by Andrew Moore
As the American frontier pushed westward, settlers crossed a wooded Appalachian landscape filled with wild foods—pawpaws among them—that became tools for survival. Daniel Boone, the quintessential American folk hero of the trans-Appalachian frontier, is often said to have enjoyed pawpaws. He likely encountered the fruit as a boy, hunting and exploring in the woods of Pennsylvania, and later in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina.
Kentucky, of course, was the landscape of Boone’s famous adventures, and Kentucky rests at the heart of the American Pawpaw Belt. Of that country Boone wrote in his autobiography, The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, “Nature here was a series of wonders, and a fund of delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of flowers and fruits, beautifully colored, elegantly shaped, and charmingly flavored . . .”31 Surely as part of this sweeping description Boone could have also been thinking of pawpaws. The idea of him slurping down their custardy pulp in the Kentucky wilderness is certainly more probable than, say, his defeating an attacking bear in hand-to-hand combat armed only with a hunting knife.
Timothy Flint’s biography of Boone, Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky, Interspersed with Incidents in the Early Annals of the Country, gives clearer indication of Boone’s familiarity with pawpaws: “When a social band . . . planted their feet on the virgin soil, the first object was to fix on a spot, central to the most fertile tract of land that could be found, combining the advantages usually sought by the first settlers. Among these was that the station should be on the summit of a gentle swell where pawpaw, cane and wild clover, marked exuberant fertility . . . The virgin soil, as yet friable, untrodden and not cursed with the blight of politics, party, and feud, yielded, with little other cultivation than planting from eighty to a hundred bushels of maize to the acre and all other edibles suited to the soil and climate in proportion.”32 Although Flint demonstrates the settler’s familiarity with pawpaws, corn was clearly the more valuable crop. It’s not clear that Boone or his contemporaries would have spared any of those identified pawpaw trees from the ax. The pioneer cleared several acres for corn and vegetables, and at the edge of these fields, pawpaws would have been among the foraged foods a pioneer family could gather and put on the table. The woods would have seemed immense and endless—to plant and cultivate, or even conserve wild stands of pawpaws (or any other wild fruit), would have seemed unnecessary, an unfathomable notion.
Boone’s autobiography was originally published in 1784 as part of John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Filson is also credited with co-writing Boone’s autobiography). Filson moved to Kentucky in the early 1780s, and his writings cataloged and described the native flora and fauna, which Americans were still discovering. Like the newly opened Kentucky territory itself, the plants were mysterious: some full of dangers, others of potential. Filson writes of honey locust beer and the “good coffee” of the Kentucky coffee tree, of the rich highlands and the bushels of corn it produced. “The fields are covered with abundance of wild herbage not common to other countries: the Shawanese sallad, wild lettuce, and pepper grass, and many more, as yet unknown to the inhabitants, but which, no doubt, have excellent virtues,” he extolled. One of the trees he found virtuous: “The pappa tree does not grow to a great size, is a soft wood, bears a fine fruit much like a cucumber in shape and size and tastes sweet.”33
Filson’s writings—and the many about Boone—celebrated the frontier. Other voices from that period were more sober, revealing a time of rapid, often violent change. In September 1786, at the outset of the Northwest Indian War, twenty-year-old William Sudduth volunteered for a campaign to attack several Indian towns at the head of the Great Miami River, at the present border of Kentucky and Ohio. Sudduth, a contemporary of Boone’s, would later write about his life, including the ensuing battle, in an autobiography. After one battle near Elliott’s Town, a call for volunteers was given to take the Wapotomica town, four miles away. “The town stood in the edge of a beautiful prairie,” Sudduth wrote. “When we discovered it, [we] went through the town to the edge of the woods; where we saw some baskets of paw-paws thrown.”34 Soon thereafter, the army reached the town, and Wapotomica was set on fire.
It might seem an insignificant though oddly specific detail to present, but the sentence provides a description of how a group of Shawnee gathered pawpaws—by the basketful, in a patch on the edge of town. The baskets would have been brought back and distributed, eaten in a great feast, or perhaps even dried and stored for later use. But Colonel Logan’s attack destroyed the town, and the pawpaws were never eaten.
