Andrew Jackson's Enormous Presidential Cheese
Oh man, every President's Day I think of Kate Beaton's hilarious historical comics, and forget to post them to the blog. Well, this time, I remembered.
The background: the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was a wheel weighing about three-quarters of a ton (and containing no Federalist milk!) given to Thomas Jefferson by the residents of Cheshire MA in 1802.
More than thirty years later, the supporters of the populist Andrew Jackson, believing that "every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid him." created a similarly massive cheese:
Click here for more Jacksonian hijinx. Beware of salty language!
Well, if the cheese wheel
Well, if the cheese wheel story is true I can certainly believe that Andrew Jackson would have done the exact thing that this depicts. Thank you for this interesting little tidbit.
There is so much that we don't know about our past presidents and the negative things they did and sometimes when we find out we wonder if it is really true or if it is just a joke.
The cheese wheel story is
The cheese wheel story is most definitely true! It was a gift to Jackson, but not, as the comic implies, one that he actually wanted. Getting rid of the cheese took years. It was eventually disposed of at a celebratory open house Jackson threw near the end of his second term:
The thousands of supporters and curiosity-seekers who filed through the White House finally demolished the wheel, but the smell of the unrefrigerated block apparently lingered well into successor Martin Van Buren's term.
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