Pecans

The only nut native to the continental United States, pecans were being harvested by Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley long before the arrival of the first European settlers. (The name itself was a Cree word meaning “hard shell.”) Thomas Jefferson had pecan trees transported from Louisiana to Monticello, but it was a Louisiana slave who first successfully grafted and cultivated the first pecans trees in 1846. By the late nineteenth century, vast orchards had been planted in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and the trees adapted so well to Georgia’s soil and climate that by the 1950s the state was the South’s largest producer of pecans. Today, Georgia supplies the nation with no less than 100 million pounds of pecans annually.