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A Family Cultivates Tradition With A Nearly-forgotten Tomato

When Mary Lou Estler married her late husband Bob in 1960, it wasn’t long before she was introduced to a priceless family heirloom — an heirloom tomato.

“They had beautiful dinners,” Mary Lou said. “And Mrs. Estler owned a Blenko piece of glass. All the way around would be these gorgeous slices of mortgage lifter tomatoes. So that was always a favorite.”

Mary Lou Estler slices up her family’s heirloom mortgage lifter tomato. But there’s a mystery with this tomato.

These weren’t the so-called “Radiator Charlie” mortgage lifter tomatoes you find in lots of seed catalog nowadays. That’s a completely different plant that originated in Logan, West Virginia sometime in the 1930s.

The tomatoes on that Blenko serving dish was a breed developed by Mary Lou’s father in law William Estler. It first showed up back in the mid-1920s—years before Radiator Charlie brought his tomato to market.

“Mr. Estler had two tomatoes that he was raising,” Mary Lou said. He was on a quest to develop a low-acid tomato. “Evidently he put those two tomatoes together and came up with this one very special tomato.”

Special indeed. Some reports say the plants could grow up to 12 feet tall. The tomatoes themselves were round, red on the outside, pink on the inside, and could weigh up to two and a half pounds apiece. But most important of all, they were delicious — pleasantly sweet, not acidic and sour.

“Mrs. Eslter had them for breakfast with a little sugar on them,” Mary Lou said.

The tomatoes were a hit with family and friends alike. So William Estler built a greenhouse and started raising seedlings.

“He sold them to local vendors, to local nurseries,” said Dean Williams, Mary Lou’s son-in-law and the family’s unofficial tomato historian. “And he did not sell anything on a retail basis, he strictly sold on a wholesale basis to some of these nurseries.

I never saw anything that gave an indication they were trying to make this into a national type of tomato.”

It was actually an off-hand remark by an employee of one of those nurseries who gave the tomato the name “Mortgage Lifter.” William Estler liked the name so much, he had it copyrighted in 1932.

By the time Mary Lou joined the family, though, her father-in-law was getting up in years. He’d turned over the farm to his son Bob, Mary Lou’s husband. And Bob converted much of the property to a nine-hole golf course to keep from having to sell it.

Bob kept raising his father’s tomatoes, though. And his passion only increased after his father passed away in 1968, in a house fire.

“Bob would put out about 75 tomato plants,” Mary Lou said. “And then he would make a point to save the choice tomatoes to save the seed from.

Dean Williams once made the mistake of bringing Mary Lou a cherry tomato plant.

“That was a no-no. A definite no-no,” he said. “He would not allow any other tomato on the property to grow because he did not want to find any cross pollination of any sort. He wanted the purity of his tomato and that strain to remain intact.”

If Bob was so protective of his father’s tomato that he wouldn’t even allow other breeds on his property, you can imagine how he felt when he heard there was another tomato making the rounds that was also called “Mortgage Lifter.”

In 1987, Bob received a letter from a guy in Texas who got Mortgage Lifter seeds from his sister. She lived in Huntington and got Mortgage Lifter seeds from Bob. The Texan was leafing through a Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog one day when he came across a Mortgage Lifter tomato … attributed not to William Estler of Barboursville, West Virginia but to a “Radiator Charlie” from Logan, West Virginia. Confused, he wrote Bob a letter to see if he could clear things up.

“We were like, ‘What?’” Mary Lou said. “It was really rather shocking, to find out that someone else was getting the credit for all of Mr. Estler’s hard work.”

The Estler family didn’t have much recourse. William Estler’s copyright lapsed in the 1970s after the family attorney failed to file a renewal. So Bob did the only thing he could. He fired off a letter to Southern Exposure, demanding the listing be removed.

Bob did not believe Radiator Charlie was claiming William Estler’s tomato as his own. They’re different plants, bred from different parent tomatoes. Bob just felt that, with the Radiator Charlie tomato using the “Mortgage Lifter” name, his father’s tomato — the original mortgage lifter in his mind — was being overshadowed.