During these frontier wars, any trip through the woods became extremely dangerous. In November 1780, seven-year-old Sarah Graham moved with her family to Kentucky, a time when “there was not at that time a hewed log house in Kentucky.”35 Because of the hostilities, she was forbidden to wander from her fortified town of McGary’s Station. In an interview later in life, she recalled sneaking off with a group of children to gather wild cherries and “paw-paws,” eventually finding a spring to drink from. The boys she was with saw the tracks of Indians, and warned them to “fly for our lives.” Despite the dangers, the promise of a sweet treat, free from the woods, was too great a temptation for the young Graham. Pawpaws may not have become prized by orchardists of the day, but for the youth of Appalachia, hunting pawpaws was a tradition that would stick.
For enslaved African Americans, pawpaws were among the wild foods that supplemented meager provisions—that is, of course, if they were afforded the liberty to forage or hunt at all. Often, these activities occurred at night, when pawpaws offered a second advantage—the sweet fruit baited raccoons, opossums, and other small, nocturnal animals that wound up in frying pans and stews. Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty has noted that a former slave cabin standing today in southern Maryland remains surrounded by a grove of pawpaws.
The flavor, texture, and aroma of pawpaw fruit would also have seemed familiar to any Africans with memories of the Old World. Pawpaws are related to many fruits eaten in Africa; there are at least 400 Annonaceae species native to the tropical regions of that continent. Among them, Annona senegalensis, or wild custard apple, is native to West, East, and southern Africa, as well as Madagascar and the Comoros and Cape Verde Islands. Its white pulp has been described as having a pleasing, pineapple-like taste, and as “the best indigenous fruit in most parts of tropical Africa.”36 This wild custard apple grows along rivers and swampy coasts, behaving and tasting much like its transatlantic cousin the pawpaw.
Pawpaws were also part of the folk medicine practiced by slaves. In some communities, seeds from the fruit were worn around necks and believed to prevent various diseases.37 In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves even played a dice game called papaw, though its connection to the fruit may only be a coincidence (the game was also played in Boston, and Paw Paw was also a common name used for Africans from the port of Popo).38 Or perhaps not: In 1887, the publication Drugs and Medicines of North America suggested that the very name pawpaw, as used for Asimina triloba, was likely brought into usage “by negro slaves brought from the West Indies.”39 As mentioned earlier, the first time pawpaw appeared in print referring to Asimina triloba was in John Lawson’s description of the fruit in Carolina in 1700, during the period in which the English began importing large numbers of slaves from the Caribbean to the Carolina coast. This forced migration and cultural adaptation could certainly have been one of routes by which the Arawak papáia became our pawpaw. And perhaps the “African dice game” had a forgotten connection to pawpaws too.
For an escaped slave, finding a pawpaw patch could have meant the difference between life and death. Guides along the Underground Railroad instructed on not only which routes to take and where to find welcoming homes, but also what wild fruits and berries were safe to eat, and where to find them. This information was essential to survival. According to one estimate, as many as one
hundred thousand slaves escaped to freedom between the years 1810 and 1850 alone, on routes that cut directly through pawpaw habitat.
As frontiers were settled, as towns and trade networks grew, wild foods diminished in importance. But through the middle of the twentieth century, Americans would return to these foods during times of economic and social hardship, whether the country was at war or in the midst of the Great Depression.
