Okay, but what did Jeffords mean when he said, “aint I some pumkins”? It turns out that some pumpkins was a common American idiom in the mid-19th century. According to Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1848, it was the opposite of “small potatoes.” The phrase could be “applied to anything large or noble.” (The lexicographer was unrelated to the John Bartlett of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.)
It was a versatile phrase. An impressively rapid telegraph conversation was “some pumpkins.” An unusually large eggplant was “some pumpkins.” A beautiful Mexican woman was “some pumpkins.” A good-looking bachelor might think he was “some pumpkins.” A young Rutherford B. Hayes told his sister that the White Mountains of New Hampshire were “some pumpkins.” During the Civil War, a Massachusetts artilleryman wrote to his brother that the thunderstorms in Virginia were “some pumkins.”
The etymologist Barry Popik has traced some pumpkins as far back as 1843. In 1848 it was popular enough, as we’ve already seen, to merit inclusion in Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms. By 1849 the phrase was already a newspaperman’s cliche; a piece of filler about a recent pumpkin crop was sardonically headlined, “Some Pumpkins.” [footnote]Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 410; “Some Pumpkins,” Charleston (SC) Courier, reprinted in Savannah (GA) Daily Republican, Sept. 10, 1849, p. 2.
That same year, James Rees, a playwright and theater critic in Philadelphia, suggested an origin story for some pumpkins. He pointed to a passage in the English actor James Fennell’s autobiography. Fennell recounted a childhood tour of France. At one point, as they were approaching the Rouen Cathedral in a carriage, Fennell and his friend (last name Walker) were too short to look out the front, so they were looking down through the carriage’s “little windows.” Walker shouted, “Look, Fennell, what immense pumpkins,” upon which his father “turned round” and said, “God! can you be looking at pumpkins, while you are passing such a cathedral as this?’” For the rest of the trip, Fennell would tease Walker whenever they passed “a stately building or towering spire,” saying, “Look, Walker, there are ‘some pumpkins!’”
Was this actually the origin of some pumpkins? John Russell Bartlett included the anecdote in the second edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859. But he noted that Fennell probably did not stress the word some when he said “some pumpkins,” whereas in the idiom, some is stressed. (I’m reminded of how they say “some pig” in Charlotte’s Web, or how a classic Hollywood actor would say, “You’ve got some nerve!”) In the Fennell anecdote, pumpkins was still functionally a noun, whereas some pumpkins is a compound adjective.