History and Origin of Potatoes

Potatoes have been cultivated for food for more than 2,000 years.

In South America

• Peru's Inca Indians, it is believed, had cultivated potatoes by 3000 B.C. The Incas had many uses for potatoes, which ranged in size from a small nut to an apple and in color from red and gold to blue and black. They placed raw potato slices on broken bones, carried them to prevent rheumatism and ate them with other foods to prevent indigestion. The Incas also used potatoes to measure time by correlating units of time with how long it took potatoes to grow.
• The Spanish conquistadores discovered the potato in 1537 and took potatoes with them on their return trip to Europe.

In Europe

• Potatoes were thought to be poisonous or evil, were believed to cause leprosy and syphilis and were even regarded as a dangerous aphrodisiac.
• Several prominent Europeans helped popularize the potato.
  • Germany's King Frederick William ordered peasants to plant and eat potatoes - or have their noses sliced off!
  • A Frenchman named Antoine Parmentier was an apprentice pharmacist-turned-soldier during the Seven Years War between France and Germany during the mid- 1700s. As a German prisoner of war, he was forced to subsist on potatoes. In later years, he reportedly introduced potato soup and other potato dishes to King Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette and Benjamin Franklin as well as the general population.
  • England's Sir Walter Raleigh was given land in Ireland by Queen Elizabeth I to grow potatoes and tobacco. According to one story, Raleigh presented potatoes to the Queen but a bewildered cook served the leaves and threw away the tubers.

In North America

• The first potatoes arrived in North America in 1621.
• Captain Nathanial Butler, then governor of Bermuda, sent two large cedar chests containing potatoes and other vegetables to Francis Wyatt, governor of Virginia at Jamestown.
• The first permanent North American potato patches were established in New England around 1719, most likely near Londonderry (now Derry), New Hampshire, by Scotch-Irish immigrants.
  
  Text & Statistics Courtesy of OreIda

In Idaho

Henry Spaulding planted the first potatoes in Idaho. His first potato crop was planted near Lapwai, Idaho in 1837.

• Potatoes were first introduced into Idaho not by a farmer but by a Presbyterian missionary named Henry Harmon Spalding. He established a mission in 1836 at Lapwai, in the state's northern panhandle, to bring Christianity to the Nez Perce Indians. He wanted to show the Nez Perce how to provide food for themselves through agriculture rather than hunting and gathering.
• The Indians were probably the ones who made the first commercial sale of Idahogrown potatoes when they traded fresh potatoes for clothing and other goods to settlers traveling west in the wagon trains.

• Even though Spalding's and the Nez Perce Indians' potato crop was eventually successful, potatoes are no longer farmed in the Lapwai area.