A Harried History
Kentucky coffee tree’s troubled past
Dying for a cup of coffee?
There’s evidence that indigenous people planted the trees near their villages to harvest the large pods—5 to 10 inches long and 1-1/2 to 2 inches wide—for a variety of uses. Historians speculate that the native people, after discovering that the pods are toxic, tossed them into streams and ponds to harvest fish. They also used the six to nine seeds inside the pods for jewelry. Each seed can be the size of a shelled Brazil nut. At some point, a brave soul discovered that roasting the seeds rendered them non-poisonous so they could be crushed and brewed as a beverage.
American revolutionaries rejected both the English monarchy and tea, adopting coffee as the national drink. But coffee beans were expensive even along the Atlantic seaboard and virtually impossible to find inland. Early land developers with more greed than scruples invented the moniker Kentucky Coffeetree to promote their region as such a utopian place that coffee literally grew on trees. Settlers who took the bait of that disinformation campaign were disappointed by the pungently bitter taste of the beverage and gladly returned to genuine coffee as soon as supply chains expanded to their area.
Despite that strong regional link, Kentucky originally designated the tulip poplar as the state’s tree, or at least they thought they did. In the early 1970s, the legislature discovered a procedural flaw, leaving the state without an official tree. Joe Creason, a writer for the Louisville Journal Courier, nominated the Kentucky Coffeetree, though it may have been a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to boost circulation. The idea caught fire, though, and lovers and detractors of the tree waged a pitched political battle for years. Supporters may have thought their cause was lost when Creason died, but he was so popular throughout the state that his tree won in 1976, partially as a memorial gesture. But sentiment often fades quickly, and Kentucky abandoned the Coffeetree in 1994, reverting to the tulip poplar.
