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Ain’t I Some Pumpkins?

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Soon after he was elected in November 1860, Abraham Lincoln received this letter from a certain H. Jeffords:

I raised the tallest Lincoln Pole in Ohio I helped to Elect the tallest President in the United States. I married a wife 5 ft 11 inches high. I produced the largest turnips in the State of Ohio and a pumkin 192 lbs in weight. honest Abe aint I some pumkins1

Who was this H. Jeffords character? What’s a “Lincoln Pole”? What does “aint I some pumkins” mean? Let’s answer these questions in order. 

When I searched the 1860 census records on Ancestry.com, I only found one male Jeffords in Ohio whose occupation was listed as “Farmer.” And his first name was Henry! So far, so good. He lived in Washington Township in Scioto County, near Portsmouth. According to the census, he was born in Massachusetts in 1790 or 1791, and his land was worth a whopping $30,000. So we’re talking about a relatively wealthy, established farmer who might’ve had the time and space to grow some prize vegetables.2

A couple of Portsmouth newspapers are available on newspapers.com, and the Henry Jeffords that appears there helps fill out our picture of the man. He owned “celebrated race horses” and was a director of the Portsmouth Jockey Club.3 In 1851, his sorrel filly won the award for Second-Best Two-Year-Old Filly at the Scioto County agricultural fair.4 At the next year’s fair, he had the Best Three-Year-Old Bull and the Best Calf.5 The best cattle, the fastest horses, the tallest wife, the largest pumpkins — this was a competitive fellow.

Henry Jeffords was also politically active. He was Vice President of the local Corn Growers and Liquor Dealers association. In 1853, he ran to be Portsmouth’s Street Commissioner. In 1859, he was the treasurer for Washington Township.6

When Jeffords died in 1871, the Portsmouth Times published an obituary. It relates that Jeffords was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts (now a neighborhood of Boston), in 1790, and was an early emigrant to Scioto County. In the 1820s, he drove a stagecoach between Portsmouth and Chillicothe. The Times called him “a man of great hospitality, of remarkable energy, and greatly attached to the sports of the field and turf, in which he always displayed great enthusiasm.” He was apparently quite a character.7

Jeffords also makes a few appearances in one of those great antiquarian county histories: A History of Scioto County, Together with a Pioneer Record of Southern Ohio, written and self-published in 1903 by Nelson W. Evans, a “Life Member of The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society.” At the same time that Jeffords ran a stage line, he also kept the Scioto Inn near Lucasville. During the 1830s and 1840s, he had ownership in a dry goods store in Waverly. In 1862, he gave an address at Lucasville’s Fourth of July festival. That same year, he hosted Battery L of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery for a celebratory dinner at his home.8

So that’s Henry Jeffords. What was a Lincoln pole? Well, “pole-raisings” were a whole thing in the 19th century. You would throw a big party and raise a tall tree trunk, decorated on top with symbols commemorating your political candidate of choice. The tradition went back to the “liberty poles” erected by the Sons of Liberty during the 1760s, and a pole-raising would often coincide with a barbecue, rally, and/or torchlight parade. So it makes sense that a horse-racing, politicking entrepreneur like Jeffords would want the tallest Lincoln pole in Ohio.9

Okay, but what did Jeffords mean when he said, “aint I some pumkins”? It turns out that some pumpkins was a common American idiom in the mid-19th century. According to Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1848, it was the opposite of “small potatoes.” The phrase could be “applied to anything large or noble.”10 (The lexicographer was unrelated to the John Bartlett of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.)

It was a versatile phrase. An impressively rapid telegraph conversation was “some pumpkins.” An unusually large eggplant was “some pumpkins.” A beautiful Mexican woman was “some pumpkins.” A good-looking bachelor might think he was “some pumpkins.”11 A young Rutherford B. Hayes told his sister that the White Mountains of New Hampshire were “some pumpkins.”12 During the Civil War, a Massachusetts artilleryman wrote to his brother that the thunderstorms in Virginia were “some pumkins.”13

The etymologist Barry Popik has traced some pumpkins as far back as 1843.14 In 1848 it was popular enough, as we’ve already seen, to merit inclusion in Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms. By 1849 the phrase was already a newspaperman’s cliche; a piece of filler about a recent pumpkin crop was sardonically headlined, “Some Pumpkins.” [footnote]Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 410; “Some Pumpkins,” Charleston (SC) Courier, reprinted in Savannah (GA) Daily Republican, Sept. 10, 1849, p. 2.[/efn_note]

