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THE HISTORY OF THE DATE
How Dates Came To America Part IV
The
first date palm trees were brought to American by the Spanish. The Spanish had long been cultivating
dates in their homeland before exploring the Americas. The Spanish where introduced to dates
by the Phoenicians at around the time that the Iberia Peninsula was a
part of the Roman Empire about two thousand years ago. The date palm trees were not intended
to be used as a food source, but rather as part of a barrier against
flooding by high tides.
Essentially it was living barrier that could withstand the high
tides and the salinity in the soil.
The fruit from these date palms was a secondary gain. When the Moors conquered Spain date palm cultivation became more
widespread throughout Spain. The province
of Alicante became the date palm
cultivation capital of Spain
and to date still has close to a million date palms.
The
first attempt to start a date farm in the new world by the Spanish was in
Cuba
about 1513 by Panfilo de Narvaez.
The attempt to cultivate the date palm tree failed, because he was
quickly killed by hostile Indians.
Rodrigo de Tamayo then continued the work in Cuba and
founded a settlement called Datil (date).
He established date and tobacco plantations at Datil. The climate was very ideal for tobacco,
but not for quality dates. When Hernando de Cortez invaded Mexico
both the date palm and tobacco were introduced as well. In addition to the date he also
introduced the eucalyptus tree and yuca plants. The date was successful in Mexico
because it has many arid desert areas which is the ideal climate for date
palm cultivation. It never grew
into large scale production and to date its impact is minor. From Spain the Spanish moved north
and established missions where the date palm was brought along. California
had climate that was ideal for the date palm, but it does not seem that
the date palm was planted for food and there is no evidence that the
Spanish attempted to establish date groves. The oldest of these date palm trees
lasted about 200 years in San
Diego, California.
There
was a lot of interest in growing date trees in the United States
about 100 years after it became a nation, but all attempts failed and all
efforts to cultivate dates commercially had been abandoned by 1830. Around the time that California
became a state some seeds had made their way to the interior of California and the
date palms had began to produce fruit.
The interest in date cultivation was revived as soon as the fruit
bearing trees were discovered in the interior of California. The first recorded harvest in the West
was 1877 in the Sacramento Valley of California. Soon after there were successful date
harvests in Arizona and other parts of California.
At
about 1900 there was an importation of Deglet Noor date offshoots from Algeria
that were take to a research center in Tempe, Arizona. There were about 400 offshoots that
were planted. The earliest private
date offshoot importation was made by Bernard G. Johnson. Johnson went to Algeria and brought back about 129
offshoots mostly of the Deglet Noor date palm and he planted it in a
parcel of land in Mecca,
California. His date offshoots did very well and
today the Coachella Valley is the date capital of the United States. The City of Indio
holds an annual date festival and is often associated with the large
scale date production, but the majority of dates actually come from
incorporated areas of the Coachella
Valley. In 1912 Johnson took another trip to Algeria
and came back with 3,000 Deglet Noor date offshoots, this was the largest
importation of shoots ever. He
attempted to sell the palms in California,
but was unsuccessful and instead planted them on land he owned in Yuma, Arizona.
In 1913 soon after Johnson’s importation large-scale importations
by private companies caught on and continued establishing the date
capital of America in
the Coachella
Valley. At the time the importation of date
offshoots required extensive dangerous primitive travel on horseback,
mules, and camels. There was also
added risk of carrying large sums of money for the purchase of the date
palms. Adding to this risks Arabs
often cheated American buyers by selling them only male offshoots or
manipulating seed grown date palms to look like offshoots.
The
largest importation project was planned by a company called the West
India Gardens out of Altadena, California with a another office in
Thermal, California in the Coachella Valley. Adjacent to the West India Gardens
Company parcel of land was the land
of Henry Simon
where he had drilled a large well in 1912 that was capable of supplying
irrigation water for the date palm tree groves. The parcels were by the Mecca Hills
area between Mecca
and Thermal. Simon and the West
India Gardens Company were pooling their resources to undertake a massive
15,000 date palm tree planting.
Paul Popenoe was planning to travel to Iraq,
but Henry Simon was to make the trip to purchase the Deglet Noor date
offshoots and a few small lots of other varieties of offshoots from Algeria and Tunisia. Simon was knowledgeable about offshoots
and spoke French and Arabic. His
trip was five months long and he kept a diary and took photographs which
were preserved.
As
soon as he arrived in Algeria
he sought out and found an assistant by the name of Abderahman Ben Ali
Ben Haouffef, but Simon just referred to him as Ben. At the time Algeria was a french colony
and the French government granted Simon a permit to buy 3,000
offshoots. During his stay he
invested time learning how to cultivate the date. As part of the deal making coffee was
important to the culture and he was required to consume much of it for
the first purchase of 2,000 date offshoots, he consumed so much coffee
that he became very ill afterwards.
In
Tunisia Simon was invited to the home of M. Jean Martel the wealthiest
and most influential colonist. The
house and gardens were described as spectacular and was clearly the
material from which movies are made from. As a result of the meeting he was
introduced to many officials which made his requests to permits for
additional date tree purchases all that much easier.
After
arranging for many purchases of date offshoots and coordinating many
deliveries to a central location in Biskra,
Algeria,
the shipment was made. He shipped
out 6,000 date palm offshoots to New
York.
Simon then went to New
York where he personally received the off
shoots which were then transported to Thermal California at the opposite
side of the country. After the
date offshoots arrived in Thermal, California
they were disinfected with a creosol bath. Thermal at the time was the only place
where date palm trees were permitted to be unloaded from a train. The
total number of date palm trees was 14,000 and almost all of them
survived. The new date palms did
well and were soon the stock that was sold to many growers in the Coachella Valley. Soon after other companies began
sending their own representatives to the Middle East and North Africa to purchase offshoots for their own
farms.
Around
1922 the end of large commercial importation of dates ended and only
small lots of different varieties of dates were imported by the
USDA. Many of the original
companies were dissolved or sold and many of the date groves fell into
neglect, but there were thousands of date palm trees and the Coachella Valley
became the center of date production in the United States.
The Coachella Valley has been very conducive to
the cultivation of dates primarily because its soil conditions and
climate resemble the North African Sahara Desert. The Coachella
Valley also has substantial
underground water and water from the Colorado River that is transported
via the All
American Canal. The primarily date palm orchards
remain the Deglet Noor, but the Medjool Date is considered the King of
Dates and it is substantially sweeter and bigger. The number of date farms in the
Coachella Valley has declined substantially since 1980 when there were an
estimated 220,000 date palm trees in the Coachella Valley, this occurred
primarily to make way for Country Clubs and Golf courses and housing
projects.
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