The Dog Eye Bean and The Eagle With Spreading Wings Beans

Partly as a result of my other recent posts about Appalachian Heritage beans and shucked beans I have had an ongoing e-mail exchange with my friend Frank Barnett who is one of the most important experts in the entire country on Appalachian Heritage beans.  Frank has spent  years locating, collecting, and saving Appalachian Heritage beans and has several hundred varieties in his collection.  He grows a large crop each year, sometimes beginning with as little as the seeds from one bean and protecting, propagating, and saving the bean in amounts large enough to be viable long term.  If he has only a few seeds for a particular variety, he will plant them in one spot and build a protective wire or mesh cage about 12 feet tall to set over the growing bean vines to protect them from animals.  Bill Best my other Appalachian Heritage crop expert says that he has regularly used poles about 12 feet tall topped with a bicycle rim to which he attaches strong strings so the bean vines can grow up the strings and be protected.  At the end of the first year with these rare varieties for which they have only a small amount of seeds, every bean will be dried and saved for seed.  In the second year, it might be possible to plant one short row from which nearly all the seed will be saved again.  Or if this second year is particularly abundant, they might try to eat one small mess of beans and save the majority of the seeds.  

As a result of these recent e-mails between Frank Barnett and myself, Frank recently sent me photographs of two beans which he is working to save. They are two of the most unique and appropriately named beans I have ever seen. 

Frank and I have also had a message or two back and forth about the nomenclature of Appalachian Heritage beans and I hope my readers will find it as fascinating as I have.  For the majority of this post, I will use Frank's own words since he is the real expert.  I am simply the messenger attempting to pass on his excellent knowledge to as many people as possible, especially those of you in the Central and Southern Appalachian region.  As the title says above, the two varieties of bean Frank and I have discussed are the Dog Eye Bean and the Eagle With Spreading Wings Bean.  The photograph attached to this paragraph is of the Dog Eye Bean and Frank Barnett took the photos and grew both beans.  As soon as you look at the photos of the individual bean seeds in the photo, it is easy to see why it is called the Dog Eye Bean.  The eye of the bean looks a great deal like the eye of a dog.  

The second bean which Frank sent me a photo of is called the Eagle With Spreading Wings Bean and it is just as appropriately named as the Dog Eye Bean.  It is truly a compelling photograph when you combine it with the name.  Until I saw these photographs, I had no idea there could be so much variety in the appearance of individual bean seeds. That is a very graphic name which is fully justified when you see the photograph of the bean seeds with their very distinctive eye. 

As I said earlier, these photographs caused me to engage in an e-mail exchange with Frank Barnett and to ask his permission to use his photographs and messages in a blog post to which he consented.  However, his copyright should be respected and protected if you choose to pass this blog post, these photographs, Frank's e-mail messages as inserted below, or any portion of this blog post.  Also, please not that with recent changes to the Blogspot format and software that it is not currently possible to insert a caption at the bottom of a photograph as I have always done previously.  The bottom line is simply that you should honor both my authorship and Frank's.  I have also done a Google search for more information about these two incredibly unique beans and found nothing which should tell you just how cutting edge Frank Barnett's work with Appalachian Heritage beans really is.  

When Frank sent me his first e-mail on September 29, 2020, he simply sent the photographs appropriately labeled with their respective names in response to my earlier writing about the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean to which I responded with the following e-mail message: 

"Frank,        Those are interesting beans with very appropriate names.  Candice & I went to Bill's on Thursday and bought some Lazy Wife Greasy Beans, froze four bags and ate one last night.  We really like the taste.  Bill & I were talking as we have a few times before about the fact that we both agree that you really should write a book about your exploits in the world of Appalachian Heritag Beans.  Winter is coming on and when you get the gardens put to bed it would be a great time to start."  (R. Hicks E-mail September 29, 2020)

 Frank responded on October 4, 2020, with the following e-mail message: 

"Roger,  You all need to come and visit me especially when I have beans ready in the garden. Like my Grandma I will draw a fresh bucket of water from the well (actually in these days and times, bottled spring water from the refrigerator ) and give you all a mess of beans to take home.  My garden here at the house in around 50ft by 100ft. It is nice to work a little in the garden and then run back into the house with the A/C. I have enjoyed my visits up the hollers and some have been right in the head of a deadening. People have been good to me and most times we have spent hours just talking. I started chasing beans down when I was 59 years old and my rules were to find the actual growers and they had to be older than me. However, now at 73 years old that is becoming more difficult. I do need to organize my notes from the past years. I have certainly enjoyed my retirement of what is now approaching 14 years." (Frank Barnett E-mail, October 4, 2020)

