In the spring of 1977, President Jimmy Carter, the former peanut farmer who had just taken office, was offered a big gift — if you can call it that — from the misty Northern California coast.
A 9-ton redwood peanut.
The roughly 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 a protest by loggers angry and anxious about his administration’s plans to expand Redwood National Park along California’s northern coast and eliminate their jobs.
Alas, the Carter White House rejected the peanut.
It was trucked back to the Humboldt County hamlet of Orick, where, for nearly half a century, it stood unmarked in a gas station parking lot, its story fading into obscurity as the town struggled and shrank.
But in Humboldt County, the saga of the poor old peanut — which was obliterated in 2023 when a car slammed into it — has drawn renewed attention since Carter died last month at age 100.
A 9-ton peanut carved from a redwood tree sits outside the Shoreline Market in Orick, Calif., in 2018. The carving would be mostly destroyed after a vehicle slammed into it in 2023.
(Katie Buesch)
Two days after Carter’s death, the front page of the Times-Standard newspaper, just below his obituary, carried the headline: “Former president outlived the Orick ‘peanut.’”
At the Shoreline Fuel Mart, the longtime home of the languishing legume, an employee answered a phone call from a Times reporter this week with a sigh, saying: “Everybody keeps calling us about this.”
Carter, whose extended public farewell concludes Thursday with a funeral at the Washington National Cathedral, was posthumously praised by the National Park Service for his “pivotal role in the story of Redwood National Park,” which he nearly doubled in size in 1978 despite heavy opposition from the timber industry.
“This critical expansion included watersheds surrounding old-growth forests, ensuring they would be safeguarded for future generations to cherish,” Redwood National and State Parks officials said. “President Carter’s vision extended beyond the redwoods. His efforts remind us that leadership involves not only addressing the challenges of our time but also nurturing the earth for future generations.”
The creation — and Carter’s expansion — of Redwood National Park has long been a touchy subject along California’s rural, economically depressed North Coast, where the once-thriving logging industry cratered over the last half-century.
Virtually all coast redwoods, the world’s tallest trees, grow in a narrow, fog-laden strip stretching from Big Sur to southern Oregon. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation establishing Redwood National Park just outside Orick in 1968, more than 90% of the original redwoods had been chopped down.
In the decade after the park’s creation, logging continued just outside its boundaries. Water and sediment from clear-cut land flowed into the park, damaging the protected space.
In 1977, the Carter administration proposed adding 48,000 acres to the park, with the new protected land — much of it already logged — to be purchased by the government.
Lumber production and employment had already been declining, in part because most old-growth trees had been cut and because newly mechanized mills required fewer workers. But in Humboldt County, loggers railed against the proposed park expansion, which would lead to the elimination of at least 1,000 jobs.
They carved the protest peanut and strapped it to a logging truck alongside a sign reading: “It may be peanuts to you but it’s jobs to us.”
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)
That May, two dozen logging trucks — including one carrying the peanut — took off from Humboldt County, horns blasting, and headed toward Washington, D.C., where they were joined by around 400 demonstrators from the West Coast.
In a short film about the nine-day drive by Associated California Loggers, a timber industry advocacy group, one protester in a hard hat said: “This peanut weighs 9 tons. … We’d like the president to take it down and plant it in Plains, Ga., and then we’re gonna make a 50,000-acre park around his ranch.”
Asst. Secretary of the Interior Robert Herbst and White House staffer Scott Burnett met the trucks near the Washington Monument. They declined to accept the peanut, calling the carving an inappropriate use of ancient redwood.
Carter signed the park expansion bill the next year.
The population of Orick, home to more than 2,000 people in the 1960s at the peak of commercial logging operations, plummeted to what is now about 300 residents.
Outside the Shoreline Fuel Mart, the cracked and brittle peanut gathered moss and slowly rotted from the inside. Even in town, its story was largely forgotten.
“When areas change so much, with the logging industry going away or severely diminishing, there’s a lot of stuff that gets lost,” said Katie Buesch, a former director and curator at the Clarke Historical Museum in nearby Eureka. “The park got expanded, so all that history just kind of disappeared.”
While researching the park a few years ago, Buesch drove to Orick to visit the carving, which, she said, hardly resembled a peanut.
“My first impression was it kind of looked like a shoe,” she said. “When I saw it, it was definitely run-down.”
Late one night in June 2023, a hit-and-run driver smashed into the peanut. A California Highway Patrol incident log describes the collision with dispassionate abbreviation: “VEH VS REDWOOD STUMP.”
“It’s in a bunch of chunks and shreds,” the Shoreline Fuel Mart employee, who declined to give her name, told The Times this week. The nut’s remains are still there, she said, but someone “took a tractor and shoved it to the back of the property.”
A spokesman for the Yurok Tribe, which purchased the gas station in 2020 and is planning to build a new, bigger store, said the tribe hopes to create a smaller replica of the peanut so that it will not be forgotten.
Orick Chamber of Commerce President Donna Hufford, 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 over time, people move on. People pass away. It would have been nice to have it still as a remembrance of those times. And, who knows, maybe one day we’ll carve another one.”
