Mr. Peanut, full name Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smyth, is a paradoxical combination of southern agriculture and Virginia aristocracy. His cane, monocle, and white gloves obscure his ambiguously sepia-toned body. De-accessorized, he is just a product of the earth. But he dresses up, masquerading as a person of capital and social status, characteristics not usually allotted to those who do the labor of cultivating peanuts. Consequently, Mr. Peanut embodies two seemingly-distinct but deeply-connected Virginian worlds: he is a product of the state’s agricultural and aristocratic traditions.
His outward appearance may not suggest an agricultural upbringing, but his origins, genealogy, and reputation—his place in the Virginia aristocracy—depend on his deep-seated connection to the land itself. Early in Virginia’s existence as an English colony, the recently-arrived colonizers established a social hierarchy through which they maintained the wealth and status of their English culture in their newly-claimed environment. They created a landed Virginian aristocracy. Rather than hereditary lords and tenants, however, Virginia’s hierarchy consisted of masters and enslaved people. Europeans, Africans, and peanuts all arrived in what is now the United States as outsiders, brought to the “new world” through international and intracolonial exchange.
It was not European colonizers, though, that brought these nuts (technically legumes) to the land that became the United States; in the seventeenth century, enslaved people brought peanuts with them from Africa, and the nuts eventually became a ubiquitous crop throughout the southeast. Because of their relative ease of cultivation—a cheap crop that grew in otherwise “poor” soils—enslaved Africans continued to grow peanuts for their own consumption, while those who enslaved them fed the legume to their livestock. In the pre-Civil War South, peanuts were often boiled, in keeping with African foodways, while in the urban North they were roasted in their shell and sold from street vendors. The nineteenth-century saw a growing awareness of the peanut’s usefulness for producing oils and butters, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the market for peanuts was on the rise with southern peanuts leading the industry.
In the first decade of the 20th century, “the peanut went from a city snack and regional food to a national staple,” with national production, distribution, and marketing. Italian-born Pennsylvania resident Amedeo Obici founded Planters Peanuts in 1906 with his business partner Mario Peruzzi. Together Obici and Peruzzi opened their business in a factory in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where they roasted, blanched, and salted Virginia peanuts.