Although that e-mail from Frank may not have a great deal of information about the two beans in discussion here it contains a great deal of other wonderful information about gardening, bean chasing as Frank calls it, and life in the Appalachian mountains all over Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia.  The comment about drawing "a fresh bucket of water" is a throw back to hand dug wells, spring houses, Appalachian hospitality, and general customs all across Appalachia. Both Frank and I have spent years traveling all across Appalachia in a variety of capacities.  Frank grew up in Floyd County Kentucky about 25 miles or so from where I grew up in Knott County and both of us have spent the majority of our lives in the region although we also spent several years outside the region and have traveled extensively in the United States.  We both like to believe we understand Appalachia and Appalachian people.  I responded to Frank's message above with the message below: 

"Frank,  We have gone to Bill's in the last few days and spent a couple of hours with Bill and Rene' but, due to the second surge of Covid which is devastating the state, we are back to pretty much where we were in March and April in terms of low contacts and self isolation.  With Candice's general condition, we cannot take a chance on getting out much.  But we appreciate the offer to visit and will when Covid is under control and an ethically produced, tested, and confirmed vaccine is being widely marketed by public health officials in the Joe Biden administration.  Maybe we can do it next year at bean picking time but we don't need to have the beans to agree to the visit.  If an appropriate vaccine from a company with no ties to TRAITOR Trump is available in the spring, we would be willing to visit then.  And, if you are out in the general area of Morgan County, under the aforesaid terms, we would be glad to have you visit here." (R. Hicks E-mail October 5, 2020)

Candice and I have visited with Frank on only one occasion when we shared a lunch with him in a fine Italian restaurant not far from his home near Georgetown, Kentucky.  We have also visited with Bill Best at the Lexington Farmers Market where he sells beans, the Berea Farmers Market, and the aforementioned visit at his farm near Berea during the first few days of October.  But all three of us (Bill, Frank, and I) regularly e-mail each other and often include all contacts in the group on our messages.  They have taught me a lot about beans, farming, eating wholesome homegrown foods, and Appalachia, Appalachian Culture, and life in general.   So, Frank responded to my E-mail of October 5, 2020, above on October 5, 2020, with the following discussion of beans, bean chasing, and raising beans.

"Sure you can do a blog about Dog Eyes and Eagles but use the last photo I sent of the Eagle Spreading Wings. There has always been a big discussion on FaceBook about Hazard Red Eyed Fall beans and Leslie Tenderpods being the same varity. Last week the Clay Bank Fall bean from me was mentioned and I had to tell everyone that the bean was from Leslie County at a spot called Hell for Certain. And besides that are at least 4 sub varieties that folks want to call Hazard Red Eyed Fall beans but folks in Perry County know better. I will try to put something together tonight that is clearer.  Maybe I need to add the Big Teddy story about the bean I got at the Morgan County Sorghum Fest a few years back, a big old boy from Owsley County selling his beans."  (Frank Barnett E-mail, October 5, 2020)

Obviously, in that message immediately above, Frank briefly mentioned several more varieties of Appalachian Heritage beans including the Hazard Red Eyed Fall Bean and Leslie Tender Pods which are probably the same variety.  He also mentioned a bean he had gotten during a visit to the Morgan County Sorghum Festival in my home county and the Clay Bank Fall Bean from a spot he called Hell For Certain.  But I have always known that creek in Leslie County Kentucky as being Hell Fer Sartain as it is called in Leonard Roberts' wonderful book of Appalachian folk tales with the title "South From Hell Fer Sartain".  But the message immediately above tells a lot about how hard Frank Barnett has worked in his efforts to save as many Appalachian Heritage beans since his retirement from IBM about 14 years ago.  He has traveled thousands of miles, visited with hundreds of small mountain farmers, driven up many small, isolated hollows, and eaten a lot of good meals in little houses with common people who welcomed him in, gave him a share of what little or much they had, and treated him like a friend even though they had often never met this man who seemed to enjoy good beans as much as they did.  

Frank and I have had a few more messages back and forth since October 5, 2020, about Appalachia, our common raising in Eastern Kentucky, and our love for traveling narrow, two lane mountain roads all over Appalachia, and learning everything we can from older Appalachians as soon as we can before any more of it is lost.  If you feel the same way, contact me at my E-mail address rchicks@mrtc.com and tell me your stories.  It would be wonderful if you allowed me to pass that information along so other Appalachians can benefit from it also.   Frank also sent me this photo on October 8, 2020, of our mutual friend, national Appalachian Heritage crop expert Bill Best with his freshly made shucked beans. 

