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