emerge from the soil. I hope he starts saving seeds from the beans he does not pull up; he might bring that particular half-runner back to its original form.

Greasy Beans

Greasy beans are usually thought of as being the best of Appalachian heirloom beans. The fact that they command prices far higher than commercially grown beans attests to their popularity: indeed, they bring up to seven times as much per pound as commercial bush beans, which are typically picked at a very immature stage by machine. Such commercial beans, if allowed to form even very small seeds, are usually too tough to eat.

Greasy beans, as mentioned earlier, are so named because they have slick hulls that look as if they have a thin coat of grease on them, and they are exceptionally tender and tasty. Even when they are fully mature and have turned yellow, they can be strung and broken easily. They are excellent when eaten fresh and are in high demand when made into shuck beans.

Greasy beans are not a variety of bean but a type. The many varieties of greasy beans come in many colors and many lengths: there are those only two to three inches long and others six to eight inches long. Most of the shorter ones seem to be cut-shorts, while the longer ones have wider spaces between the beans without the beans even touching. All greasy bean hulls are so thin that when held up to the sun, the beans inside are quite visible.

Cut-Shorts

When Appalachian heirloom beans are discussed, the term cut-short often causes confusion, leading many people to call them “short-cuts” instead. Others think that cut-shorts and greasy beans are one and the same, but the term cut-short simply describes what has happened in the hull as the bean grows: the beans grow large in proportion to the hull and tend to square off on the ends.

As cut-shorts dry on the vine prior to being saved for seed, another interesting thing sometimes occurs. After becoming partially dry on the vines, if a sprinkle of rain comes (or even just a heavy dew), the beans can swell up and break the hull open. Because of this, some traditional growers call cut-short beans “bust-out” beans instead. Whenever someone asks me if I know about bust-out beans, I know they are talking about cut-shorts.

Fall Beans or October Beans

The terms fall beans and October beans are typically used interchangeably. I will use fall beans in this discussion.

To ensure a full complement of beans for eating fresh and for preserving for later use, many, if not most, traditional gardeners plant a row or two of fall beans in addition to their other cornfield beans. Fall beans are typically larger in the hulls than other beans are, and the beans are often stringless (most other heirloom cornfield beans are not stringless). Fall beans also lag some two weeks or even longer behind most other beans in maturing: this late maturity is how they came to be known as fall beans.

While the hulls of fall beans are somewhat tougher than other cornfield beans, most are usually tender enough to be eaten with the mature bean seeds just as one would eat green beans. However, if they are to be eaten fresh, most people shell them out at the “shelly” stage (before they have dried) and prepare them as soup beans. Since the advent of refrigeration, many people also freeze them and put them in airtight containers for eating later.

Other fall bean enthusiasts allow their beans to dry on the vine and then shell them out as dry beans to be eaten in much the same way as one would eat pinto beans, cranberry beans, or commercial horticultural beans. Of course, it is best to rehydrate them by soaking them in water for several hours before cooking them. The advantage of eating or freezing them at the shelly stage is that then they do not have to be rehydrated. In addition, most growers believe that they have a better flavor and texture at that stage.

Fall beans come in many colors, from solid white to solid black and all colors of the rainbow. Some are speckled, some are striped, and some contain both speckles and stripes. Some fall beans are named after their interesting color patterns. One example of this is the Baby Face fall bean, with a pattern that looks like the face of a baby; a friend of mine found this variety for me while he was traveling in southeastern Kentucky a few years ago.

Many fall beans are stringless, but a few have strings. Their seeds are typically rounder than those of most other beans. Some have eye colors different from the rest of the bean. Most are climbing beans, but a few are bush beans. Those that are bush beans tend to be stringless, but there are exceptions to this rule as well.

Pink Tip Beans

Pink tip beans have a pink tip on the blossom end when they become nearly mature. As the seeds become fully sized, the pink tip becomes very obvious and a sign that the bean is ready to be picked from the vine and eaten fresh, canned, or dried.

East Tennessee seems to have more pink tip beans than other parts of the Southern Appalachians. For two years running (2004 and 2005) I attended the Farm Expo in Kingsport, which features farm machinery, grafting demonstrations, a host of craft and food exhibits, many types of 4-H and Future Farmers of America (FFA) projects, talks and demonstrations by agricultural experts, and a lot of entertainment. I attended as an heirloom seed collector and seller.

I also did a lot of trading of beans with many of the old-time gardeners who showed up both years. (When they saw my beans, they brought theirs to the Expo the following day.) I had grown up with my mother’s white-seeded pink tip beans, but there were many varieties of pink tip beans that I had never seen before, with most of them being brown-seeded instead of white. When I later grew them out, I came to realize that most were much larger than the white-seeded varieties I already knew about.