Turkey Craw Beans, Appalachian Language, and Writers Learning About People

Two separate incidents over the last week or so have led me to write this post which I find interesting whether you readers do or not.  On a Letcher County Kentucky Facebook buy, sell, trade group, I saw a person offering to sell what they were calling "Turkey Crawl Beans".  Although I have not seen Turkey Craw Beans to my knowledge, I knew instantly that this person had made a common mistake by either not understanding what they had been told about these beans when they got the seeds or they had just not bothered to learn their real name.  In my childhood, I heard hundreds of older Appalachian people sit in our country store and talk about thousands of different subjects and I learned an awful lot about the native Appalachian dialect.  So I did some research on the internet and found a website called "Local Harvest"  which has a pretty good description of Turkey Craw Beans and some excellent photographs of them. Not only was my first guess substantiated but the story got even better because there is some belief that the person who found the beans in the gizzard of a turkey was also a slave. The photos I have attached to this post are also from that website and, if you use them, you should also give Local Harvest proper photographer credit.   I also sent an e-mail to two of my friends, Bill Best, who is the author of two very good books about heritage Appalachian food crops,  and Frank Barnett, who is also an expert on Appalachian food crops and an expert on Appalachian Heritage beans.  Both responded and both have Turkey Craw Beans in their collections.  Frank has this to say in his response:

Roger,

Yep, we both have the Turkey Crawl (sp) bean. It is not an uncommon bean in the area. 

The seed I got was from Bill and I only raised it one year. However, in Lincoln County, WV the bean goes by the name of Harts Creek which I also raised. Same variety but a much better story about Harts Creek. I was underwhelmed by both.

This is what Bill Best had to say: 

 

Roger, I don’t remember who first gave me the Turkey Craw bean  but I believe it was Eugene Parsons of Lee County, Virginia.  Had he lived he would be a hundred years old this year but a (sic) died of Alzheimer’s several years ago.  There is a story about Eugene in my first book on heirlooms.  What to me is significant about the bean is that it seems to be the dominant bean in all three states of the Cumberland Gap area.  I remember as we walked through his garden Eugene had bean vines running up into nearby trees.  The Lee County ag agent, Harold Jerrell, took me to meet him at his home and in his garden.  Harold is also featured in the first book because of his seed saving and tree grafting.

I do think that turkey craw is the original name of the bean.

As you can see, I still listen to other older Appalachians, especially those who are experts on some narrowly focused subject such as heritage food crops or simply Turkey Craw Beans.  

Turkey Craw Beans, Photo by www.localharvest.org

One of the most common words in the Appalachian dialect is "craw" which is used as a synonym for several words including gizzard, throat, gullet, esophagus, etc.  A common use of the word when the user is upset is to hear them say "that sticks in my craw" which translates to "that upsets me" and is analogous to becoming choked on something which is difficult to swallow.  In fact, some of the very same people who use the previous expression, "that sticks in my craw",  might also use the similar expression "that was a little hard to swaller".  So when I saw the mistaken use of "Turkey Crawl Beans", I knew instantly that the person was actually trying to sell Turkey Craw Beans.  And, without any extensive knowledge of Turkey Craw Beans, I also instantly knew that the original person who recognized and named these beans had either found them the first time in the gizzard of a turkey they had killed or that some portion of the beans, at some time in their development, was shaped a bit like a turkey gizzard.  So I went looking for some answers on the internet and found a website called "Local Harvest" which has an excellent, but brief,description of Turkey Craw Beans.  The story got even better when I learned that Local Harvest believes the person who found and named Turkey Craw Beans was a slave sometime before the Civil War. There are several other seed saver and seed sales sites which carry some version of the same story about a turkey gizzard although all of the sites do not mention the possible connection to slavery.  Bill Best responded to me in a second e-mail regarding the possible slavery connection:

One comment on Turkey Craw beans:  I had never heard about the slave story and I’m wondering how it came to be.  Since the variety is located mostly in the Cumberland Gap area, and since that area was not known for having slaves, I’m wondering how that might have come to be.  I’m also wondering if many slave owners would have trusted their slaves with guns.  As a tiny kid I asked my mother how the Goose Bean came to be.  She told me that her grandfather had shot a wild goose and when she was cleaning it for cooking, she found the seeds in its craw and the bean had been part of our family collection since that time.  I later learned that thousands of children in the Southern Appalachians had been told the same story.  The Goose Bean is also called the Goose Craw Bean in many areas.

