A Pressing Discovery
At noon on January 20, 2021, as President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, I will mark the moment with a few slices of locally sourced cheese as I watch the televised ceremony. It’s not just that the commander-in-chief might be called “the big cheese,” that politics is a cheesy business, or that frequently photographed new presidents tend to smile as if saying the obligatory word as their image is snapped. Rather, my snack choice is less about symbolism than homage to historical precedent. Ever since the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1802, few foods have received such chief executive notoriety.
I stumbled on this confluence of cheddar and history while on a summer trip to the Berkshires of Massachusetts that featured visits to contemporary art museum MASS MoCA in North Adams and a baseball game at Pittsfield’s venerable Waconah Park. Traveling north on Route 8, my wife Mary and I pulled into the small community of Cheshire in hopes of finding a cup of coffee. Across from the post office on a sliver of grass at the corner of Church and School Streets an unusual monument caught my eye. I couldn’t resist. With a quick turn of the wheel, I abruptly pulled over.
Shaded beneath maples and flanked by a couple park benches was what looked like a large, old fashioned hand-turned cider press. Somewhat boxy and fabricated of weathered concrete, what it lacked in elegance and beauty it made up for in unusual and curious materials and design. Affixed to the front was a bronze plaque bearing a bas relief of a stern gentlemen attired in the fashion of the early nineteenth century. Below was an inscription rendered a bit difficult to read from blue-green drips of corrosion. The text explained that the monument, placed in 1940 by the Sons of the American Revolution, was in the form of a cheese press.
The plaque depicted Elder John Leland, described as an “eloquent preacher, beloved pastor, and influential patriot” who “despite opposition of every other pulpit in Massachusetts, carried every vote in Cheshire” for Thomas Jefferson. On New Year’s Day 1802, in the East Room of the White House where foreign diplomats, members of the supreme court, and congressmen had gathered, Leland presented the new president with “the Big Cheshire Cheese weighing 1,255 lbs.”
Jefferson’s Mammoth Cheese
Picturing a humongous wheel of cheese rolling into the grand, well-appointed rooms of the White House, Mary and I were over the moon (which some suppose is made of green cheese) with laughter. How could this historic boast of a small, rural village possibly be true? Outrageously brilliant in conception, complex in the logistics of execution, and herculean in transportation, it seemed more the stuff of legend than historical fact. But here it was memorialized for all to see in long-lived concrete and bronze.
Not one to let the oddities of the past go unexplored, I returned home and went online to the website of Jefferson’s Monticello and other reliable sources which corroborated the story with additional facts and suppositions. Indeed, a cheese weighing over 1,200 pounds, more than four feet in diameter, seventeen inches thick, and engraved with the Jeffersonian motto “Rebellion to Tyrant’s is Obedience to God,” was given as a “thank you” to the new president for his efforts to protect religious freedom. Jefferson praised the citizens of Cheshire for this “extraordinary proof of the skill with which those domestic arts which contribute so much to our daily comfort are practiced by them.” Unwilling to accept gifts while in office, Jefferson paid $200 for massive wheel.
This cheese odyssey began in July 1801when Leland requested supporters of Jefferson to contribute as much milk and curd as they could, and organized erection of a large cheese press in a local cider mill. With donations from 900 cows without Federalist leanings, the great cheese was made as Leland’s congregants mixed the ingredients while supposedly singing hymns and uttering prayers. By late November, it was on its way some 500 miles to Washington by sleigh or wagon, and pulled by six oxen, according to some stories. On reaching the Hudson River, it was loaded on a sloop for Baltimore. On arriving in Maryland, it was placed in a wagon for the final leg of the trip.
The cheese gained a measure of celebrity and drew great interest on its journey, including derision from Federalist newspapers. With mammoth fever seizing the nation after a recent discovery of bones from an extinct elephantine creature, one outlet sarcastically referred to the “Mammoth Cheese.” The name stuck.
It’s not easy to consume a food so large, and slices were being served at a new year’s event a year later, at which it’s said the air was filled with a ripe scent. Crusty leftovers were apparently still at the President’s House (as the White House was then known) in March 1804, and described as being “far from good.” Legend has it that the cheese was last served at a reception in 1805, after which the rest was dumped in the Potomac.
