Back in the day, the Cape Fear region worked for peanuts–and boy did it pay.
While North Carolina’s golden child may forever be tobacco (regardless of the industry’s condition) the peanut was a standout crop for this part of the coastal plain, its significance national.
“Before the Civil War, the most important peanut-growing region in the United States was around Cape Fear in North Carolina, where peanuts were being grown commercially by 1818,” Los Angeles based author Jon Krampner highlights in his new book, “Creamy & Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food” (Columbia University Press).
Released Nov. 20–timed with the celebration of Peanut Butter Lovers Month–the book is a salty, delicious and easily digestible history of the world’s most famous nut–that really isn’t a nut at all–and the creamy-or-crunchy American kitchen standard that came of it.
Some basics: Peanuts are actually underground-growing legumes, Krampner notes, more akin to peas and beans than hard-shell nuts produced from trees. The place of origin for cultivated peanuts: probably Bolivia–South America, that is–not to be confused with the small, Brunswick County municipality 20 miles southwest of Wilmington.
Krampner explains the legumes’ arrival here followed Spanish and Portuguese exploration of South America in the early 16th century. Their ships brought peanuts back to Europe, though “they’ve never really caught on there.” Almonds, he writes, are much more popular with Europeans, notably in candy. And Nutella, from hazelnuts, is their preferred spread.
The Portuguese also in the 16th century brought Brazil-grown peanuts to Africa. And from there, via slave ships, they made their way here.
The story’s highlight of the Cape Fear is just a page away from chapter three (the real stuff of the book), “The Birth of Peanut Butter.”
Our ‘goober peas’
The U.S. Census Bureau recently recognized Peanut Butter Lovers Month as a celebration of “one of life’s simple pleasures” but also of an industry worth $6.8 billion a year in the United States. November is significant in the peanut-butter timeline as it marks the month of the stuff’s first patent, in 1895.
But there’s more to know about this region’s role in America’s incipient peanut industry. As acknowledged by the Peanut Growers Cooperative Marketing Association, “The first commercial peanuts in North Carolina were grown in the Wilmington area beginning around 1818.”
According to food writer Andrew F. Smith in his book, “Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea” (a classic nickname for the peanut), Wilmington newspapers began listing peanut prices in the 1830s; by 1856 the area mustered 100,000 bushels yearly (worth $125,000 in 1856 money). Smith adds that just a few years later peanuts were raising more money than cotton and that two-thirds of the United States’ peanut production came from North Carolina.
Poplar Grove just north of Wilmington was a prominent site, bought by the Foy family in 1795 and kept under that name into the 1970s, six generations later, according to the property’s official history. “Joseph Mumford Foy was the first man in North Carolina to grow peanuts on a large scale,” it said. “He learned how from his slaves.”
It added: “Cotton, rice, tobacco, and indigo brought wealth to plantation owners. Poplar Grove’s history until the end of the American Civil War was no exception. At Poplar Grove, peanuts reigned supreme as a cash crop.”
The Porters Neck area, also just north of Wilmington, too owed to peanuts, according to a history from Porters Neck Country Club. When a man named Robert Nixon arrived with son Nicholas F. Nixon in the early 1800s (the Porters name–which indeed bears no apostrophe–comes from John Porter, who bought land there the century prior), the plan was to farm livestock. When the younger Nixon’s son, Nicholas F. Nixon, came into the picture, the focus shifted to peanuts, “a marketable product that sustained the plantation’s operation until 1885.”
The advent of steam-powered ships and new rail lines allowed Wilmington to grow into one of the state’s largest cities by 1840, and it doubled size-wise over the 20 years to follow, according to New Hanover County government archives. The business boom saw import numbers cower under exports, which notably included peanuts (as well as rice, cotton, flax and naval stores).
And they were indeed a characteristic treat, here.
‘Goodness how delicious’
“Before the Civil War, peanuts were regarded as a southern regional food,” Krampner writes in “Creamy & Crunchy,” adding that during the conflict years peanuts became an important ration to Confederate troops, who sang of the legume in the song “Goober Peas.” (“Lying in the shadow underneath the trees, goodness how delicious, eating goober peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Peas! Eating goober peas! Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas!”)
“All those soldiers gobbling goober peas led to the first major spike in U.S. peanut consumption,” says Krampner, and it was roughly three decades later, in the Gay Nineties, that the creamy invention started to stick.
Today, peanut butter is in 75 percent of American kitchens, and according to the Census Bureau each of us eats six pounds of peanuts in all forms yearly.
Krampner’s book, just shy of 300 pages with notes, walks us through not only the product’s history, spread in popularity, related anecdotes, revolutions and crises (heard of the “peanut butter crisis of 1980”?) but also recipes (even for an alcoholic peanut-butter beverage) and plenty of brands and varieties you’ve probably never heard of. Historic illustrations and photos are throughout.
“Creamy & Crunchy,” Krampner’s third book and credited as the first account of its kind, is available for $27.95. Click here for more information.
Contact Ben Brown at [email protected] or (910) 772-6335. On Twitter: @benbrownmedia
