Jefferson’s Vegetable Market Charts

There is evidently no trend in American history historians won’t connect to Thomas Jefferson and that includes the recent emphasis on food. This is an interesting piece on the vegetable market charts Jefferson kept while in the White House that are useful windows into early 19th century food, albeit from a rare gourmand in a nation with an international reputation for horrible, inedible victuals.

The chart also provokes a question about where early nineteenth-century Washingtonians got their food. Before there were trucks and trains to transport food from country to city, with refrigeration to preserve it on the way, suppliers of perishable foods often lived very close to cities, sometimes in them. Market gardeners, many of them women, trundled their produce into urban markets on carts early every morning. Cows and pigs wandered around city streets; milk often came from the cow around the corner. (Frances Trollope, a British visitor to the United States in the late 1820s who lived mostly in Cincinnati, described the “republican cow” who, after being fed and milked “at the door of a house,” wandered away “to take her pleasure on the hills, or in the gutters, as may suit her fancy best.”) Farmers, fishermen, hunters, bakers, and butchers, carried in their goods and displayed them for sale in city markets. The Georgetown market where Etienne Lemaire did his shopping opened in 1796 when Washington was still under construction and the federal government was still in Philadelphia. The Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue was authorized by Jefferson himself soon after he took office; it opened in December, 1801.