During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops ate pawpaws, often for a lack of other rations. When Robert E. Lee wrote to the Confederate secretary of war, he said the main cause of desertions was “the insufficiency of food, and non-payment of troops. There is a suffering for want of food.”40 According to one historian, “replenishing scant larders,” meant soldiers took fruit and vegetables from gardens and homesteads, in addition to “foraging” for “nuts, berries and pawpaws.”41 But even when other foods were available, pawpaws were still a welcomed treat. While encamped on Sicily Island in Louisiana, one Confederate soldier wrote, “Whilst wandering through the woods one day, I found myself in the midst of a pawpaw grove and for the first time in 14 years tasted of that fruit that I had so often run over the hills in search of in my youthful days.”42
In September 1862 Union forces, then stationed in the Cumberland Gap—a mountain pass at the junction of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia—were ordered to evacuate toward the Ohio River. The gap was part of the Wilderness Road, an ancient route originally used by Native Americans and, more recently, by settlers of the Kentucky frontier. This particular march was through the rugged eastern Kentucky mountains. “As the army advanced, the difficulties increased a thousand fold by the rough nature of the ground,” wrote John Randolph McBride, a veteran of that campaign. “The supply of rations continued to diminish as the army advanced, [farms] yielding only an occasional patch of corn, isolated instances of ‘stunted’ cattle, and a limited number of ‘razor-backed’ hogs sometimes called ‘elm-peelers.’ The succulent pawpaw, however, was generally in abundance all along the route, and gave some nourishment to the hungry men.”43
— CHAPTER THREE —
TOWARD DOMESTICATION
Pawpaws were not exclusive to frontiersmen and rural peoples; nor were they eaten solely as a survival food. As the colonies of the eighteenth century transformed into the United States of the nineteenth, pawpaws often ended up at city markets. In 1867, pawpaws were included in The Market Assistant, a book “containing a brief description of every article of human food sold in the public markets of the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.” Author Thomas Farrington De Voe wrote that “[pawpaw] is found plentiful in the Southern and Western States, and appears somewhat, in form and color, like a small cucumber when ripe.”1
In 1886, the Drugs and Medicines of North America quarterly reported, “In cities like Cincinnati, where the shrub grows, the fruit . . . is sold quite largely in the market, but is not shipped to other cities to any great extent.”2 An 1890 article on wild fruits noted, “The small quantities brought to the markets of some of the eastern cities, mainly by negroes, are usually sold to persons of their own race, or to others who buy it as a curiosity; there are some who eagerly seek for it as a delicacy.”3
Whether in large or small quantities, the pawpaws likely did not come from orchards, but rather were the work of foragers gathering in the woods, or the enterprising farmer who, upon observing overburdened pawpaw trees at the edges of his fields, went to gather baskets of fruit (or sent his children to pick them up). The bounty of the forest was not wasted. Pawpaws were sold at markets everywhere from Kentucky and Indiana to Kansas and Missouri, and all points in between. As late as 1918, a box of pawpaws sold for twelve cents at markets in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,4 and in Ohio for fifty cents a bushel.5
At the same time, pawpaws occasionally found themselves in the hands of experimental agronomists. By the nineteenth century, horticultural publications in the Northeast and Midwest—the fruit was mentioned as early as 1830 in the New York Farmer and Horticultural Repository—were publishing discussions of the fruit’s merit. If pawpaws were to become domesticated, to become more than a wild fruit, then someone within these societies of farmers and scientists would be the one to do it.
After the Civil War, more serious attention was given to pawpaws with regard to domestication and commercial development, and horticulturalists were curious as to what breeding might accomplish. In 1888, the American Horticultural Society, headquartered in Greencastle, Indiana, published a report of its annual meeting held in San Jose, California. They wrote:
There is probably no native fruit of greater real value and more promising in its character as likely to yield readily to the domesticating influences of horticulture than the papaw, which yet remains wholly unimproved. It combines a natural disposition to vary greatly in size, quality, season of ripening, fruitfulness, etc., all pointing to the ease with which it may be trained to sport into varieties combining points of excellence adapted to the tastes of the experimenter.6
More than 125 years ago, then, the pawpaw was identified by an American horticultural society as the native fruit of the highest potential, with predictions that the domestication process would be easily achieved. Plant breeders and others would continue to make claims on the pawpaws’ destiny for commercial agriculture, but for various reasons it was not an easy course.
