THE SWEET CORN STORY 
My daughter, Alice, just like your daughters, and also just like 
your sons, has in her ancestral line, four maternal great, great 
grandfathers. One of these, Cephas Atkinson by name, came to Ohio 
in 1812 before the Indians had entirely left the state of Ohio. Please 
remember this reference to the Indians, for the Indians of 1812 
were real flesh and blood Indians whose squaws helped them plant 
and harvest corn and who used it as a standard article of food. 
This great, great grandfather became a large landholder, and in 
the 1830’s, 40’s and 50’s, before the railroads were built, he engaged 
in the business of buying livestock from the farmers, and driving 
his purchases on the hoof, over the mountains to Philadelphia and 
other Eastern cities. 
Sometime before 1850, (none of his descendants know of either 
the time or place), he came into possession of a white sweet corn, 
which seldom ripens in the garden or field. It is believed that the 
excessive amount of sugar in it, causes it to ferment and quickly 
decay during the fall rains, when the moisture penetrates the ex¬ 
panding husks and comes in contact with the unripe corn. 
As the men gathered their seed corn in the fall, the women in 
the family found that if they would preserve this corn, which 
everybody liked so much, they could not wait for the men to har¬ 
vest it, so they adopted the custom of gathering each year, the few 
ears necessary for seed while it was still green, and then ripened it 
in the house. 
Cephas’ son, John, married Nancy Phillips in 1850, and she told 
me before her death, that during every one of the thirty-five years 
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