The story of how a 1,400 pound cheese wheel made its way into the White House. For years.
The people loved Jackson. Jackson loved cheese. What better way to celebrate Jacksonian democracy than by sending Old Hickory himself an enormous wheel of cheese? Dairy farmer Colonel Thomas S. Meacham of Sandy Creek, NY, hit on this notion in 1835, and he had the know-how to craft a titanic cheddar. The fruit of Meacham’s labor was a wheel that was four feet in diameter and two feet thick, weighed nearly 1400 pounds, and was wrapped in a giant belt that bore patriotic inscriptions like, “The Union, it must be Preserved.”
This cheese was actually the crown jewel of a larger collection of ten cheeses that appeared at an 1835 patriotic celebration in Oswego, NY. After the locals all got a good look at the cheese and felt themselves well up with national pride, the wheel was loaded onto a schooner and set sail for its new home on Pennsylvania Avenue. Meacham sent off two other 750-pound wheels in the same shipment, one to Vice President Martin Van Buren and one to New York Governor William L. Marcy.
By 1837 Jackson’s second term was winding down, and he wasn’t about to haul a two-year-old mountain of cheese with him when he left office. So he decided to make the famed fromage a featured player at his last public reception at the White House. It was an astute move; there’s nothing people love more than free food. The reception’s 10,000 visitors attacked the wheel of cheese with such fervor that the entire thing was gone within two hours.
The reception took care of the cheese-disposal problem, but the cheddar certainly wasn’t forgotten. There are certain downsides to sending a big honking block of cheese to a warm climate like Washington and having it sit around for a couple of years. Namely, the cheese starts to get a bit fragrant, and a block that massive can give off some serious cheese-stink. Washingtonians could allegedly smell the cheese, which one dubbed “an evil-smelling horror,” for several blocks around the White House before the big party.
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