That same year, James Rees, a playwright and theater critic in Philadelphia, suggested an origin story for some pumpkins. He pointed to a passage in the English actor James Fennell’s autobiography. Fennell recounted a childhood tour of France. At one point, as they were approaching the Rouen Cathedral in a carriage, Fennell and his friend (last name Walker) were too short to look out the front, so they were looking down through the carriage’s “little windows.” Walker shouted, “Look, Fennell, what immense pumpkins,” upon which his father “turned round” and said, “God! can you be looking at pumpkins, while you are passing such a cathedral as this?’” For the rest of the trip, Fennell would tease Walker whenever they passed “a stately building or towering spire,” saying, “Look, Walker, there are ‘some pumpkins!’”15

Was this actually the origin of some pumpkins? John Russell Bartlett included the anecdote in the second edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859. But he noted that Fennell probably did not stress the word some when he said “some pumpkins,” whereas in the idiom, some is stressed. (I’m reminded of how they say “some pig” in Charlotte’s Web, or how a classic Hollywood actor would say, “You’ve got some nerve!”) In the Fennell anecdote, pumpkins was still functionally a noun, whereas some pumpkins is a compound adjective.16

Also, James Rees made up a key part of the Fennell story! He mostly quotes the Fennell autobiography accurately — the trip to Rouen, the boys in the carriage, the remark about “immense pumpkins,” the scolding father. But the last bit of Rees’s story — Fennell teasing his friend by saying, “Look, Walker, there are ‘some pumpkins!’” — is an invention. Fennell did not say this. I have scoured Fennell’s autobiography and it’s not in there. I guess it’s possible that James Rees received this second part of the story from another source, but I sincerely doubt it. The story is bullshit, and this is not where some pumpkins came from.17

Antebellum Americans did not agree on where the phrase came from, regionally speaking. Some called it a “Yankeeism,” and it could be attributed more specifically to the rustic “Vermonter, direct from the Green Hills.”18 An Albany paper, however, thought some pumpkins was something “they say out West,” and a British travel writer considered it a Missouri phrase. An 1859 etiquette book associated the idiom with the generic “backwoodsman.”19 In short, the idiom was popular throughout the rural United States, and it was familiar enough in the cities too, even when used ironically.

In her enjoyable book Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (2012), the historian Cindy Ott explains how the pumpkin took on a new cultural significance during the mid-19th century. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a pumpkin could be any cultivar of Cucurbita pepo or Cucurbita maxima. Really, the words pumpkin and squash were interchangeable. But eventually these terms took on more distinct meanings. The cultivars that people cooked and ate were squashes, while the blander cultivars used for feeding livestock were pumpkins. As more Americans moved into cities, they continued buying and cooking squashes, but there was no urban market for pumpkins. Pumpkins were for pigs and cattle, not people. As a result, urban Americans began to associate the pumpkin with a mythic rural America. It became a subject of nostalgia, something found in Thanksgiving cookbooks and Halloween postcards. Ott doesn’t actually talk about some pumpkins, but it fits squarely within her chronology.20

Finally, I have to mention that there’s a “some pumpkins” joke in the 1858 play Our American Cousin, in which an English baronet hosts his distant cousin Asa Trenchard, a stereotypical Vermont rube. About halfway through the play, the baronet’s daughter Florence introduces Asa to another cousin, Mary, an impoverished milkmaid. Asa is impressed by her skill at milking the cows and making butter and cheese; he tells Florence that she (Florence) is “small potatoes . . . compared to a gal like that.”

FLO: I’m what?

ASA: Small potatoes.

FLO: Will you be kind enough to translate that for me, for I don’t understand American yet.

ASA: Yes, I’ll put it in French for you, “petite pommes des terres.”

FLO: Ah, it’s very clear now; but, cousin, do tell me what you mean by calling me small potatoes.

ASA: Wal, you can sing and paint, and play on the pianner, and in your particular circle you are some pumpkins.

FLO: Some pumpkins, first I am small potatoes, and now I’m some pumpkins.

ASA: But she, she can milk cows, set up the butter, make cheese, and, darn me, if them ain’t what I call raal downright feminine accomplishments.21]

In this exchange, some pumpkins was part of a rambunctious American vocabulary that celebrated the common folk and mocked elite pretension. Asa deflated his cousin’s aristocratic status by associating her sophisticated talents with a rather unsophisticated gourd. Today, of course, Our American Cousin is remembered as the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he died. The scene with Asa, Florence, and Mary happened two scenes before Lincoln was shot, so he would’ve heard the exchange about small potatoes and some pumpkins. Did he recall that bizarre letter from Mr. Jeffords? Did he laugh?

