One man from London, Kentucky, came by our house and brought an heirloom bean from Morgan County, Kentucky, called the Nickell Bean. I gave him some of our beans in return but unfortunately did not get his name and address, since I had not yet started formally collecting bean varieties and was unaware of the importance of documentation.

      Over the next few months, things began to explode, because people were sending the magazine to friends and relatives within Kentucky and in other states. I received eighty-six letters from six states within six months. From those letters and the contacts involved, I became a collector, grower, and distributor of heirloom beans. But I was still working in a very informal way and not documenting enough. I certainly became aware that there were a lot more beans out there than I had thought.

      Finally it dawned on me that I was on to something that would come to occupy a lot of my time and energy. I had been slow to realize that I was involved in an activity that dealt with a lot of history and culture and also tapped into widespread unhappiness with the state of the modern food supply—a food supply increasingly dominated by large corporate farms and multinational food/ feed/seed/chemical conglomerates. (And this was long before the outbreaks of mad cow disease and the more recent problems with tainted food from other countries and the problems with E. coli, salmonella, listeria, and other food-borne pathogens.)

      I needed assistance from as many interested people as possible, so in cooperation with my youngest son, an agricultural economics professor, and several other people interested in heirloom fruits and vegetables and sustainable agriculture in general, we formed a not-for-profit corporation, the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, to develop a seed bank that would house the growing number of heirloom beans (and other vegetables) in my collection.

      My son, Michael Best, directed the organization for its first three years and then went back to university teaching. I have directed it since that time, taking the position some years after my retirement from Berea College. Other members of the board come from three states and include retired college professors, a graduate school dean, an educational TV producer, and growers of heirloom fruits and vegetables.

      When we set up our website, www.heirlooms.org, the organization became the focal point for many seed savers and others wishing to become involved with heirloom gardening. I started receiving Appalachian heirloom beans from people in many states and requests from hundreds of people.

      Other growers also bought into the idea of growing and selling quality beans, and today heirloom beans could easily and quickly corner the market if enough were available. But because seeds must be saved and the beans must be picked by hand, there often is not enough supply to meet demand, even with prices at $3.00 to $4.00 or more per pound.

      Part 1 Heritage fruit and Heirloom Seeds

      Beans

      Beans occupy an almost mythical status not only in the Southern Appalachians but also in other bean-growing parts of the world. They have been found in Indian burial mounds and in pyramids. When kept in airtight jars, they have been found to be viable after hundreds and even thousands of years.

      Corn, of course, also occupies high status in many cultures, with corn and beans being the dominant foods. Together, and accompanied by pumpkins, they occupied a special status within many Indian tribes, who saw them as the Three Sisters, for their growth habits were symbiotic, with the cornstalks providing support for the beans; the beans providing nitrogen for the corn, winter squash, and pumpkins; and the squash and pumpkins providing ground cover to help control weeds.

      Our Appalachian Beans Came from Where?

      There are many ongoing discussions about where the beans of the Southern Appalachians originated. The debate has intensified with the coming of the Internet and numerous gardening forums where people swap information, sometimes misinformation, and questions. Seed-saving organizations also have sessions at their annual meetings and informal get-togethers.

      I have come to believe that most of the beans found in the mountainous areas of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama can be traced to the Indians living in the area when Europeans first arrived from the flat and coastal areas of what would become the United States of America. Given the bean’s tendency to cross and mutate, most of the varieties that now exist in the mountains could have come from a far smaller suite of original beans than one might think.

      At the annual meeting of the Kentucky Vegetable Grower’s Association in January 2005, the keynote speaker, Dr. Gwynn Henderson of the Kentucky Archeological Survey, gave a talk on the history and possible origins of many of the edible plants of the Southern Appalachians. During her presentation, she showed slides of beans taken from an Indian dump in Jessamine County, Kentucky, that had been discovered during a construction project. Carbon-dated at more than 1,000 years old, they were clearly cut-shorts, one of the dominant types of beans in the Southern Appalachians (called cut-shorts because the seeds are so crowded in the pods that they square off on the ends). Beans from another site in Mason County, Kentucky, were more than 1,400 years old.

      Cut-short beans take the shapes of squares, rectangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, and even triangles. Because of the high ratio of seed to hull, they are much higher in protein than other beans are and could have been prized by the Indians for that reason alone. They were also valued by the European settlers; today, they are still treasured by traditional gardeners and, increasingly, by farmers’ market customers.