Bill's comments about slavery being relatively rare in the Cumberland Gap area is dead on and so is his suspicion that few slave owners would have trusted a slave with a gun.  But it strikes me that on rare occasions with an older, trusted slave a slaveholder might have taught them to use guns and allowed them to hunt at times since one of the primary reasons many people in that area did not own slaves was related to necessity to provide slaves with at least a basic subsistence.  However, it is also possible that some slaves might have hunted with sling shots or even thrown rocks at game which was less flighty two hundred years ago.  There is also the well known fact that slaves performed most of the undesirable jobs on a farm such as cleaning all types of fowl whether wild or domestic and such a slave could have simply found the beans while cleaning a turkey (or goose as Bill Best mentioned) for their slaveholder.  Slaves also frequently did the great majority of work in tending plantation gardens and a slave could well have had sufficient leeway to plant a few seeds they found.   

In the other incident which triggered this post,  my wife and I have been reading a Pearl S. Buck novel called "The Long Love" which I will write about in a few days.  It is one of the five novels which Buck wrote and published under the pseudonym John Sedges.  I have written earlier on this blog about two of those novels, "The Townsman" and "Voices In The House".  I actually like "The Long Love" a bit better than either of the other two although they are also good novels. Also, I recently published a memoir piece called "Christmas On Beaver Creek" in a book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation called True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  In that memoir piece, I talked about hiding behind a stand up Coca Cola Santa Claus in our store as a child in order to listen to older people talk about subjects like Old Christmas and the Biblical story of Christmas along with any other topics I could hear discussed.  And, to complete the loop back to the Turkey Craw Beans, I had learned enough about Appalachian dialect in those nights in the country store to know that the person trying to sell the beans had not known the actual name of the beans.  In other words, it pays to pay attention especially when you are young.

Turkey Craw Beans, Photo by www.localharvest.org

  The tie in between the Turkey Craw Bean story and "The Long Love" lies in the fact that in one fairly long section of the book Pearl S. Buck has a character who is a novelist who grew up in the town in which her novel is set and he talks at length about all the things he learned about the town and its people by listening to them talk in their homes and other settings during his childhood.  I laughed out loud as I was reading that section because it ties in closely with my previous mention of the memoir piece "Christmas On Beaver Creek" which was published as a chapter in the aforementioned book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation called "True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  In that memoir piece, I talked about hiding behind a stand up Coca Cola Santa Claus and listening to older Appalachians talk about hundreds of subjects including Old Christmas and the Christmas story from the Bible.  I also learned enough while listening behind that Coca Cola Santa Claus to have sufficient knowledge about Appalachian dialect to know that the person trying to sell the beans did not know what they were talking about.  I realize I repeated the account of  the Coca Cola Santa Claus in two slightly different versions here but I wanted to make absolutely clear the connection between that incident and the Turkey Craw Beans.

This little experience has been educational for me and I hope it has for at least a few of my regular readers. 

"Kentucky Heirloom Seeds Growing, Eating, Saving" by Bill Best with Dobree Adams--Book Review

Best, Bill with Dobree Adams.  Kentucky Heirloom Seeds Growing, Eating, Saving. (Lexington, KY, University Press of Kentucky, 2017)

As I begin my response to this book, it is necessary for me to state a couple of very important disclaimers.  

1) What I know about collecting, saving, preserving, and protecting heirloom seeds, fruits, and vegetables would not fill a thimble. 

2) The author Bill Best is a new found friend of mine and I don't intend to damage that relationship if I can prevent it.  Therefore, I will try to limit too much exposure of the aforementioned ignorance.

3) I also have a newly established and budding friendship with Frank Barnett who is also a significant individual in this book.  Like Bill Best, Frank is a major figure in the Kentucky heritage seed field and I also have no intentions of allowing my ignorance to damage that relationship.  

Now let's talk honestly about this book.  I bought it because a man who is married to one of my cousins is retiring effective December 31, 2019, and he loves to garden, cook, can, freeze, keep bees, and produce his own food.  I had come to know Bill Best because he and I both have true Christmas stories in a fairly new book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation, "True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  We had gotten in touch through Facebook and Bill informed me that Frank Barnett was already a reader of this blog.  I advised Bill that I was searching for a small sample of a few varieties of heritage seeds to include with this book as a retirement gift for this member of my extended family.  Bill put me in touch with Frank Barnett who mailed me a few seeds for the cost of the postage.  Frank and I had a subsequent telephone conversation which lasted close to an hour because we learned we had grown up not far apart in Floyd County for Frank and Knott County for me.  We also had similar interests in Appalachia, Appalachian Culture, and traveling the back roads in order to meet people, learn, and gain further knowledge about Appalachia.  