  1. H. Jeffords to Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. This letter is also quoted in Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 66.
  2. 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Washington Township, Scioto County, Ohio, p. 48, online at Ancestry.com.
  3. “A Holiday Story,” Portsmouth (OH) Times, Dec. 24, 1870, p. 1 (quotation); “Portsmouth Races,” Portsmouth (OH) Inquirer, Sept. 8, 1851, p. 3. Also see “Locals,” Portsmouth Inquirer, Oct. 3, 1851, p. 2.
  4. “Agricultural Fair,” Portsmouth Inquirer, Sept. 26, 1861, p. 3.
  5. “Awards Made by the Scioto County Agricultural Fair, Oct. 8th and 9th,” Portsmouth Inquirer, Oct. 29, 1852, p. 3.
  6. “Meeting of the Corn Growers and Liquor Dealers,” Portsmouth Inquirer, Feb. 18, 1853, p. 2; “City Election,” Portsmouth Inquirer, March 18, 1853, p. 3; “Statement of the Financial Condition of the Treasury of Scioto County, Ohio, for the Quarter Ending March 5th, 1859,” Portsmouth Times, March 15, 1859, p. 3.
  7. “Sudden Death of an Old Citizen,” Portsmouth Times, May 6, 1871, p. 3.
  8. Nelson W. Evans, A History of Scioto County, Together with a Pioneer Record of Southern Ohio (Portsmouth, OH: s.p., 1903), 118, 242, 348, 407.
  9. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 71–72; Shira Lurie, “Liberty Poles and the Fight for Popular Politics in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Winter 2018): 673–97; O. A. Garreston, “A Lincoln Pole Raising,” State Historical Society of Iowa Palimpsest 6 (April 1925): 109–16.
  10. John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases, Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 1st ed. (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1848), 410.
  11. “Quick Work,” Albany (NY) Journal, Dec. 23, 1847, p. 2; “From Texas,” New Orleans Daily Picayune, Sept. 6, 1849, p. 1; George F. Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (London: John Murray, 1847), 46; [Eliza] Leslie, Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1859), 319.
  12. Rutherford B. Hayes to Fanny Hayes Platt, Aug. 30, 1847, in Charles Richard Williams, ed., The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States (5 vols.; Columbus, OH: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1922–26), 1:214–15 (quotation on 215). Also see Hayes’s diary entry for Dec. 14, 1848, in ibid., 237.
  13. John W. Chase to Samuel S. Chase, June 24, 1862, in John S. Collier and Bonnie B. Collier, eds., Yours for the Union: The Civil War Letters of John W. Chase, First Massachusetts Light Artillery (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 112. Also see John Chase to Samuel Chase, April 15, 1862, and Oct. 29, 1862, in ibid., 76, 164.
  14. Barry Popik, “‘Some pumpkins’ (something of importance),” The Big Apple, April 23, 2022; “Correspondence,” Van Buren Arkansas Intelligencer, Dec. 30, 1843, p. 2.
  15. Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, Nov. 15, 1849, quoted in John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1859), 427–28. The critic is identified as “Colley Cibber” in Alexandria (VA) Gazette, Nov. 26, 1849, p. 4, clipped by Barry Popik at newspapers.com. This was a pseudonym used by James Rees, as seen in an advertisement for Rees’s Life of Edwin Forrest; see Publisher’s Weekly, Feb. 21, 1874, p. 216.
  16. Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 2nd ed., 427–28.
  17. James Fennell, An Apology for the Life of James Fennell (Philadelphia: Moses Thomas, 1814), 72–73.
  18. “Winter Is Here!,” Trenton (NJ) State Gazette, Dec. 23, 1848, p. 3; “Taking the Starch out of ’Em,” Windsor Vermont Journal, April 27, 1849, p. 1.
  19. “Quick Work,” Albany Journal, Dec. 23, 1847, p. 2; Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 46; Leslie, Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book, 319.
  20. Cindy Ott, Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
  21. ]Tom Taylor, Our American Cousin (New York: Samuel French, 1869 [1858]), Act II, scene 2, p. 26.
Bill Black is a history teacher in Houston and an editor for Contingent. He holds a PhD in history from Rice University, where he studied religion, nationalism, and slavery in the 19th-century Ohio Valley.

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