The letter didn’t work. Southern Exposure and a lot of other seed catalogs still sell Radiator Charlie’s tomato, and it’s still called the “Mortgage Lifter.”

But for the rest of his life, Bob did what he could to set the record straight. He gave lots of interviews to newspapers, magazines and TV stations. He also gave away a lot of tomatoes.

That generosity is part of the reason the Estler Mortgage Lifter is still around today.

Mary Lou tried to keep the strain going after Bob died in 2012 but couldn’t contend with the deer that like to stop by. Her son-in-law Dean Williams grows tomatoes that he’s pretty certain are Estler Mortgage Lifters.

“They came from the Hatcher nursery in South Point (Ohio),” Williams said. “We grew three plants this year. They came in fairly well. We still have quite a few tomatoes. But they’re on the smaller side than what they’re used to.”

But Bob sent seeds to lots of people through the years. The family has heard that relatives in Virginia are growing Estler Mortgage Lifters. There’s tales the seeds made it to Australia and Panama and Africa. But the family knows for sure that a niece in Alabama is still growing the genuine article. She is going to send seed back to West Virginia so Dean can get them going here again.

That’s what’s special about heirloom seeds varieties. Their stories are never over, so long as people keep growing them. And knowing the story only makes the food taste better.

This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Searching For The Pawpaw’s Indigenous Roots

It was early August, a fresh summer afternoon in Jackson County, Ohio at the Leo Petroglyph, which is a huge rock carved with images of animals and humans. The sounds of insects in the dense woods combined with the sounds of a nearby creek.

“These pawpaws are on the edge of the forest,” Chris Chmiel said as he motioned to a group of trees nearby. “There’s a clump of them about 15 or so feet away, you know, they grow in a patch.”

Chris Chmiel is the founder of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival and is showing me the numerous pawpaw trees in the area of the Leo Petroglyph. This sacred and historic site is the work of Indigenous Americans who visited this site over 1,000 years ago. What we were searching for isn’t made of stone, but like the petroglyph, it has survived here for thousands of years.

The pawpaw represents a cultural connection between displaced Native American tribes like the Shawnee and their ancestral lands in what we now call Appalachia. Removal robbed them of access to the food, but the pawpaw lingers as a ghost in their language and memory. Now, almost 200 years later, people are trying to bring it back in the flesh.

Chmiel is an expert in all things pawpaw running the festival for many years along with co-owning Integration Acres, the world’s largest processor of pawpaws. Over the years, he’s noticed something about where pawpaws grow.

“It just seems like every one of these ancient sites I hear about or talk about with someone, they mention there’s pawpaws everywhere” he said. “At places like Shawnee Lookout, the Serpent Mound, there’s pawpaws there.”

And they were at the Leo Petroglyph, too. All around us.

The mounds that Chmiel referred to are earthworks that functioned as graves and ceremonial sites for the Hopewell, Adena, and later the Fort Ancient people – a Native American cultural group that had flourished in the Ohio River Valley from about 1000 to 1600 AD. Some scholars believe the Fort Ancient people who made the Leo Petroglyph were ancestors of the Shawnee, who by the 17th century would call this part of the Ohio home.

“These are ancient native plants, they’re well adapted to our soils and the region,” Chmiel told me as we looked out at a patch of pawpaw trees on the trail leading to the creek and gorge. “I’d say these things have been here for a long time.”

We know that the pawpaw was an important resource for the Shawnee because it left an imprint on their culture even after the Shawnee were forcibly removed from this region by the U.S. government in the early 19th century.

Chris Chmiel shows a pawpaw tree and its leaves at the Leo Petroglyph, a Fort Ancient culture site that is around 1,000 years old in Jackson County, Ohio

Joel Barnes is one of the major guardians of Shawnee culture and language in the present day. Barnes lives in Miami, Oklahoma, and is the language and archives director for the Shawnee Tribe and is a tribal member.

Barnes said that the Shawnee marked time by phases of the moon, they used the fruit to mark one of those phases.

“The word for pawpaw is ha’siminikiisfwa. That means pawpaw month. It’s the month of September,” Barnes said. “That literally means pawpaw moon. That moon would indicate that was the time the pawpaws were ripe and it was time to go pick them and probably also indicated, ‘Hey, we’re getting close to winter.'”

