President Andrew Jackson’s Cheese Party

Today marks the 293rd anniversary of the birth of George Washington. It also marks another rather strange anniversary of a cheese party at the White House held by a later American President, Andrew Jackson, in 1837, as a commemoration for Washington’s birthday, and to celebrate the end of his own presidency. How exactly did a 1,400 cheese make its way to the White House and stand there for 2 years to mature before this part was held?

Portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, by Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl via Wikimedia Commons

It all started when in 1835, Colonel Thomas S. Meacham, who lived in a rural part of New York State, decided that after the Erie Canal opened in 1825, his local area could do with a bit of promoting. What better way to promote his area than to make a massive cheese that could travel to the White House as a gift to the President Andrew Jackson. The 1,400 cheese he had in mind for the President was also not the first large cheese had had made. He had made five other cheeses as gifts for various other high profile politicians, ranging from 700 and 850 pounds. A cheese for the President must be much bigger and better than the one Meacham had already made. President Jackson’s cheese would be 1,400 pounds, 4 feet in diameter and 2 feet tall. Talk about the big cheese!

Whilst the cheese given to President Jackson was weird enough, it was not the first giant cheese gifted to an American President. Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third President, had been gifted one back in November 1801. Jefferson’s cheese had been made by the Baptist congregation of Cheshire, Massachusetts, which weighed in at 1,235 pounds, and supposedly made from the milk 900 cows. The press for this so called ‘mammoth cheese’ still exists in the place it was made and looks just like an ordinary cheese press, but, of course, much bigger.

Photograph of the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese monument in Cheshire, MA, USA, Photograph by makeitalready (2012), Wikimedia Commons

Just as with Meacham’s later cheese, Jefferson’s did a tour on it’s way to the White House. It was taken by wagon from Massachusetts to the Hudson River, where it took a boat to New York, before moving on to Baltimore, and then eventually arrived, again by wagon, in Washington on 29th December 1801. After such a long journey, the party who had followed the cheese needed a rest and officially presented the cheese to Jefferson on New Year’s Day 1802. There was one issue; Jefferson famously didn’t accept gifts whilst in office. Instead, he paid $200, which is around $5900 today. It’s not sure exactly what happened to this cheese, but it reportedly still sat in the White House in March 1804.

Now… back to Andrew Jackson’s cheese from 1835. Just as the previous cheese had done a tour, so did this one. It also travelled a similar route via New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore before arriving at the White House on New Year’s Day 1836. Once it arrived there, it stayed in the White House’s entrance hall to mature. It was only on 22nd February 1837 that it was finally eaten. Andrew Jackson decided to use it for the celebrations of George Washington’s birthday, as well as to celebrate the end of his tenure as President.

When the cheese was finally eaten, an open invitation to the people of Washington was sent out. Anybody and everybody was welcome to help eat the giant cheese. That’s exactly what happened. According to the Fayetteville Observer newspaper from the time, “the crowd was immense”. It’s no wonder really when it took two hours to consume the whole cheese.

Image of the famous Jackson Cheese, as reported in Perley’s Reminiscences written by reporter Benjamin Perley Poore (1886)

People were supposedly fighting each other to get in and sample some of the cheese or take bits of it away in their pockets. The newspaper then goes on to say just how much of a talking point the cheese was for Washington in that “cheese, cheese, cheese, was on everybody’s lips and in everybody’s mouths. All you heard was cheese. All you saw was cheese. All you smell was cheese.”

In fact the smell and stain of cheese lasted much longer than the cheese itself did. Benjamin Perley Moore, who wrote a book on Washington reminiscences in 1886, reminded people about the unusual cheese party from fifty years before. He admitted that “the carpet was slippery with cheese” for some time afterwards. Even the White House Association on their website admit that the cheese left stains and smells for a long time. That probably would have meant having to clean carpets a lot and leaving windows open.

B. H. Latrobe, The White House (“President’s House”) Washington, D.C. South front elevation (1817), National Library of Congress,

So there you have it, the rather unusual story of large cheeses and some of the early American Presidents. What a sight it would have been to see the “crowd of men, women and boys, hack at the cheese”, no doubt trying to take as much of it home with them as they could. However, the smell and stains were not Andrew Jackson’s problem for too long as his presidency ended on the 4th March 1837. That issue would now be up to Martin Van Buren, who had also received one of the other large cheeses created by Colonel Meacham.

Bibliography:

Benjamin Perley Moore, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, Volume 1, (Michigan: A. W. Mills, 1886) Fayetteville Observer, 9 March 1837, https://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83045228/1837-03-09/ed-1/seq-1/ Noah Kaufman, ‘The Real Story of the Huge Chunk of Cheese That Sat in the White House for a Year’, Food and Wine, June 2017, https://www.foodandwine.com/news/real-story-huge-chunk-cheese-sat-white-house-year Snack Stack, ‘The snack that took over the White House’, https://snackstack.net/2022/01/06/the-snack-that-took-over-the-white-house/ The White House Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/painting-of-andrew-jacksons-cheese-gift Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, ‘Mammoth Cheese’, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/mammoth-cheese/