Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon
  • Home
  • About the Book
    • 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
  • Events
  • Contact
Picture
Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods(New York: New American Library, 1960 [1854]), 30. 

Famous Pumpkin:
Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Yet when Americans thought about the pumpkin as a part of nature and the rural past, as Thoreau did in Walden, they embraced the vegetable’s earthiness and rusticity, envisioning it as an anecdote to the hectic way-of-life of the modern, industrialized world. So in the first half of the nineteenth century, people thought of the pumpkin and pumpkin farming as both awe-inspiring as well as backward.

View Next Image
View Previous Image
Return to Chapter: The Making of a Rural New...
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.