pecan

The Mississippi valley and the southern plains, from Illinois to Texas and Louisiana, and central and northeastern Mexico, the native range Kew records for Carya illinoinensis; named pakani in Algonquian, a nut too hard to crack by hand

Eaten in North America since at least 6,750 BCE and gathered, traded and tended by many Native nations; grafted and orcharded in the nineteenth century, beginning at Oak Alley in Louisiana, where Antoine, an enslaved gardener, made the first successful graft, sixteen trees in the winter of 1846 or 1847, and the plantation had 126 grafted trees by 1865

The pecan industry rests on a graft made by an enslaved man recorded only as Antoine, and every record the plantation's own database lists for him is a succession, a mortgage, a sale, a transfer of rights or his owners' family papers: he exists in the archive as property. The 1848 succession of his owner's estate lists him at thirty-eight, as the gardener, valued at one thousand dollars, and his owner's notes call him "a Creole Negro gardener and expert grafter of pecan trees". His skill is recorded because it was an asset being counted, and the document had no use for a surname. In the winter of 1846 or 1847 he grafted wood from a tree on the Anita plantation across the river, a tree Dr Colomb had failed to graft, onto sixteen trees at Oak Alley, and what he propagated became the world's first acknowledged pecan variety. When its nuts went to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, the diploma went to the plantation's owner of the day, Hubert Bonzano, and the variety took the name of the fair. The nut's own name is older than any of it: pecan comes from Algonquian pakani, usually given as a nut too hard to crack by hand, and Native nations ate it, traded it and cleared the groves so the trees would bear before an orchard of grafted trees was counted as the start of an industry. This means that the first grafted pecan was named for a fair and awarded to an owner, while the man whose graft it was entered the record at his price.