The Editors of the Jefferson Papers at Princeton recently did a bang-up job creating an online edition and data visualization of a particularly unusual and interesting Jefferson document. Early after completing two terms as United States president, Jefferson distilled records that he had evidently kept all along and produced “A Statement of the Vegetable market of Washington, during a period of 8. Years,” showing in the form of a bar graph “the earliest & latest appearance of each article.” Listing a total of 37 fruits and vegetables ranging from raspberries to watermelon and artichokes to eggplant, Jefferson confirmed what any fussy toddler must have suspected: in an era when fresh produce could only be obtained from local suppliers, one could get spinach and cabbage year-round, but the season for grapes and strawberries was painfully short.
We at the sister project, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, keep a copy of this document on the wall and always show it off to fascinated visitors as a prime example of Jefferson as gonzo collector of all sorts of data. It is charming to imagine him turning his attention from weighty affairs of state and instead taking down notes on the availability of endives, lima beans, and sorrel. It is probably safe to say that no other president has given so much personal attention to these arrivals and departures, much less to computing averages and creating an elegant graph to display the result.
To the excellent work already shown on the website, we can add further observations. Jefferson created not one but two graphs capturing the news from the Washington vegetable market. In addition to the one at the Library of Congress, he prepared a second version, also entirely in his own hand. It contains the same information, differing mainly in giving the names of the fruits and vegetables immediately adjacent to the dates that they first appear rather than displaying them all flush left.
This different version of the list has a checkered history. The original no longer seems to be extant. Fortunately, a facsimile was printed in volume 1 of Henry S. Randall’s 1858 Life of Thomas Jefferson:
Based on the page number 37 at the top, this page was evidently part of the Garden Book in which Jefferson kept track of his gardening activities for many years (more gonzo record keeping). Randall, himself an ardent agriculturist and sometime secretary of state of New York, seems to have borrowed the document from Jefferson family members as he worked on his biography and never returned it. It has not been seen since and may have been discarded when Randall died. This is particularly tragic because we will probably never know what was on the verso, page 38 of Jefferson’s Garden Book. But we can at least take comfort in the fact that this page was preserved in facsimile and shows that Jefferson was so taken with his digest of information on the availability of fruits and vegetables that he tinkered with it and produced two distinct versions. And this document, along with Jefferson’s meteorological observations more generally, is of more than antiquarian interest as a record of weather conditions before climate change became a serious concern.
J. Jefferson Looney
The Daniel P. Jordan Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series
Further Reading
Vegetable Market Chart on the Jefferson Weather & Climate Records website.
Jefferson’s Garden Book, manuscript, Massachusetts Historical Society.
Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, 1766-1824 (Philadelphia, 1944).
