Immortality in Green Beans

A student in my Foodways of Appalachia class walked in one day with seeds and a story. “Have you ever grown any Walker Sisters beans?” she asked that day. 

I hadn’t, but the next spring we planted them, and they produced the longest, fullest green beans we had ever seen. I then began to learn more about the people who had kept these prolific beans alive.  

The Walker Sisters, who lived on land that would ultimately be incorporated into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, were known for their self-sufficiency. They often told visitors to their cabin that they produced everything they needed except sugar, soda, coffee, and salt.

They were the daughters of John Walker, who fought for the Union in the Civil War, and his wife Margaret. John and Margaret raised 11 children—seven girls and four boys. Of the sisters, Margaret, Polly, Martha, Nancy, Louisa, Sarah Caroline, and Hettie, Sarah Caroline was the only one to marry. After John Walker’s death in 1921, the six unmarried sisters inherited the family farm and carried on the tradition of self-sufficiency they had learned from their parents for over 40 years.

Not only were they self-sufficient, they were fiercely independent. As the federal government was making plans for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the sisters refused to leave their land. The government would eventually buy the sisters’ 122-acre homestead. As the park was being established, the government paid the sisters for their land but allowed them to live out the rest of their lives in their cabin through a lifetime lease. The last unmarried sister to live there died in 1964.

The Walker cabin still stands as testament to the sisters’ devotion to the mountains and as evidence of their strong-willed character. Their beans live on, too. They are resilient symbols of the Walker Sisters’ love of the land and its bounty. For people in Appalachia, green beans passed down through the generations are indeed heirlooms.

Gardens in the Appalachian region yield many varieties of green beans that bear the names of the families who have nurtured them. Seed saver Bill Best of Berea, Kentucky, tells me of a Noble bean that once traveled from West Virginia to Oregon. The great-granddaughter of the man who brought the bean to the Northwest sent Best some seeds that weren’t germinating. They had been in a container for about 20 years. Meticulously, Best coaxed six seeds out of 100 to germinate. All of them died but one. From that one plant, Best saved 11 seeds. “If I’m lucky,” he tells me, “I will have helped bring this bean back from extinction.” Those beans will forever carry the Noble family name.

Bill Best’s reputation as a caretaker of beans is such that letters addressed only as “Bean Man, Kentucky” successfully arrive in his mailbox. A native of North Carolina, he takes special pride in the Hill Family Bean, a multi-colored variety that has been around for over 100 years. Cecile Hill, the keeper of the seed, grew up in Haywood County, North Carolina, and was one of 12 children. All of them participated in putting up food for the winter. 

Cecile died in 1992 at the age of 89. About 20 years later, her son, Ben Best, found her bean seeds in an open half-gallon jar and planted them. They grew. And, at age 87, Ben Best continues to garden.

“The Hill Family Bean is from my home community and is the first bean I remember picking as a toddler,” says Bill Best. “I was fascinated by the colors as well as the taste. Many families in Upper Crabtree still grow it. The Rogers family Greasy Cut-Short is also from my home community and continues to be grown by several families. The Doyce Chambers Greasy Cut-Short is from the Bethel area of Haywood County and is one of the favorite beans on our website, heirlooms.org. It was given to me by a second cousin, Delores Best, 30 years ago.”

In Scott County, Virginia, the name Addington is strongly associated with education and county history, but in my wife’s family, it elicits detailed memories of green beans. My mother-in-law, Elsie Derting, says beans often carried the name of the family from which you received them. Such was the case with the Mrs. Addington Bean, named for Edla Addington, who lived with her educator husband Ezra near the North Fork of the Holston River.

“The Mrs. Addington Bean was a bunch bean,” recalls my mother-in-law, now 94. “It was an early bean, a yellow bean. And we’d try to have them by my husband’s birthday, June 25. The bean had a lot of flesh to it, and it was as tender as it could be.” 

Still today, Elsie Derting shows up at every Fourth of July family picnic and every Labor Day picnic with a pot of long-cooked green beans.

We love our green beans in the mountains. We love them cooked for hours with a hunk of pork. We love them threaded with string and dried as “Leather Britches.” We love them canned, frozen, and even fermented as “pickle” beans when the signs are right and the moon is new.

Most of all, we savor their history and recall with every forkful the resourceful people who have cared for them and cultivated them over generations. Walker, Hill, Rogers, Chambers, and Addington—these are just a few of the family names that have earned immortality through the goodness of green beans.

About the author: Fred Sauceman’s latest book is The Proffitts of Ridgewood: An Appalachian Family’s Life in Barbecue.