Others were beginning to champion the pawpaw not for its fruit, but for its ornamental beauty. In 1904, J. Horace McFarland, perhaps best known as a leader of the City Beautiful Movement, wrote of pawpaws, among other trees, in an essay titled “Some American Trees,” celebrating their architecture and the beauty of their flowers. He described the fruits as being “all too luscious and sweet, when fully ripe in the fall, for most tastes, but appealing strongly to the omnivorous small boy. I suppose most of my readers know its banana-like green fruits . . . [but] it is the very handsome and distinct little tree, with its decidedly odd flowers, that I would celebrate, rather than the fruits.” McFarland argued that the tree was “not nearly so well known or so highly esteemed as it ought to be,” and deserved to be planted for its “spreading richness of foliage.”7
Whether because of their fruit or their visual beauty, similar pleas were made over and over throughout the years, for pawpaws to be granted greater attention and appreciation. And it remains so to this day. With each season the case is made in newspapers, magazines, and blogs, with predictions that pawpaw will be the next “exotic” superfruit.
In 1905, the Country Gentleman, “the oldest agricultural paper in the world,” included a dispatch from the Indiana Horticultural Society reporting the following: “James A. Little of Cartersburg, the ‘original pawpaw man,’ was on hand with a collection of the fruit that has helped to make the Hoosier State famous. Mr. Little has an orchard of trees at Cartersburg. He has prepared a treatise on the pawpaw, which says this fruit is often called ‘the Hoosier banana.’”8 But as revered as the fruit may have been in Indiana, Little’s pawpaw story began in Kansas.
In 1860, one of the worst droughts on record hit the Kansas Territory, and would last eighteen months. James A. Little, who was living in the southern part of the territory, reported that the Neosho River dried up and no farm products could be raised. Settlers were confronted with starvation and many were forced to leave the area. “Providentially there was one of the greatest pawpaw and nut crops ever known in the Neosho bottoms,” Little later wrote. In the fall, many people subsisted partly on pawpaws and pecans. “Some of us spent a good deal of our time out in the woods with our hammers cracking nuts and eating pawpaws . . . We may never realize what great a blessing the pawpaw was to the first settlers while they were clearing the great natural forest and beginning to build cabins.” Many of the settlers, from northern and eastern states, had never seen or heard of pawpaws, but Little noted that the Indians were frequently in camp on the river and were great lovers of the pawpaw. “Nature se
ems to have been generous in producing the Indians with one of the most delicious fruits,” he wrote. Forty-five years after this record drought, Little published the first ever substantial work on pawpaws, a twenty-two-page treatise titled The Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), A Native Fruit of Great Excellence.
Little said no other fruit received less attention than the pawpaw during his forty-plus years as a member of the Indiana Horticultural Society. He knew of only three other individuals in the nation studying pawpaw: Benjamin Buckman, of Farmingdale, Illinois (a name we will return to), propagating and experimenting; Geo. Remsbury, of Oak Mills, Kansas, writing a paper; and Professor M. A. Barber of Kansas State University, conducting a study of pawpaw. Little was among the earliest to sound the modern refrain: “It is particularly strange that a fruit of so great excellence as the pawpaw should be so little known or receive so little attention.”
Little, like many today, believed perishability was why pawpaws were not commonly found in markets. He recognized the fruit’s benefits as a native tree, which was then thought to have no insect or fungal pests, and therefore wouldn’t need to be sprayed with chemicals. No livestock was thought to browse the tree or fruit. “So we have one fruit that is immune from the ravages of blight, insect, and fungus troubles and that means a great deal to the fruit grower.”
Unlike the earlier writers predicting the pawpaw’s great future, however, Little wanted to have a hand in shaping it, and so on his Indiana property he conducted a pawpaw-breeding experiment. Little looked for the best varieties in the country and collected their seeds. He wrote that these trees produced “fruit that are hard to excel.” From these experiments Little produced one variety he believed superior to all others. He named this cultivar Uncle Tom, and it is regarded as the first named pawpaw variety (whether the name was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, or by a relative of Little’s, is unknown). The Uncle Tom was as large as any pawpaw in its day, and its tree produced for an entire month. It produced so well that Little needed to support its burdened limbs, some of which inevitably broke. At nine years old it stood fifteen feet tall.
