Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
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    • Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
    • Reviews
  • About the Author
    • Cindy Ott
    • Publications
    • Acknowledgments
  • Online Exhibition
    • Just Another Squash: 12,000 BCE to 1600
    • From Pumpkin Beer to Pumpkin Pie: 1600 to 1799
    • The Making of a Rural New England Icon: 1800 to 1860
    • The Pumpkin and the Nation: 1861 to 1899
    • Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins: 1900 to 1945
    • The Changing Nature of Pumpkins: 1946 to the Present
    • The Changing Nature of American Rural Economies: 1946 to the Present
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Americans Celebrate the Fall Harvest with Pumpkins

1900 to 1945

In 1920, for the first time in history, farmers made up less than half the American population.  Many felt the foundation of American society and its core values, rooted in a rural way of life, were under serious threat.  Some farm families who were unable to compete with large-scale producers took advantage of this new incarnation of rural nostalgia by setting up roadside stands and selling a picturesque ideal in which the pumpkin had long been a prime attraction.  Farmers, of course, sold many fruits and vegetables from their stands, but the pumpkin is a particularly powerful crop to follow because demand for it was spurred by its bucolic meanings and symbolic uses in harvest displays and holiday treats, rather than by the needs of sustenance, as was the case with strawberries and apples. 



 

Next: The Changing Nature of Pumpkins

Changing Name and Face of Pumpkins

Picture
The field pumpkin’s rusticity, its headlike shape and living flesh, its time of harvest, and its historic connection to the world of wild spirits all captured the Halloween's essence and propelled it into ghoulish persona of the Jack-‘O-Lantern.

Farmers Sell Pumpkins at Roadside Stands
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Picture
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) “Roadside Stand near Greenfield, Massachusetts,” 1939. B&W film. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-USF33-012448-M4    

Heading out to the Countryside to Buy Pumpkins 
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Picture
Glaser, William C.C., Lithographer.  In Florence Bourgeois' "Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Grower."  Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1937.

Playing with Mischievous Pumpkins
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Picture
“Halloween,” color postcard, ca. 1910s. Author’s private collection.

Eating 
Pumpkin 
Pie
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Picture
Jack Delano (American, 1914-1994) “Pumpkin Pies and Thanksgiving Dinner at the Home of Mr. Timothy Levy Crouch, a Rogerine Quaker Living in Ledyard, Connecticut,” 1940. B&W film. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection LC-USF34-T01-042712-D. 

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