The Mammoth Cheese of Cheshirewas the most unusual gift ever given to a President of the United States. In the aftermath of the
"Revolution of 1800", the
eccentric Baptist preacher
John Leland decided to celebrate the presidency of Thomas Jefferson by convincing the predominantly Baptist farmers of
Cheshire, Massachusetts to create a giant 1,235-pound block of cheese as a monument to small-"r" republicanism and religious freedom.
The cheese eventually reached Thomas Jefferson on New Years Day in 1802, the
same day that Jefferson wrote his famous
letter to the Danbury Baptists about the
wall of separation between church and state. The
Federalist Party, which opposed Jefferson's funding of
scientific research during the Lewis & Clark expedition, ridiculed the cheese as a "mammoth," a reference to the recent
exhumation of a mammoth by the painter and naturalist,
Charles Willson Peale. The derision of the Federalists backfired, however, as the delivery of the cheese coincided with a huge
"mammoth craze" that popularized the word "mammoth" as an
adjective describing anything enormous, including a
mammoth loaf of bread gifted to Jefferson in 1804. An experimental dairy station in Perth, Ontario eventually made a
bigger mammoth cheese, but Jefferson's mammoth cheese has inspired
a novel,
a children's book,
a monument protected by
funds from the Department of Homeland Security, and
a subplot on The West Wing. Last but not least, check out this
research paper, which places the Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire in the context of Jeffersonian participatory democracy.
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Fantastic post, thanks.
posted by nasreddin at 1:52 PM on December 3, 2007