A huge cheese is said to have sealed the election of Thomas Jefferson, who occupied the White House on January 1, 1802, after a bitter contest with his rival, the incumbent president and Federalist leader John Adams. It is an oft-told tale.
Upset by Puritan denunciations of Jefferson, Elder John Leland of the Baptist Church of Cheshire, Massachusetts, organized a communal effort to demonstrate support for Jeffersonian Democracy.
The resourceful preacher urged those of his congregants who owned cows to donate every quart of milk produced on a certain day for processing into a giant cheese that would be taken in a wagon drawn by six horses to Washington and presented to President Jefferson.
The result was a huge cheese, estimated to weigh more than 1,200 pounds.
When presented with this unusual token of esteem on January 1, 1802, President Jefferson responded, “I will cause this auspicious event to be placed upon the records of our nation, and it will ever shine amid its glorious archives.” Jefferson ordered the cheese to be cut and presented Leland with a great wedge to take back to his supporters in Cheshire.
It is said that no Federalist cows were allowed to give milk for the making of Jefferson’s big cheese.
Now that cheese had been politicized, it is not surprising that Democratic supporters of President Andrew Jackson would commission a great cheese for their hero.
Convinced that “every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid to him,” Jackson’s admirers therefore welcomed the donation of a 1,400 pound cheddar cheese created by an Oswego County dairyman by the name of Thomas S. Meacham.
A veteran of the War of 1812, Col. Meacham, described as “a man of enthusiastic temperament and fond of remarkable things,” kept 150 cows on a farm near Sandy Creek. He produced a mammoth cheese that was shipped to the nation’s capital on November 15, 1835.
Pulled from Sandy Creek by twenty-four grey horses, the gargantuan cheese first went Port Ontario. The cheese then went by canal and river from Oswego to Syracuse, Albany, and New York and then down to Washington, DC. Crowds cheered, and cannons boomed as the big cheese passed by. A historic marker near
Sandy Creek now commemorates Meacham’s big political cheese.
Col. Meacham presented President Jackson with the mammoth cheese in the name of the “governor and people of the State of New York.” On February 22, 1836, Jackson opened the White House to the public and invited them to eat the cheese.
A contemporary report, quoted in Harold W. Thompson’s Body, Boots & Britches (1940), describes the ensuing chaos and speaks to the power of cheese, or perhaps, the inelegance of Jacksonian democracy:
“This is Washington’s birthday. The President, the departments, the Senate, and we, the people, have celebrated it by eating a big cheese! The President’s house was thrown open. The multitude swarmed in. The Senate of the United States adjourned. The representatives of the various departments turned out. Representatives in
squadrons left the capitol-and all for the purpose of eating cheese!
“Mr. Van Buren [then Vice-President Martin Van Buren] was there to eat cheese. Mr. Webster [Noah Webster] was there to eat cheese. Mr. Woodbury [Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury], Colonel Benton [Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton], Mr. Dickerson [Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson], and the gallant Colonel Trowbridge [Albany native and Detroit settler Charles Christopher Trowbridge] were eating cheese.
“The court, the fashion, the beauty of Washington, were all eating cheese. Officers in Washington, foreign representatives in stars and garters, gay, joyous,
dashing, and gorgeous women, in all the pride and panoply and pomp of wealth, were there eating cheese. It was cheese, cheese, cheese. Streams of cheese were going up in the avenue in everybody’s fists. Balls of cheese were in a hundred pockets. Every handkerchief smelt of cheese. The whole atmosphere for half a mile
around was infected with cheese.”
When the cheese eaters left, cheese curds were found ground into the carpets of the White House. The big cheese that Col. Thomas Meacham delivered to
President Andrew Jackson was of the cheddar variety.
Cheddar cheese takes its name from the village of Cheddar in the County of Somerset in southwestern England. Said to have been produced as early as the twelfth century, cheddar cheese (in all varieties) is today the world’s most popular cheese. As the cheese’s name was not protected by legal covenants, many cheese makers (including Meacham) could produce cheese and call it “cheddar.”
Only cheese produced using traditional methods within the British counties of Somerset, Devon, Dorset, or Cornwall, can be marketed today
with the prized West Country Farmhouse Cheddar label.
Mammoth cheeses have appeared at the New York State fair and, like Meacham’s giant cheese, have been used for both eating and political purposes. A 24,000 pound cheese made from 240,000 pounds of milk from 30 dairy farms around Lowville, Lewis County, New York, went by railroad flat car to the fairgrounds in Syracuse in 1921.
The gigantic cheese, weighing about 12 tons, was commissioned by George E. Hogue, New York State Agricultural Commissioner, to persuade the public to eat more
cheese.
A large flatbed truck took the cheese on a tour of Syracuse and then to the fairgrounds. The truck failed to carry the big cheese up an improvised wooden runway covering the steps into the dairy barn. Then a second truck was attached to the first, but even with this added pulling power, the cheese stayed where it was.
As a last resort, two hundred men tugged the big cheese into the dairy barn using ropes. Lt. Governor Jeremiah Wood had the cheese cut into one and two-pound chunks and sold to the public.
Today it is not huge cheeses but the butter sculpture that draws visitors to the Great New York State Fair. One is tempted to say that the political coinage of colossal cheeses has been devalued. However, this was not true during the presidency of Barack Obama.
The Obama administration held two Big Block of Cheese Days. The cheese blocks underscored the accessibility President Obama and his administration to all American citizens. Unlike the mammoth cheddar cheese that Colonel Meachum delivered to President Andrew Jackson, the Obama cheeses were not consumed by a near-riotous public that descended on the White House.
Social media came to rescue of the Obama cheeses. The welcoming message the Obama administration intended to convey on Big Block of Cheese Day went over the Internet via a wonderfully creative YouTube presentation.
Illustrations, from above: Cheese consumption in Jackson’s White House (from Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in The National Metropolis, White House Historical Association); an historic Big Cheese marker (Sandy Creek, NY History Center); the 1921 big cheese (from Eunice R. Stamm, The History of Cheesemaking in New York).
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