Where pumpkins come from

The twelve stops

1. Before about 10,000 years ago

   Wild, bitter gourds

   Wild squash and gourds were too bitter for people to eat. Mastodons and other giant plant-eaters ate them anyway: whole squash seeds turn up in mastodon dung. When those animals died out, many wild gourds declined. The ones that lasted were the ones people started to grow.

   Source: Kistler et al., “Gourds and squashes (Cucurbita spp.) adapted to megafaunal extinction and ecological anachronism through domestication,” PNAS (2015)

2. 10,000 to 8,000 years ago

   Early pumpkin remains in Oaxaca

   Seeds, stems and bits of rind from Guilá Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, show people growing Cucurbita pepo, the pumpkin’s species, between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. The seeds got longer, the stems got thicker, and the fruit changed shape and color. That is more than 4,000 years before maize, beans or any other directly dated crop in the Americas.

   Source: Bruce D. Smith, “The Initial Domestication of Cucurbita pepo in the Americas 10,000 Years Ago,” Science (1997)

3. By about 1070, in the Northeast

   The Three Sisters

   Corn, beans and squash were planted together. The method spread north from Mesoamerica over many generations. Archaeologists date its adoption in North America to about 1070. The Seneca of western New York called the three Diohe’ko, the Three Sisters, and grew them for at least 500 years before contact with Europeans.

   Source: USDA National Agricultural Library, “The Three Sisters of Indigenous American Agriculture”

4. The word

   Pepon, pompon, pumpion, pumpkin

   “Pumpkin” grew out of an older English word, pumpion. That came from French pompon, from Latin pepō, a melon or gourd, and before that from Greek pepōn, a large melon eaten ripe. The dictionary gives the chain but not dates, so this stop’s place on the line is approximate.

   Source: The American Heritage Dictionary, “pumpkin”

5. 1700s to the early 1900s, Ireland

   Turnip lanterns

   On Samhain eve, October 31, people in Ireland and other Celtic lands carved faces into turnips, and sometimes potatoes, radishes or beets, and lit them to keep spirits away. An 18th-century Irish folktale tells of Stingy Jack, barred from heaven and hell, who wandered with an ember in a turnip lantern. Turnips were the usual lantern through the 1800s and early 1900s. The National Museum of Ireland keeps a plaster cast of one, a “ghost turnip.”

   Sources: Smithsonian (2021); National Geographic (2020)

6. 1796, Hartford

   Pumpkin pie in American Cookery

   Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery was the first cookbook written by an American and published in America. It has two recipes for “pompkin” pudding baked in a crust: a custard close to the pumpkin pie of today.

   Sources: Library of Congress, “A Brief History of Pumpkin Pie in America” (2017); American Cookery (1796), Library of Congress

7. The 1840s

   The turnip becomes a pumpkin

   A wave of Irish immigrants brought the turnip lantern to the United States in the 1840s. Pumpkins were easy to find there, and much easier to hollow out than a turnip. The jack-o’-lantern became an American tradition.

   Sources: Sue Hubbell, Smithsonian (1996); National Geographic (2020)

8. 1883, France

   Cinderella

   Rouge vif d’Étampes, a very old Cucurbita maxima from Étampes, France, is often called the Cinderella pumpkin. It was already in the Vilmorin seed catalog in 1883, and it was the most popular pumpkin in Paris markets in the 1880s. Burpee brought it to American gardeners the same year.

   Sources: ProSpecieRara variety catalog; UC Agriculture and Natural Resources; Royal Horticultural Society

9. 1977, Massachusetts

   Howden, the carving pumpkin

   John Howden of Massachusetts found it in his crop of Connecticut Field pumpkins and began selecting it in 1960. Joseph Harris Seed Co. released the result, Howden, in 1977. Purdue Extension calls it the first commercial jack-o’-lantern variety, and dates its development to the early 1970s.

   Sources: Victory Seeds; Purdue Extension, HO-352-W

10. 1979 to 2023

    Atlantic Giant

    Howard Dill, a Nova Scotia farmer, patented Atlantic Giant seeds in 1979 and set a world record in 1980 with a 459-pound pumpkin. Almost all serious giant-pumpkin growers use his seeds. In 2023 Travis Gienger of Anoka, Minnesota, set a Guinness world record with one: 2,749 pounds (1,246.9 kg), weighed on October 9 at Half Moon Bay, California.

    Sources: Inside Science, AIP (2010); CBC News (2022); Guinness World Records (2023)

11. Why orange?

    Beta-carotene

    A pumpkin’s orange comes from beta-carotene, one of the carotenoids, the plant pigments that also color carrots. Most pumpkins turn orange as they ripen, though some ripen blue, tan or white. In 2005, USDA chemists described a faster lab method for measuring pumpkin carotenoids.

    Sources: University of Vermont Extension, “Pondering Pumpkin”; USDA Agricultural Research Service (2005)

12. 2022, Illinois

    The pumpkin state

    Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state: more than 634 million pounds in 2022, close to four times Indiana’s 161 million. Almost 80 percent of it is grown for processing, such as canning. Two of the largest pumpkin processing plants are there: Nestle Libby in Morton and Seneca Foods in Princeville.

    Sources: University of Illinois Extension; USDA Economic Research Service