Barnes’ ancestors were forcibly moved from their Ohio Valley home in Appalachia by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Shawnee were sent first to Kansas, and then after the Civil War, they were pushed into Oklahoma.

For the Shawnee, the pawpaw is a direct tie to Appalachia and their uprooted past. Pawpaw’s are hard to find in Oklahoma because the state is at the edge of the tree’s climate zone.

“Some tribal members have planted them out in their yards, just to get them to grow,” Barnes said. “They’re not quite that abundant in this part of Oklahoma. Once you start moving east you start seeing more and more of them pawpaw trees.”

He does remember eating the fruit when he was growing up. It was rare, but it existed.

“We never did get really fancy with it,” he said. “We would just cut it open and peel it and eat it. It was pretty good, and I’ve ate some off and on throughout my life, but it’s been a while since I’ve had any.”

A patch of pawpaw trees in Athens, Ohio.

Cut off from their ancestral homeland and the plants that grow there, the Shawnee have seen some of the pawpaw’s cultural relevance fade with time, according to Barnes.

“Some of these old folk, they all had them, they’ve all ate them,” Barnes said, but no ceremonies or dances connected to the pawpaw remain. “If there ever was, nobody knows.”

Somehow, through all that upheaval and across all those miles, the Shawnees’ connection to the pawpaw tree has endured. Even though the food is largely absent from their physical surroundings, traces of it persist in memory. And in the Shawnee language itself. Barnes closes our conversation by teaching me a Shawnee phrase that translates to “I’m hungry for pawpaws.”

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And some Indigenous people are working to strengthen their cultural connections with the pawpaw. Dr. Devon Mihesuah is a professor at the University of Kansas, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, and also a Chickasaw descendent. She has devoted her life to recovering lost knowledge of indigenous foods.

“I have spent decades taking a look at travelers’ reports, people who observed back in the 1700s, coming through,” she said. “Nobody ever mentioned pawpaw. They just say this strange fruit. They didn’t know what to call it.”

She has not found any traditional pawpaw recipes among the Choctaw, who called the Mississippi Valley and Southern Appalachia home before they were forced West. She says there’s a reason for that. Like a banana, the pawpaw has a short window of ripeness. That meant it was probably consumed right on the spot–a convenient, fast food.

“They would just wait until the time to eat it because they don’t store well,” she said. “Maybe they dried it and it could be that they mixed with other things, which is what I like to do.”

Despite the difficulty of obtaining written records, Devon has her own special ways of preparing the pawpaw that extend its use. She mashes it, mixes it with berries, cooks it down into a flavorful sauce, and freezes it. Occasionally, she adds it to cornbread.

Pawpaws for sale during a short window of availability in September at Kindred Market in Athens, Ohio.

Even though they had to forage to find pawpaws, Mihesuah’s Choctaw grandparents introduced her to the fruit when she was a child at their home in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

“They had a massive garden,” she said. “It was a model of my grandmother’s ancestors when they lived in Mississippi. They had all kinds of trees. But they didn’t have pawpaws. But they knew where they were.”

Just like Joel Barnes, Mihesuah has childhood memories of the pawpaw, even though it was scarce. Mihesuah reminisces about that first taste in her grandmother’s kitchen.

“It was delicious,” she said. “Just the most amazing flavor. It was sort of like a banana mango combo with a hint of a little strawberry.”

Mihesuah runs a popular Facebook group on indigenous foodways. There’s a lot of interest among American Indian people in getting reacquainted with the foods their ancestors ate, she said. But many of those traditional foods are disappearing or not available where Indigenous people live, like the pawpaw. She worries that it’s a food that some people “will never get a chance to taste.”

There are a few pawpaw trees in Kansas where she currently lives, but the fruit tends to be on private property and inaccessible.

“I just wish more people who had them on their property recognized and appreciated what they have,” Mihesuah said, “There’s a yard in Lawrence and you can just smell it because there’s hundreds of them laying there.”

Ripe pawpaws on the forest ground in Athens, Ohio.

