It could have been a gift from a runaway enslaved person. Maybe it wasn’t.
The oral history of Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad tomato could easily fit on an index card, with room to spare. As the story goes, a Black man entered Ohio from bordering Kentucky. No details about when he made this journey are available, but it may have been during slavery or well after emancipation. His travels took him to Ripley, a town that slavery’s proponents characterized as infested with that most odious species: abolitionists. While there, he gave tomato seeds he’d been carrying to a white woman. Years later, her great-nephew, Francis Parker, began sharing the seeds for what had become “Aunt Lou’s tomato” with fellow gardening enthusiasts. Passed from person to person, the seed spread in the small corner of Kentucky and south-west Ohio connected by the Ohio River, a region known for Underground Railroad stops from which runaway enslaved people were secretly ferried to free states.
At some point, the Kentucky tomato guru Gary Millwood proposed a revision of the plant’s name to fellow seed keepers who knew of the variety. Millwood, who was white, suggested adding the “Underground Railroad” part to reflect the anti-slavery activity in the plant’s apparent home ground, and to acknowledge how enslaved people helped build the nation’s agricultural wealth in captivity. Despite centuries of forced farming that transitioned into sharecropping and other exploitative labor systems, few plants bear the names of the Black Americans who stewarded flora and fauna in fields and provisioning grounds. Black workers tilled the land, but white Americans have typically gotten credit for importing, breeding and cultivating crops that became critical to the US diet and economy. Millwood’s move cemented the pinkish beefsteak tomato’s place in history as one of the few vegetable varieties whose name references, however obliquely, slavery or Black contributions to what we grow and eat.
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