In the spring of 1977, newly sworn-in President Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer, was offered a great gift, if you can call it that, from the misty Northern California coast.
9 tons of sequoia peanuts.
The rough-hewn Goober was strapped to the back of a logging truck, transported across the country, and parked near the White House. The plan was proposed to Carter amid protests by loggers angry and worried about the Carter administration’s plan to expand Redwood National Park along California’s northern coast and eliminate their jobs.
Unfortunately, President Carter rejected peanuts.
The car was trucked back to the village of Orrick in Humboldt County, where it sat unmarked in a gas station parking lot for nearly half a century, its story forgotten as the town struggled and shrank. .
But in Humboldt County, since Mr. Carter died last month at age 100, the story of the poor old Peanut, who disappeared after being hit by a car in 2023, has received new attention.
A nine-ton peanut carved from a sequoia tree. Outside Shoreline Market in Orrick, California in 2018. The sculpture will be largely destroyed in a vehicle crash in 2023.
(Katie Bush)
Two days after Carter’s death, the front page of the Times-Standard carried the headline just below his obituary: “The former president outlived Orrick’s ‘Peanuts.'”
At Shoreline Fuel Mart, a longtime home for the declining legume, an employee answered a call from a Times reporter this week with a sigh: “Everyone keeps calling me about this.” It is,” he said.
Carter’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on Thursday marks the end of his long public farewell, but he was posthumously praised by the National Park Service for his “pivotal role in the story of Redwood National Park” and faced fierce opposition. Nevertheless, in 1978 the park was almost doubled in size. From the wood industry.
“This important expansion includes watersheds surrounding old-growth forests and will ensure they are protected for future generations to cherish,” Redwood National and State Park officials said. “President Carter’s vision extended beyond the sequoias. His efforts demonstrated that leadership includes not only meeting the challenges of our time, but also nurturing the planet for future generations. It reminds us.”
The creation of Redwood National Park and Mr. Carter’s expansion have long been a sensitive topic along the economically depressed north coast of rural California, where a once-thriving logging industry has declined over the past half-century. It has become.
Almost all of the coastal sequoias, the world’s tallest trees, grow in a narrow, foggy belt that stretches from Big Sur to southern Oregon. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation establishing Sequoia National Park outside Orrick in 1968, more than 90 percent of the original sequoias had been logged.
For 10 years after the park’s creation, logging continued just outside the park’s boundaries. Water and sediment from the clearcut flowed into the park, damaging the protected space.
In 1977, the Carter administration added 48,000 acres to the park and proposed that the government purchase new protected land, much of which had already been logged.
Timber production and employment are already declining, in part because most old trees have been cut down and new mechanized factories require fewer workers. But in Humboldt County, loggers are fighting a park expansion plan that would result in the elimination of at least 1,000 jobs.
They carved protest peanuts and strapped them to a logging truck along with a sign that read, “It may be peanuts to you, but it’s a job to us.”
Redwood National Park was expanded by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 despite opposition from the logging industry.
(C. Dani I. Jeske/DeAgostini via Getty Images)
In May of that year, 20 logging trucks, including one carrying peanuts, departed Humboldt County honking their horns and headed for Washington, D.C., where they were joined by about 400 demonstrators from the West Coast.
In a short film about the nine-day drive by the timber industry advocacy group Associated California Loggers, one helmeted demonstrator said: “This peanut weighs nine tons. …We want the president to cut it down and plant it in Plains, Georgia, so we can grow 50,000 acres around his ranch. We’re going to build a park.”
assistant. Interior Secretary Robert Herbst and White House official Scott Barnett met the truck near the Washington Monument. They refused to accept Peanut, saying the carving was an inappropriate use of ancient sequoia.
Carter signed the park expansion bill the following year.
Orrick’s population has plummeted from more than 2,000 people in the 1960s, at the height of commercial logging, to about 300 today.
Outside Shoreline Fuel Mart, cracked and brittle peanuts were covered with moss and slowly rotting from the inside. Even in the city, the story was almost forgotten.
“There’s a lot that’s going to be lost when the logging industry disappears or significantly declines and the region changes significantly,” said Katie Bush, former director and curator of the Clark Historical Museum in nearby Eureka. say. “As the park expanded, all of that history disappeared.”
While researching the park a few years ago, Busch drove to Orrick to visit the sculpture, which she said bore little resemblance to a peanut.
“My first impression was that it kind of resembled a shoe,” she said. “When I saw it, it was clearly in disrepair.”
Late one night in June 2023, a hit-and-run driver crashes into Peanut. The California Highway Patrol’s incident report describes the crash with the sobering abbreviation “VEH VS REDWOOD STUMP.”
“It was a mass of lumps and shreds,” a Shoreline Fuel Mart employee, who declined to give his name, told the Times this week. The remains of the nuts are still there, but someone “took a tractor and pushed them to the back of the property,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Yurok tribe, which bought the gas station in 2020 and plans to build a new, larger store, said the tribe wants to create a miniature replica of the peanut so it won’t be forgotten.
Donna Hufford, president of the Orrick Chamber of Commerce, whose family has lived in Orrick for generations, said most of the lumberjacks who participated in the protests have moved away or died.
She said of Peanuts: People leave. It would be nice if it remained as a memory of those days. And maybe someday we’ll carve something else. ”