Three years ago, Mihesuah decided to try and grow pawpaws herself. She is propagating about 50 seeds in containers and eventually hopes to transplant them. She said it was a long process.

“I ate the fruit and then I packed the seeds away and I put them in the refrigerator,” she said. “They overwinter. I took them out at the end of February and planted them. They each had their own little container. And nothing happened for months and months. It wasn’t until the end of July that finally one sprouted.”

It will be years until they are ready to transplant, and even longer until they bear fruit. So why is she going to all this trouble? Mihesuah believes that not having access to where your ancestors lived, and the foods they ate, is a form of historical trauma that needs to be healed.

“It’s very important that people who are interested in learning their culture and being reconnected to their culture understand what it was that sustained their ancestors,” she said. “Food teaches us all of these different lessons that expand into every aspect of your life.”

By bringing these foods and their lessons back into circulation, Mihesuah hopes to address some of the losses her people have sustained.

In the hills of Appalachia, it’s easy to take the abundance of pawpaw for granted. But far away, on the plains of Oklahoma, it’s a piece of precious history for those who once called Appalachia home.

In Floyd County, KY, People Turn To Traditions Of Processing Meat At Home

Over the past several months, people have turned to traditional skills and practices as one way of coping with the challenges created by the Coronavirus pandemic. Many have baked bread or started a garden, while others have returned to community traditions of raising and butchering animals at home.

In a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, Nicole Musgrave spoke with several people in Floyd County, Kentucky who have used the pandemic as an opportunity to teach others how to process meat at home.

We Need To Get Us Some Hogs

In eastern Kentucky and throughout the rural South, it was once common for families to butcher a hog every winter, an annual tradition known as “hog killing day.” Forty-five-year-old Frank Martin grew up in Langley, Kentucky in a family that raised and butchered their own hogs. He lives on the same property today, and he remembered the feeling of waking up as a child on hog killing day: “The excitement of waking up that morning knowing that all your uncles were going to be coming over and your family members, everybody’s going to get together…The comparison to going to somewhere that you’ve never been and you’re so excited about it, and you get there and it’s as beautiful as you thought it would be. That’s kind of the same feeling come that morning,” Martin recalled.

Frank Martin (right) stands with his two sons, Jace (left), and Max (center), in front of their chicken coop. The three built the chicken coop as a “quarantine project” while Martin’s sons were home from school because of the Coronavirus pandemic.

It had been thirty years since Martin felt that excitement of hog killing day. But this past spring, just after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, he decided to process a hog with his two sons. At the time, news outlets were beginning to report that meat packing plants across the country were closing due to Coronavirus outbreaks among workers. “I was talking with one of my friends at work and he’s like, ‘You know, they’re talking like there might be a meat shortage.’ And he’s like, ‘We need to get us some hogs,’” Martin said.

A hog hangs at the Martin family home in March, waiting to be butchered. Frank Martin bought the hog from his cousin who had been hauling livestock from Pennsylvania to sell in Floyd County, Kentucky.

While the initial conversation was prompted by reports about potential disruptions to the supply of meat, that was not Martin’s primary reason for butchering a hog. With his two sons home from school because of the pandemic, Martin saw it as an opportunity to pass on the skills and the memories associated with home hog killings. “I want these boys to be exposed to this. I want to teach them that this is how their grandfathers got their meat….And that’s one of the things we did this for is to show the boys that you can be independent and self-reliant in uncertain times, especially,” Martin said.

Frank Martin’s oldest son, Max, takes a break from working up cuts of meat at the family’s kitchen island. As a deer hunter, Max had experience butchering animals, but this was his first time butchering a hog.

For Martin’s oldest son, Max, helping his dad gave him a new appreciation for how meat gets to the table. “Just knowing where your ham comes from. You know that it comes from a pig. But I guess you don’t really know until you do it. How much work goes into it,” Max said.

With the help he had from his sons, Martin was able to pack his freezer full with vacuum-sealed meat. And he was not alone. Martin has noticed that friends around Floyd County have a revived interest in processing their own meat. “I’ve seen a lot of people looking for chickens this year. Lot of people asking if anybody has any hogs. So obviously this pandemic has created a circumstance where people’s looking to do more of those traditional things,” Martin said.

