... When it comes to beans…the most commonly seen is the Trail of Tears. This is a prolific drought tolerant highly productive bean producing decent quality green beans (when small) and high quality slim shiny black dry beans. Another good but much lesser known bean is Price’s Cherokee. This bean has been traced back to the 1830’s, came over the Trail of Tears and later the family then moved to California (1920’s) where it was later collected by the U.C. Davis Seed Saving Project of the 1980’s. This is a nice cream colored dry bean of good production. A very good green bean is the Cherokee Greasy Bean, highly productive, has a white dry seed and is still grown in western North Carolina. A good dry bean of larger size is the October Bush Bean, a nice cream bean with purple flecking, great for shelly beans of dry beans. There are many good eastern Tennessee and Kentucky Cherokee heirlooms. Cherokee Cornfield is a good example, a beautiful mixture of seed types that has been traditionally grown together for hundreds of years. Then there is the Cherokee Butterbean, actually a true Runner bean (P. coccineus)...

Most of these items are very rare today, mostly still grown by isolated families or being preserved by seed savers.

Raises more questions than it answers for some I guess.

Blueflint