Potatoes

Potatoes are native to the South American Andes, whence European explorers brought them to Europe. From Europe they were carried to North America, first to Canada and later to the United States, where potatoes may have been introduced several times. Most sources agree that northeastern U.S. potato production originated with Presbyterian Scotch Irish settlers who brought potatoes with them to Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1719, and from there the crop spread to the neighboring colonies throughout the Northeast and then westward. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginia planters experimented unsuccessfully with potatoes as a field crop; they fit them into rotations with corn (the major staple food for humans), clover, and other grains, roots, and tubers in the unrealized hope that potatoes would replenish the soils and that animals and workers would eat them.