I Wish I’d Paid Attention

About six miles down the road in Hueysville, Kentucky, thirty-four-year-old Misty Shepherd also knows a lot about the hog killing tradition. As an adult, she has continued her family’s practice of processing meat at home. She butchers a hog every three to five years. For Shepherd, knowing how an animal was raised and worked up gives insight into how healthy the meat is. The way a hog looks is also important. “The color, the fat content. How it wiggles when it’s moving….The eyes and the skin color. Make sure it’s not pale, it’s got to be pretty. It takes a lot. I mean, years of experience to be able to walk up and just say ‘that’s a good hog,’” Shepherd said.

Misty Shepherd at her home in Hueyesville, Kentucky. Shepherd butchered two hogs this spring with her family.

When looking for a good hog, Shepherd typically buys locally from people she knows in eastern Kentucky. But this year was different. With so many meatpacking plants closed, farmers were left overstocked and looking to sell their animals for cheap. “Right now where this virus is going on, these farmers are having to kill their hogs because they can’t sell them, and they have new litters coming on. So these hogs actually come from out of state that we got,” Shepherd said.

With the prospect of higher prices and bare shelves in supermarket meat aisles, Shepherd noticed others in the community taking advantage of discounted livestock. But this created another challenge to the local food supply. “A lot of friends and people are buying hogs and buying cows, and the slaughterhouses that did stay open in this area, that did take the precautions, are already booked So now they have this hog and they can’t get it killed, they can’t get it worked up and they have no place to put it. So it’s a huge burden on them,” Shepherd said.

One of the two hogs that Misty Shepherd and her family butchered this spring.

People reached out to Shepherd for advice on what to do with the animals they had purchased. A lot of her friends had the same regret and often said the same thing: “‘I wish I’d paid attention. I wish I’d have paid more attention growing up, watching them do this’…They remember certain parts of working up a hog or a beef or something like that, but they don’t remember all the process,” Shepherd said.

But Shepherd does remember all the process, including one of the final steps to butchering a hog—rendering the lard.

Watching a Caterpillar Change Into a Butterfly

Standing at her kitchen counter, Shepherd took a slab of hog fat and cut it up into small pieces. The pieces then went into a large aluminum pot to cook over low heat, where they transformed from slick pink to crispy brown. As the fat cooked, it hissed and popped, releasing a golden liquid.

Chunks of hog fat ready to be rendered. Misty Shepherd shaved about 70 pounds of hog fat off of the two hogs she butchered this spring.

This process of rendering lard produces two products: liquid lard and solid cracklings. Shepherd uses lard for cooking, baking and canning; to make soaps and salves; and as a wood conditioner. She saves the cracklings to add to cornbread. “You can see it kind of looks a little bit like fried chicken crumbs. I don’t like to render it out so much that your cracklings are completely hard,” Shepherd said.

A batch of salted cracklings sits on a tray to cool. Misty Shepherd keeps cracklings in her freezer to add to cornbread for extra flavor.

Once the fat finished cooking, Shepherd strained the cracklings from the lard. She then poured the lard into a glass Mason jar, where it would sit on the counter for several days, turning from a golden liquid into a white solid. “It’s a lost art…You go to the store and you can buy processed lard out of containers, but you never see it change form. You never see it go from this slick, white-pink, to a dark gold liquid and then turn back into a solid, beautiful white color in a jar. So to see something change form is kind of like watching a caterpillar change into a butterfly,” Shepherd said.

Now, Shepherd shares this artful process with others in a Facebook group she started in April. In the group, she posts tutorials that explain traditional skills, like how to butcher a hog and render the lard. For Shepherd, these are things she would be doing regardless, but because of the pandemic, she has had extra time. “I was out of work and I had time and I was doing this stuff anyways. And I’m like, ok I can post some of what I do,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd has a lot of skills to remain self-sufficient, and the pandemic has created an opportunity for her to teach them to others, the way she learned from her family growing up. She now has close to 500 members in her Facebook group. Shepherd not only shares how-to videos and recipes, she also sells items she makes, like soaps, salves and balms made from hog lard.