"Pee-kahn, Pi-kahn or Pee-kan?"
Travel just about anywhere in the southern United States, and you will find pecan trees. The “nut too hard to crack by hand”— is one of the most successful native agricultural crops of North America. So popular are pecans that Thomas Jefferson once wrote home from Paris for a supply, while many people today consider their holidays incomplete without a pecan pie. Not many have ever explored the natural history, cultivation, and uses of the pecan tree and nut. This simple nut pieces together a fascinating mosaic of the peoples caught up in the pecan story—Native Americans, Spanish explorers, European immigrants and their American descendants, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Over the last 40 years, many pecan orchards in Mobile and Baldwin Counties have been sold to land developers and turned into neighborhoods. Have you noticed if any of the pecan trees in your neighborhood seem to line up in rows? HAPPY CACHING!