It’s not quite yet tomato season in Ohio, but there’s still a small variety at the Smith Farm Market in Columbus. Heirloom tomatoes of all sizes, with purplish and yellow hues, pile atop one another. A row of seed packets offer potential for even more variety.
“This is a variety called Black Crim, which is called that because the outside is a little bit purple,” said Ohio State University horticulture and food science associate professor Jessica Cooperstone, grabbing a seed packet from the rack.
Cooperstone picks up a perfectly plump beefsteak-style tomato. With its uniform red hue and nearly spherical shape, it's almost identical to its neighbors in the crate.
“It’s the kind of tomato that looks like what you might find on a cheeseburger,” Cooperstone said.
This beloved burger topping crop wasn’t always so picturesque. It was made to look this way, with the help of Alexander Livingston. The 19th century Ohio resident is credited with developing the first commercial tomato in Reynoldsburg, 10 miles northeast of Columbus.
Alexander Livingston’s legacy
In the mid-1800s, wild tomatoes were small, nearly hollow and outcasts of the horticulture world, said Mary Turner Stoots with the Reynoldsburg-Truro Historical Society. Many people believed the crops were poisonous, because even hogs wouldn’t eat them.
Livingston’s mother warned him away from the wild tomatoes, but they piqued his curiosity.
“This is a man that didn't finish school, but he was a genius when it came to genetics,” Turner Stoots said.
He decided to try to tame the scraggly tomatoes into a commercially viable product. He began experimenting to see if he could make a tomato that wasn’t so bitter and wouldn’t easily smush in packaging.
“You can't sell tomatoes if you can't ship them and you can ship them unless they're more uniform,” Turner Stoots said.
After 20 years of trial and error, in 1870, Livingston created the ‘Paragon Tomato’: juicy, meaty with thick skin, that made it ready to hit the road. It was just the start of his tomato varietal creations. He went from county fair to county fair, collecting seeds to experiment with.
By 1937, the Federal Department of Agriculture declared that "half of the major varieties were a result of the abilities of the Livingstons to evaluate and perpetuate superior material in the tomato."
He helped kickstart an entire industry that Ohioans – and people all over the world – still enjoy today, Turner Stoots said.
“He sold seeds for tomatoes and they were sold nationwide,” she said. “And I think [Ohioans] need to know that the ketchup they're eating might have been developed from a plant years ago that he started.”
Making the perfect tomato
Since then, tomato breeders and gardeners have developed more than 10,000 types of tomatoes, and people like David Francis are still tinkering around.
Francis runs Ohio State University’s TomatoLab in Wooster with a team of graduate students. They’re engineering ways to make these crops more disease resistant and flavorful.
“Our challenge is to grow a tomato that is harvested at peak ripeness and can still be transported to a facility where they're gonna take the peel off and can it, or grind it up and make a sauce out of it and have it taste good after it's gone through that whole process,” he said.
Francis’ team works closely with Hirzel Canning Company and Farms in northwest Ohio. The 100-year-old family business cans locally sourced tomatoes for products like soup, salsa and pasta sauce.
Steve Hirzel, fourth generation company head, said the state once had dozens of tomato canneries. Many have closed or moved to California, but he’s proud of what he said is a rich history of perfecting tomatoes in Ohio.
“It goes back to Livingston,” he said. “He had some of the first varieties that people started to enjoy.”
Celebrating the tomato
Ohio ranks third in the country in processing tomato products, thanks to companies like Hirzel.
The crop has grown into an important part of Ohio culture. Tomatoes are not only the state fruit, tomato juice is the (quite controversial) pick for state beverage. Reynoldsburg even throws a Tomato Festival. Turner Stoots said the city’s annual celebration features a vine-growing competition, tomato tossing and plenty of salsa.
“One guy has a ham radio and he straps his tomato vine to the antenna to see how tall he can get the tallest tomato,” Turner Stoots recalled.
To food scientist Cooperstone, tomatoes are more than just key players in BLTs and pizza sauce. She said the way agronomists and home-gardeners have developed their own tomato varieties over the years is a testament to the creativity that goes into even our most everyday foods.
Livingston planted the seed, and generations of Ohioans have been tending to it ever since.
“You could see here a legacy of Livingston and his tomatoes here in Ohio.”
