Vancouver’s cotton and tobacco plants are all abloom, and the lime crop is ripening nicely.
Don’t look for a huge harvest, however. Those commodities represent agriculture as it was practiced here about 175 years ago. They’re growing at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.
As we noted Thursday, Fort Vancouver’s attractions include a garden just outside the reconstructed stockade. You can see rows of cotton and several varieties of tobacco plants.
The limes are inside the stockade, just below the front porch of the Chief Factor’s House, where Dr. John McLoughlin would have ruled the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Northwest fur empire in the 1830s.
Some are multi-colored: mostly green, with some yellow. According to online sources, limes turn yellow as they ripen; we pick them when they’re green.
The plants in the garden “all are things Dr. McLoughlin would have grown,” said Fort Vancouver volunteer Nancy Funk, site manager of the garden and the fort’s kitchen.
Corn, squash and melons, OK. … But cotton and tobacco? Elaine Dorset, a National Park Service archaeologist, can cite historic records that document their production here.
“They definitely grew cotton,” Dorset said. “They tried it, anyway.”
The home-grown tobacco was a useful commodity here, but not how you might think. It killed bugs.
“They used it in fur bales,” Dorset said. Dried tobacco leaves would be layered in bales of beaver pelts or packed with high-value furs to prevent insect damage.
“They also made sheep dip” from dried tobacco leaves, Dorset said.
Limes are squishy
When it comes to growing citrus, things get a little, well, squishy.
One source wrote that folks here grew citrus. Another respected source — Jason Lee or a missionary associate — said they didn’t. Contrary to what you might have heard, he wrote, they don’t grow citrus at Fort Vancouver.
But they did serve lemonade here, according to a clerk’s diary entry.
The fruit “could have come by ship from San Francisco,” Dorset said.
Since citrus grows here now, however, “I can see them trying it,” Dorset said.
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