Homegrown Pecan Pride

Homegrown Pecan Pride

Diners always can find a slice of pecan pie at Sherry’s Home Cookin’ Cafe in Brunswick, Mo. The pie’s homemade, but, even better, the pecans are homegrown.

This north-central Missouri river town of 1,041 is the nation’s northernmost pecan producer. The 3 million pounds of pecans harvested each year in Chariton County are just a plunk in the bucket compared to Georgia’s 100 million pounds, but the town couldn’t be prouder of its annual nut crop.

Northern pecans are smaller than Southern pecans, but locals swear that they’re sweeter and tastier. “I eat a handful of pecans every day,” says Melvin Neidholdt, 77, one of the county’s seven major pecan growers.

Pecans long have been a wild delicacy in Chariton County, but the pecan industry didn’t boom around Brunswick until the late George James began experimenting with a thin-shell variety he discovered on his farm in 1955. James received a patent to propagate the Starking Hardy Giant pecan a year later.

Elizabeth James, 85, recalls how pecans staved off poverty for the newlywed couple when rising floodwaters claimed their row crops. “We had a three-room house, and the Missouri River ran through it three times in the first five years, and we lost everything,” she recalls. “I haven’t decided if I was crazy or if I loved the man, but I stayed with him.”

The couple survived by picking up pecans and selling them for 3 cents a pound. Eventually, they moved their house to higher ground and began growing and harvesting pecans full time.

Today, their children—Bill James, Sandy Naylor, and Betty Knight—manage the farm’s 10,000 trees and operate the Nut Hut, a retail outlet where the world’s largest pecan—a 12,000-pound concrete replica of the variety patented by James—was built in 1982.

Each fall, members of the Melvin Neidholdt family head home for the pecan harvest, which begins with the first frost. “It’s hard work, but we can’t wait to get here,” says Toni Neidholdt Burton, a schoolteacher in Liberty, Mo. (pop. 26,232).

Like any proud farmer, Neidholdt enjoys showing off his earliest harvesting equipment—a 5-pound wooden club to whack the nuts from the branches. “I remember Dad climbing the trees and swinging that club and jumping from tree to tree like a squirrel,” Burton recalls.

Modern machinery makes pecan harvesting safer and faster. A mechanical shaker on a tractor grabs the tree trunk like a giant fist and shakes it hard enough to knock the nuts off their limbs. A pecan harvester vacuums up the nuts, removing twigs and other debris. Pecans are cracked individually as they roll along a conveyor belt through a mechanical cracker.

The area’s wild native pecans are “God’s gift to us,” says Ruth Miller of Miller Pecan Farms, nine miles west of Brunswick. “The cold weather takes care of the insects so we don’t have to add chemicals,” she adds. “City people love to drive to the country and pick up pecans. Some bring their lunch to our farm.”

During Brunswick’s annual Pecan Festival, Miller serves caramel apples smothered with pecans, and about 100 of the town’s best bakers prepare pecan pies for judging. This year’s event, scheduled Oct. 1-3, also will feature a parade, queen contest, pecan-cracking demonstration, a carnival, crafts and pecan treats aplenty.

Mary Swan, 78, owner of Harvey’s Pecans, says it’s tradition to gather nuts in autumn. “When I was little, Granddad would hook up his horses, Troxie and Snip, and we’d take the wagon and gather the nuts that had fallen,” she says. “Grandma had a wood stove, and we’d sit around the fire of an evening and pick out the nuts.”

Today, her children and grandchildren help harvest. “Lots of times when we’re working in the pecan grove from sunup to sundown, we’ll stop and have a wiener roast,” she says.

Brunswick’s Pecan Festival is “the event of the year,” says Mary Nicholson, festival committee member. “We do this to promote the pecan growers and to share the traditions of gathering pecans. It’s all about family.”

And pecan pie, of course.

Marti Attoun is a freelance writer in Joplin, Mo.

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