“Porcupine” squash plants believed by some to be descended from seeds preserved for centuries in an ancient jar that was unearthed by a farmer in Utah are thriving in a local greenhouse. While some experts doubt the seeds’ origins, skeptics and believers alike say the story highlights the fundamental connection that cultures past and present share.

Bart Henderson last year gave the Sunshine Gardeners, a local gardening group who share growing space, a bag of seeds he’d received from his brother, Syd Henderson. Those seeds were harvested from a squash Syd’s wife, Helen’s, family has been growing since the mid-1960s after her grandfather unintentionally excavated the seeds with his plow in an area of Utah called the Uintah Basin.

“He was plowing next to one of the cornfields one year, extending it out a little bit, and when he came back with the tractor, he could see fragments of one of the old black and gray Fremont pots,” Helen Henderson said during a visit to Haines to positively identify the squash. “He stopped and picked up the pieces of the pot. Later in the year he was out checking on the corn and weeding and there was a little squash plant with big flowers on it,”

The Fremont peoples lived in areas around Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Idaho from around 500 B.C. to around 1,300 A.D. and tribes such as the Hopi and Ute claim to be descendants, according to archaeologists.

Helen said her family thought someone dropped squash seeds in the dirt, or that it was a hybrid variety. Two squash plants grew and when porcupines snacked on one of the plants, Helen’s grandfather brought the other one home.

“They threw it in the microwave and cooked it up. (It was the) best stuff ever. He collected every seed he could get his hands on,” Helen said of her grandfather, Gordon Hansen. “Mother took a squash out to Utah State, which is a national seed depository and they do DNA testing. They tested this thing to see if it was a hybrid of something and they said ‘We have never seen anything like this before. This is either really new or really old.'”

Helen said since the 1960s her family has grown as many as 60 acres of the plant, all descended from that one squash plant they cooked in the microwave and smothered in brown sugar and butter.

Utah State University archivists were unable to locate records of the seed or its genetic analysis, but USU archaeologist Judson Finley said he doesn’t doubt the story’s veracity. He’s been conducting research on Fremont agriculture in the Uintah Basin and recently came across a collection excavated in the 1920s that includes preserved squash from the Fremont culture.

“A story of somebody plowing a field and hitting a jar is not surprising to me,” Finley said. “It’s amazing. This is kind of the nature of how things go down out there. (The Fremont peoples) lived in pit houses. (The farmer) probably plowed through a pit house and the jar was probably in a storage pit in the pit house. It’s really dry in this part of Utah so you get that remarkable preservation.”

Finley said the region the Hendersons live in is the northern limit of maize agriculture that diffused from the American Southwest around 300 A.D. Beans and squash arrived in the area around 500 A.D.

“The Uintah Basin is a pretty cool and arid region that required specific plant varieties that could tolerate shorter growing seasons and drier temperatures,” Finley said. “We are interested in the genetic traits that allowed for this to happen, particularly with the Fremont (squash).”

New Mexico’s Silver City Museum curator and archaeologist Joseph Bryce said although he’s never heard a story similar to the Henderson’s account, it’s common to find Fremont sites sealed underneath modern towns in the region. “Just about every town has an ancient town underneath. The European settlers were looking for the exact same thing just hundreds of years later: good farmland and access to water. It’s an overlap of cultures.”

In June 2016, archaeologists discovered the seeds of a squash thought to be extinct in an 800-year-old pot in Wisconsin’s First Nation’s Menominee Reservation. Scientists later grew the seeds and various universities and organizations are working to proliferate the ancient vegetable, according to news accounts. Even that story has its critics, Finley said, who believe the seeds were passed down through the generations.

Finley spoke to a seed geneticist who was skeptical that a seed could remain viable for so many centuries. “But we know of teams who have germinated and grown Fremont corn in northern Utah so I don’t think it is out of the question as strange as it may seem,” Finley said.

Joseph Lofthouse is a Utah gardener who specializes in genetically diverse crops that have adapted to unique climates and ecosystems. A regular contributor to Mother Earth News, Lofthouse said he’s heard similar stories about dozens of plant species, but that the varieties are not visibly different than those “which have been grown since time immemorial.”

“In general, when genetic analysis is done on plant varieties, it turns out that most of the provenance stories are not literally true. I don’t know if that matters,” Lofthouse said. “Stories about hobbits, and light-sabers are likewise not objectively true, but they teach us valuable lessons about the world we live in, and how we might better interact with it.”

Helen said while visiting the Denver Museum of Nature and Science she saw a fossilized squash in a reconstructed Fremont pit dwelling. She told the museum staff about her family’s squash. “We asked about them and they said, ‘Oh those are extinct,'” Helen said.

Fremont jars are clay pots used primarily for cooking and storage, and are the most common vessels excavated by archaeologists, Bryce said.

“Squash rinds and seeds have been found at cave sites and charred seeds have been found at archaeological sites,” Bryce said. “I have been able to find several instances of when archaeologists found preserved squash seeds, but normally in poor condition. They are not often specifically identified, but some seeds have been tentatively identified as Curcurbita pepo or Curcurbita mixtla.”

Helen Henderson’s family calls their plants the “Porcupine Squash” after the animal that ate one of the two that originally grew in her grandfather’s corn field. She has preserved the seeds in her own way; she sends them to friends and family.

Two weeks ago, during a tour of Alaska, Helen and Syd visited Haines and verified that the plant grown by the Sunshine Gardeners is indeed their porcupine squash.

“I really appreciate your generosity,” gardener Laurie Mastrella told Helen during the visit. “There’s another philosophy, which is to copyright and own it and you’ve gone the other way.”

Helen said they purposefully didn’t copyright the seed. “We believe in spreading knowledge and seed varieties as far as they go,” Helen said.

The squash’s skin is grayish green. The meat is a deep orange, reminiscent of a butternut squash. It has vines that can grow to 20 to 30 feet in length. Helen said she once had a squash grow up and over her neighbor’s fence. She said it tastes best slathered in butter and brown sugar and cooked in a microwave. Her family has sent the squash seeds to Florida, Iowa, Alabama, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Africa.

Finley said he’d love to be added to that list. “I would kill to grow some Fremont squash,” Finley said Monday morning, who just started gardening this year.

Shortly after his interview with the CVN, his wish came true. Finley learned he lives about three blocks from Helen and Syd Henderson. He visited their home Monday afternoon where he saw the plants. He said they look similar to a pumpkin the Fremont peoples used to store seeds. The ancient desert dwellers hollowed out dried pumpkins to store corn seeds, an essential agricultural practice necessary for survival.

“In the past, just like today, seed saving was a critical practice, and as we learned from Helen and Syd yesterday, it is wise to spread seeds among people far and wide to insure preservation of the genetic line.”

Finley has two bags of seeds on his kitchen counter. He said although the seed geneticist he spoke to “thinks me hoodwinked,” he plans to reach out to other archaeologists and geneticists to learn more about the squash seeds.

Meanwhile, Mastrella and the Sunshine Gardeners are carefully tending their squash plants. She said it’s notable that a plant adapted to survive in a warm, dry climate is thriving in Haines, and that recent weather patterns are causing local gardeners to take a second look at how they grow food.

Finley said on a fundamental level, it doesn’t matter whether the Henderson’s seeds are Fremont stock or not. “The seed saving and sharing they practice…is having an impact in (the) Chilkat Valley. This is part of what my research team refers to as ‘Climate Smart Food Systems’-a concept coined in a recent United Nations paper on sustainable agricultural practices. If Alaska, and everywhere else, continues to warm like it has we may need this kind of diverse, community-based sustainability to succeed in the future.”

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