You may be used to varieties of pecans that are large with a lot of meat inside and at the same time easy to crack because of their thin shells. When I a little girl, we had a “native” pecan tree in our yard, and I can testify that the pecans were small and hard to crack with tiny bits of nutmeat inside.

We have the many varieties of pecans that we have today partly because of a man from Louisiana named Antione, that’s all, just Antoine. He was a slave gardener, and he grafted the first official variety of improved pecan, Centennial, at Oak Alley Plantation on the west bank of the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans in 1846. It won the Best Pecan Exhibited award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876.

Antoine is listed in an 1848 inventory of his owner, J.T. Roman’s, slaves as a “Creole slave, age 38.” That and the fact that he was a pioneer and expert gardener, skilled in the grafting of pecan trees, make up about the sum total of what we know about Antoine. But he did do something that I will appreciate tomorrow when I’m shelling my pecans, my paper-shell pecans.