After I bought the book, I could not resist reading it before the retirement party for its intended owner.  I have devoured the book in a little over a week at a time when I have been heavily engrossed in writing several short stories over the past month, two of which have recently been selected for publication.  I was busy on other things but this book drew me in, held my interest, and taught me many things which I value knowing.  Bill Best is a professor emeritus at Berea College, one of the half dozen or so work colleges in America.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and was actually a swimming coach for many years.  But he is also a native Appalachian from Western North Carolina who grew up working in a home garden with parents who valued and protected heritage crops.  He has spent his entire life doing the same thing and has been a co-founder of both the Berea and Lexington Farmer's Markets.  He is frequently and primarily referred to as a farmer, not Dr. Best, not Professor Best, not any of those intellectual names which many, if not most, people with a doctoral degree like to do.  He is a man of the soil, a man of the earth, a proud Appalachian who has worked to educate other Appalachians, to protect many aspects of the complex culture which exists in Appalachia, and to preserve as many of the early food crops in America as he possibly can.  To say the least, Bill Best is a complex man of many talents in many areas and this book proves it admirably.   

While I do not profess to be a farmer, I grew up on a small Appalachian farm in Knott County Kentucky where my parents also ran a family store.  My parents, grandparents, and most of my extended family raised, ate, and preserved nearly all our food during my childhood.  I grew up working a garden; helping kill hogs; preserving, or helping preserve, the foods we ate all year long; and knowing that home raised, killed, canned, frozen, preserved, and protected food is the best food on earth.  But I have not raised a garden in twenty years because of living both a complicated life and having a wife who has been in a wheelchair for those same twenty years.  My priorities have been elsewhere but I have missed gardening.  This book reminded me of my family, my youth, and the early years of my marriage when my wife and I did raise a small garden on our single acre of land.  Over the last few years, we have changed our eating habits and sought out local produce from several of our Mennonite friends who live their lives in most of the old ways.  We have eliminated most meat from our diet except for chicken and fish.  We eat a lot more vegetables and seek out organic foods whenever we can find them.  This book has shown me that I should be doing more in the area of heritage crops, organic foods, and home based food production.  

This is an excellent book written by a regional expert who has spent 84 years accumulating knowledge in many areas and doing every thing he can to expose others to that knowledge.  If I had more land, more time, and different priorities in my daily life, I would invest much more of my time to similar efforts.   So should every other citizen in America.  The rewards in better health and happiness would be well worth the effort.  This book is quite interesting, informative, and entertaining to read.  Bill Best discusses both his own work in the field and the work of more than a dozen others who are fully committed to preserving heritage crops.  He allowed several of those people to write up short accounts of their own experiences and included them in the book.  He also delivered his own accounts of numerous others he has known who are no longer alive or were unable to provide their own written accounts of their work.  He includes several letters he has received from people who have contributed to the field of heritage crops.  In all ways, this is a valuable book.  

As I have read this book, I have been reminded of those first twenty years of my life in a country store in one of the most truly Appalachian counties in the entire region, of the five years I spent as a door to door salesman in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, and of the five years I spent running an auction house in Floyd County Kentucky.  I have no idea how many heritage crops I might have passed up during all those years for which I could easily have obtained seeds to assist in preserving those particular rare varieties of tomatoes, corn, beans, squashes, and other food crops.  I have spent many days in the head of hollows in Mingo, Logan, Boone, Lincoln, Wyoming, Wayne, and Raleigh Counties in West Virginia along with equal amounts of time in Floyd, Pike, Knott, Martin, Johnson, Morgan, Wolfe, Breathitt, Letcher, and Lawrence Counties in Kentucky.  I also spent time in the most Appalachian areas of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina when I was focused on other areas of Appalachian Culture.  All these areas in all four states are fully historically Appalachian both in cultural and geographical ways. During that time, if my focus had been slightly altered, I could have accomplished everything I have and also been productive in locating and preserving numerous unique varieties of food crops.  This book has taught me a lot about what I have missed.  It can do the same for you.  If you love to garden; to feel good, rich, black earth between your toes; to eat a warm, sun drenched tomato with a salt shaker standing in the garden where it was raised, this book is for you.  Buy it!  Read it!  Study it!  Work to put the priceless knowledge it contains to use and to pass that knowledge on to others, especially to others who are younger than you and able, by accident of birth, to preserve that knowledge for years after you and I are gone.  This is a very valuable book.  Bill Best is also the author of a very good book about the history of Berea College which covers a fifty year period when he was a student, professor, and administrator there. 

And purely by coincidence, I finished this book on the 84th birthday of the author, Bill Best!  Happy Birthday, Bill!