Western Massachusetts has a
long and storied history of popular resistance to overreaching authority. During Shay’s Rebellion which took place just
a few years after the Revolution, frustration with unresponsive government and
ruinous debt lead many farmers and merchants in this area to armed insurgency. In 1801, citizens of Cheshire in Berkshire County
found a novel way to express their disaffection with the tax policies of Massachusetts. They made an enormous cheese.
John Leland, a Baptist preacher and evangelist, was the
driving force behind this novel approach to tax resistance. Elder Leland was a strong defender of the
religious liberties not only of his Cheshire
congregation but of Baptists across the Commonwealth and in Connecticut where Calvinism was deeply
rooted and entwined with politics. As a
religious minority, Baptists were among the staunchest proponents of the separation
of church and state.
The followers of Elder Leland were strong supporters of the
Republicanism of Thomas Jefferson worked to elect him over the incumbent John
Adams in 1801. During the campaign, the
idea was hatched to collect milk from the good “republican cows” of Cheshire to create an
enormous wheel of cheese and deliver it to Jefferson
at his inaugural. While cheese making
was a local specialty, nothing on this scale had ever been attempted. Undaunted, Leland and his congregation
managed to get Cheshire
farmers to donate a day’s supply of milk from their herds to make the vast
cheese.
They used a large cider press to create a cheese as wide as
a millstone and just as heavy. Well over
a foot thick and four feet in diameter, Cheshire’s
cheese tipped the scales at 1,235 lbs and there was still plenty of milk left
over to make three smaller cheeses.
The big one, though, was for Jefferson,
and Leland was determined to make the trip to the Capital in the dead of winter
to deliver “The Greatest Cheese in America – For the Greatest Man in America.” This required the hire of a sleigh, and
nearly a month long journey over the nation’s dubious roads. John Leland and his parishioner Darius Brown
made the journey, and attracted throngs of people along the way. There was even an offer of $1,000 – which
Leland declined – to exhibit the cheese in New York as a circus attraction.
Undoubtedly, the cheese ripened considerably in transit, and
it attracted both jeers and admiration en route to the White House. Some Federalist detractors dubbed it the
Mammoth Cheese, in reference to the mania over newly unearthed mammoth bones on
display at the Peale
Museum in Philadelphia and greatly
admired by Jefferson. The name was received as a compliment,
however, and as with Yankee Doodle the intended insult was embraced with pride.
Jefferson flung wide his
arms to welcome the cheese bearers as they arrived at the inaugural, expressing
his gratitude to this “mark of esteem from freeborn farmers, employed
personally in the useful labors of life.”
The citizens of Cheshire
took great pride in their accomplishment, and in 1940 a monument to Leland and
the Mammoth Cheese was erected in town.
Crowned by a statue of the cider press that formed the cheese, it is one
of the most unusual public monuments in Massachusetts,
and proof that the American genius for combining publicity stunts with politics
is as old as the nation itself.
(This article first appears in the Summer 2009 issue of Massachusetts Main Streets and Back Roads)
Just read The Mammoth Cheese and reveiwed it on my blog Cooking with Ideas and so found this wonderful.
Posted by: bibliochef | March 28, 2011 at 07:38 AM