In the spring of 1977, a great gift – if you can call it that – was offered to President Jimmy Carter, the former peanut farmer who had just taken office, from the foggy coast of Northern California.
A 9 ton redwood peanut.
The rough-hewn goober had been strapped to the back of a logging truck, hauled across the country and parked near the White House. It was offered to Carter amid protests from loggers angry and concerned about his administration's plans to expand Redwood National Park along California's northern coast and eliminate their jobs.
Unfortunately, the Carter White House rejected the peanut.
It was trucked back to the hamlet of Orick in Humboldt County, where it sat unmarked in a gas station parking lot for nearly half a century, its history forgotten as the town struggled and declined.
But in Humboldt County, the saga of the poor old peanut — wiped out by a car crash in 2023 — has drawn renewed attention since Carter died last month at the age of 100.
A 9-ton peanut carved from a sequoia tree sits outside the Shoreline Market in Orick, California, in 2018. The carving was expected to be mostly destroyed after a vehicle crashed into it in 2023.
(Katie Buesch)
Two days after Carter's death, his obituary appeared on the front page of the Times-Standard newspaper the headline: “The former president survived Orick’s ‘Peanut’.”
At Shoreline Fuel Mart, the long-time home of the languishing legume, an employee answered a Times reporter's call this week with a sigh and said, “Everyone keeps calling us about this thing.”
Carter, whose extended public farewell ends Thursday with a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral, was posthumously praised by the National Park Service for his “pivotal role in the history of Redwood National Park,” which he nearly doubled in size in 1978 despite fierce opposition from the state Wood industry.
“This critical expansion included watersheds around old-growth forests to ensure they are preserved for future generations,” according to Redwood National and State park officials said. “President Carter's vision went beyond redwoods. His efforts remind us that leadership is not just about meeting the challenges of our time, but also caring for the earth for future generations.”
The creation – and Carter's expansion – of Redwood National Park has long been a thorny issue on California's rural, economically depressed North Coast, where the once-thriving timber industry has collapsed over the last half century.
Virtually all coast redwoods, the tallest trees in the world, grow in a narrow, fog-shrouded strip that stretches from Big Sur to southern Oregon. At this point, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the charter into law Redwood National Park Just outside Orick in 1968 contained more than 90% of the original sequoia trees choppy.
In the decade following the park's creation, logging continued just outside its boundaries. Water and sediment from clearcut areas flowed into the park and damaged the shelter.
In 1977, the Carter administration proposed expanding the park by 48,000 acres and purchasing the new preserve – much of which had already been deforested – from the government.
Lumber production and employment had already declined, in part because most of the old trees had been cut down and because newly mechanized mills required fewer workers. But in Humboldt County, loggers protested a planned park expansion that would result in the loss of at least 1,000 jobs.
They carved the protest peanut and attached it to a logging truck next to a sign that read: “Maybe it's peanuts to you, but to us it's jobs.”
Redwood National Park was expanded by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 despite opposition from the logging industry.
(C. Dani I. Jeske/De Agostini via Getty Images)
In May of this year, two dozen logging trucks – including one carrying peanuts – set off from Humboldt County, honking loudly, toward Washington, DC, where they were joined by around 400 protesters from the West Coast.
In a short film Of the nine-day operation by Associated California Loggers, a logging industry advocacy group, one protester wearing a hard hat said: “This peanut weighs 9 tons. … We want the president to tear it down and plant it in Plains, Georgia, and then we will create a 50,000-acre park around his ranch.”
Asst. Interior Secretary Robert Herbst and White House staffer Scott Burnett met the trucks near the Washington Monument. They refused to accept the peanut, calling the carving an inappropriate use of old redwood wood.
Fuhrmann signed the park expansion bill next year.
The population of Orick, which was home to more than 2,000 people in the 1960s at the height of commercial logging, has fallen to about 300 today.
In front of the Shoreline Fuel Mart, the cracked and brittle peanut was forming moss and slowly rotting from the inside. Even in the city, his story was largely forgotten.
“When areas change so much, when the timber industry disappears or declines sharply, a lot of things are lost,” said Katie Buesch, a former director and curator of the Clarke Historical Museum in nearby Eureka. “The park expanded, so all that history kind of disappeared.”
When Buesch was exploring the park a few years ago, she drove to Orick to see the carving, which she said barely resembled a peanut.
“My first impression was that it kind of looked like a shoe,” she said. “When I saw it, it was definitely run down.”
Late one evening in June 2023, a hit-and-run driver crashed into Peanut. A California Highway Patrol incident log describes the collision with the matter-of-fact acronym: “VEH VS REDWOOD STUMP.”
“It's in a lot of chunks and pieces,” the Shoreline Fuel Mart employee, who declined to give her name, told the Times this week. The remains of the nut were still there, she said, but someone “took a tractor and pushed it to the back of the property.”
A spokesman for the Yurok Tribe, which purchased the gas station in 2020 and plans to build one new, bigger store, said the tribe hopes to create a smaller replica of the peanut so it isn't forgotten.
Donna Hufford, president of the Orick Chamber of Commerce, whose family has lived in Orick for generations, said most of the loggers who took part in the protest have moved away or died.
She said of the peanut: “It was an icon for us, but as time goes on, people move on. People die. It would have been nice to still have it as a reminder of those times. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll carve another one.”