I also became aware about that time of a variety of greasy beans that has a pink tip. A gardener from my home county sent me some pink tip greasy beans that I found to be quite good. They were about two weeks later than most other greasy beans, and the pink tip appeared just as they reached complete maturity, a day or so before the green hulls began to turn yellow and at a time they needed to be picked unless they were to be kept for seed.

Stringless and Three-String Beans

I rarely have anyone ask about a stringless heirloom bean, since most people have such a preference for string beans. Stringless beans tend to have a tougher hull than string beans do, which means that they have to be picked earlier, before the seed matures. However, many, if not most, fall beans are stringless. And while their hulls are somewhat tougher than those of string beans, many people still break them and eat them as green beans. The beans separate readily from the hulls during the cooking process because the beans are so large in proportion to the hulls.

Some varieties of beans have three strings, one on the outer side and two on the inner side of the bean. (The inside of the bean is the side within the curl that almost all heirloom beans have.) The two strings on the inner side of three-string beans are side by side, each “zipping” its own half of the bean pod, and the two strings peel off easily together.

Wax Beans

Although wax beans are not widely grown in the mountains, many gardeners keep at least one variety. Wax beans are pale, from yellow to almost white. Some people use them in three-bean salads, and some cook them for use in the same way as green beans. They range from very thin hulls to exceptionally thick hulls and tend to have a less “beany” flavor than do green beans or purple-hulled beans (which turn green when cooked).

Butter Beans

Many Appalachian gardeners also keep at least one variety of butter bean, ranging from white to deep purple in color. Many are striped or speckled. They do not cross with green beans or wax beans, but they do cross readily with one another. Their hulls are not eaten, and they are much later than green beans in maturing, sometimes taking 120 days, so they must be planted early to ensure that they reach maturity before frost. I do not know of any heirloom bush butter bean grown in the Southern Appalachians; the heirloom varieties require cornstalks, poles, or trellises to yield effectively. They can be shelled prior to the hulls becoming dry as shelly beans and may be eaten without having to be rehydrated, but most people tend to eat them as dry beans because they store well.

Butter beans often come with stories attached. One Kentucky gardener has butter beans that can be traced back to the end of the Civil War. His great-grandfather was near New Orleans at the end of the war and had to walk back to Kentucky. Whenever he passed a garden where butter beans were being grown, he would collect some of them, and he ended up with an amazing array of colors. In retirement, Joe Richards keeps growing them at his home in Somerset, Kentucky.

Types of Heirloom Beans in Tennessee

John Coykendall, master gardener for the Blackberry Farm Resort, has long experimented with heirloom and heritage vegetable seeds. In the following two sections he discusses the many old-time bean varieties he has collected.

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Collecting Beans in Tennessee

John Coykendall

During the years that I have been collecting beans in Tennessee, it soon became evident that the vast majority of old varieties to be found were in rural counties in or near the Smoky Mountains region of East Tennessee.

It was in isolated coves and hollows that I found most of the old bean varieties that I collected. Families in these regions had saved their own unique varieties down through the years. Often these old varieties had special characteristics that had developed over time, through selection and isolation.

There were beans for each growing season; some tolerated early spring planting when the soil was still cold, while others were grown during the hot summer months, and these included stick beans, pole beans, and cornfield beans, which were somewhat shade tolerant and suited for growing in cornfields. There were also a number of fall or October beans that thrive during late summer and early fall.

Most people are familiar with the dry shell types of horticultural beans, which have tough hulls at all stages of development. Not many people, however, are aware that there are a number of tender-hull October bean varieties that were once commonly grown.

I have five different October beans in my collection that come from Campbell and Greene Counties here in East Tennessee. With the tender-hull October beans you had a multipurpose bean; they were good to use at all stages of development, including fresh shell beans. In late fall the dried pods were gathered and shelled out to be used as dry beans during the winter.

One of my earliest memories of beans was “leather britches.” I remember seeing them hanging on long strings from rafter poles, on the front porches of farmhouses, or from nails on the walls of back porches. I especially remember a neighbor lady in a calico dress with a large apron and wearing a split bonnet. She was sitting on the front porch of her cabin stringing up green beans to be dried for winter use.

Today a few people still string up leather britches, although the necessity of doing so is long past. For some it is a part of a nostalgic tradition that is still being carried on. Perhaps for many it is carrying on what they remember their parents and grandparents doing. For others it may be the unique old-time flavor that awakens memories from long ago. For me leather britches represent a celebration of our culinary traditions, along with history, heritage, and a way of life that is unique to our mountain region.

As seed savers we are not only preserving old varieties; we are also keeping them alive by “using” them, selling them at farmers’ markets, and introducing them to chefs who are always on the lookout for something unique for their culinary creations.

