[Toby Waller]

Originally Posted by rabblerouser

29/30

I missed the one about Andrew Jackson's cheese wheel

So I learned something.

What’s More Presidential Than a Gift of Big Cheese?

http://theplate.nationalgeographic.c...-a-big-cheese/

American presidents are traditionally associated with Air Force One, the State of the Union, “Hail to the Chief,” and the West Wing. Historically, however, they’ve also been paired with – yes, really – large wheels of cheese.

The tradition began in 1802, when President Thomas Jefferson was given a gift

of a giant cheese from the citizens of Cheshire, Mass. The cheese was the idea of Baptist Elder John Leland, a Jefferson supporter in the fraught election of 1800 in which Jefferson (a Republican) defeated John Adams (a Federalist).

It was made from the milk of 900 impeccably Republican cows and pressed in an outsized cider press. When finished, it measured four feet across and 17 inches high, and weighed, once cured, 1,235 pounds.

Engraved with the patriotic motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” the cheese was shipped to Washington via sleigh (hauled by six oxen), sloop, and wagon.

It arrived on Dec. 29, 1801, and Leland himself was on hand to present it, pointing out – somewhat uncomfortably to slave-owning Jefferson – that the cheese “was produced by the personal labor of freeborn farmers and with the voluntary and cheerful aid of their wives and daughters, without the assistance of a single slave.”

The gargantuan Jeffersonian cheese was the first object to which the word “mammoth” was applied as an adjective. The first complete mammoth skeletons had recently been excavated from a marl pit near Newburgh, New York, and were on display in Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum – where they so caught the public’s fancy that the word “mammoth” was soon used to describe anything of remarkable scope or size. A Washington, D.C., resident, after gulping down 42 eggs in ten minutes, proclaimed himself a Mammoth Eater; a New York gardener grew a 20-pound Mammoth Radish; and the U.S. Navy, inspired by Jefferson’s Mammoth Cheese, produced a matching Mammoth Loaf of bread, baked using an entire barrel of flour.