Bigger than Mammoth
It took only 35 years for an even larger cheese to roll into the East Room on the watch of President Andrew Jackson. The gift of Thomas Meacham, a well-to-do upstate New York farmer, it tipped the scales at 1,400 pounds, was four feet in diameter, and two feet thick. Less an endorsement of the tumultuous Jackson administration than a symbol of regional pride, it was made over four days with milk from 150 cows.
After display in Utica, New York, the enormous cheddar was paraded in a flag decorated wagon on its way through other towns. In New York City, throngs of eager people got a peek at the Masonic Hall before it was shipped to Washington by schooner. On New Year’s Day 1836, Jackson graciously accepted the gift and wrote to Meacham praising “evidence of the prosperity of our hardy yeomanry . . . who are engaged in the labor of the dairy.”
Aging in the President’s House for over a year, Jackson at last decided to dispose of it by throwing a public reception on Washington’s birthday. It was a wild, unruly affair with thousands crowded into the building and eagerly devouring the huge fromage in about two hours despite what is said to have been its powerful odor after sitting a hot, humid summer indoors.
Martin Van Buren assumed the presidency soon thereafter, and is said to have banned food at presidential receptions. Crumbs from Jackson’s very over-aged cheese had been trampled into the carpet and the President’s House reeked for months.
Beyond Mammoth
You’d think that the Jefferson and Jackson experiences would have soured presidents on cheese forever, that such an attitude would be a part of the political DNA of those seeking the highest office in the land. But presidential encounters with cheese continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In 1911, President William Howard Taft, the heftiest man ever to occupy the White House, ceremoniously cut a six-ton cheese at the National Dairy Show. “A whopper of a cheese, a regular Behemoth of a cheese, a Gargantuan, Brobdingnagian sort of cheese, the very granddaddy of all the cheeses that have been made, manufactured or concocted since the world began,” according to Walton Williams, a Pennsylvania journalist.
Calvin Coolidge is said to have accepted a 147-pound Wisconsin Swiss in 1928. The donors were grateful for a tariff imposed on cheese from Switzerland. Coolidge kept the cheese in his private larder. He and his secret service detail are said to have enjoyed it in sandwiches.
Although I’m not aware of other presidents accepting gifts of large cheese blocks, visits to farms and factories where cheese is produced remains a temptation on the campaign trail. No surprise that President George W. Bush couldn’t resist an unscheduled stop at the Cady Cheese factory in the swing state of Wisconsin in 2004.
Life, Art and Cheese
Something about the ginormous captures the artistic imagination. Shortly after Jefferson received his gift, poet Thomas Kennedy wrote a nine stanza “Ode to the Mammoth Cheese.” But the legend lives with creative expressions into the present. Candace Fleming’s A Big Cheese for the White House, an illustrated children’s picture book was published in 1999. Sheri Holman’s novel The Mammoth Cheese came out in 2004.
Television remembered President Jackson’s cheese in episodes of The West Wing where fictional President Josiah Bartlet held a Big Block of Cheese Day. For that event, administration officials met with ordinary citizens to hear their concerns, a nod to Jackson’s opening the President’s House to the people at large. In a case of life imitating art, President Obama also held Big Block of Cheese Days in an effort to make the “administration the most open and accessible in history.” Staff took to social media to answer questions “about the President’s State of the Union Address and the issues that are most important to you.”
Roadside Serendipity and New Traditions
I’ll be munching on cheese from a nearby farm when Joe Biden promises to defend the Constitution of the United States at his inauguration. Like so much on that day of pomp and ceremony, even such a minor gesture offers a taste of history.
But it can be more than a quirky, if ill recognized way to salute the swearing-in of a new president. It’s also a celebration of over two centuries of cheese making in southern New England, a region of hardscrabble, resilient agriculture where farmers bravely persist despite challenging economics and land-use patterns. Even in my thickly settled home state of Connecticut, farms continue making and marketing their own cheeses. We even have a Cheese Trail, and at some dairies you can meet the cows or goats and watch cheese being made.
But for a serendipitous visit to that singular and somewhat peculiar monument in Cheshire, Massachusetts, inauguration day would remain merely a momentous, but cold and distant national milestone for me. Knowing a largely hidden and beguiling historical idiosyncrasy brings it all back home. I can enjoy the moment with a new, quiet tradition that ties the personal to the grand and the present to the past, enabling me to feel connected and share stories.
You never know what you’ll find along New England’s cheese-maze of roads. Never fail to stop. Unexpected discoveries await.