My personal favorite method for preparing leather britches is to cook them in a cast iron pot over a slow fire and season them with a piece of smokehouse meat. They are also excellent with potatoes cooked on top of the beans, and the addition of a potato onion also enhances the flavor. In this region, greasy and cut-short beans were commonly used to make leather britches, although a number of other types were also used.

A Few of the Old Tennessee Bean Varieties

Occasionally when collecting seeds I will be given a variety with a name that suggests its origin. Two examples come to mind—the first being Old Time German, which is a strikingly beautiful bean with pods that are light green in the early stages of development and light pinkish violet when fully mature. The elongated seeds are light pink-gray-tan in color, and the flowers are a faded pink-violet hue, making a beautiful addition to either flower or vegetable gardens. The second example is called Old German and is similar to the white half-runner types. During the mid-1800s, a good number of Germans settled in East Tennessee, so they may have brought seeds from these beans with them from Germany. Both examples are pole beans.

Most of the old bean varieties that I have are pole beans, and that seems to be the case down through the history of our region. One of my old mountain friends, Herb Clabo of Sevier County, Tennessee, who is now one hundred years old, once told me, “If hit’s worth havin’ it’s worth stickin’,” and I have found that to be true for my preferences.

Although the greatest diversity of bean varieties is to be found in the mountains of western North Carolina and the eastern sections of Kentucky, in East Tennessee, especially in the mountain regions, a good number of old beans are still to be found that have been grown, preserved, and handed down through the generations.

To a lesser extent there are still some old varieties being grown on the Cumberland Plateau, but in West Tennessee where the country is flat and large-scale mechanized farming has been practiced over a long period of time, old varieties fell out of favor and were replaced with modern varieties. This is not to say that old varieties don’t exist in West Tennessee; it is that their numbers are fewer, far between, and difficult to locate.

Below are listed some of the more unusual varieties that I have collected over the years. With the exception of a number of white-seeded beans, the vast majority of beans have beautiful seed coat mottling and are works of art worthy of display.

Milk and Cider—One of my personal favorites is a pole bean called Milk and Cider that came from Claiborne County, Tennessee. The green pods are from five to six inches long with slightly curved pods. The beans’ seed coat mottling resembles the Turkey Craw Bean, with the exception that the light gray color appears as though it had been airbrushed onto the seed coat. As is the case with many of the old bean varieties, Milk and Cider remains tender at all stages of growth, right up to full maturity when the pods are well filled out.

Southern Cornfield—The Southern Cornfield bean was collected in Sevier County, Tennessee, and was once commonly grown in cornfields across Southern Appalachia. The pods are semiflat, measuring six to seven inches in length with the pods being slightly curved. The elongated seeds are light tan with dark brown stripes. The Southern Cornfield is a prolific producer, often producing eight to ten beans to a tag.

Mountain City Whitehull—One of the most unusual beans in my collection is the Mountain City Whitehull, which comes from upper East Tennessee. The pods measure from five to six inches in length, and the well-filled-out pods are white with a hint of light yellow. The seeds are white and range from medium to large. This is the first white-hull bean that I have been able to find, although a good number of varieties were once available.

Old Time Golden Stick—Collected in Fentress County, Tennessee, in 1994, the Golden Stick Bean is an excellent all-purpose variety that matures early in the growing season. This bean very much resembles the white half-runner and makes a good substitute for it. At full maturity the seeds are golden tan.

Pink Tip Pole Bean—Pink tip beans have long been popular in upper East Tennessee. This variety is a heavy producer of five-inch-long beans that are an off-yellow to white color fading to a pink hue at their tips, and finally turning to a pink-purple at full maturity. The seeds are dark tan. My seed stock came from Unicoi County, Tennessee.

Red Goose Pole Bean—The Red Goose Bean is a heavy producer of six- to seven-inch pods that are well filled out at maturity. When the beans are nearing full maturity, the pods fade to a pinkish-violet hue. The seeds are dark red and elongated in shape.

Pumpkin Bean-Pole Variety—The Pumpkin Bean produces large pods that are from six to eight inches in length. Two or three of these and you have a plate full! The large elongated light tan seeds are quite large and have a wonderful flavor when the green beans are cooked after the pods have matured.

Butter Beans

People often ask, What is the difference between butter beans and limas? The answer is, They’re all limas. Outside of the South, when the term lima is used, it generally refers to the green limas and in some cases the large and small white varieties. Here in the Southland it is the speckled limas that are referred to as butter beans, with Florida Speckled and Jackson Wonder being two good examples. Although butter beans are grown to some extent in East Tennessee, they are not nearly as common as they are in the Deep South, where no large garden would be complete without them.