MeMoMu_PSW_053 CHERRY TREE STORY _ GRANT WOOD 1939 / MANUEL MEHAU 2026

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☞We Cannot Tell a Lie! -- Not Even About Cherry Pie!
☞Buttermilk Junction wishes all of our Facebook fans a Happy National Cherry Pie Day!
☞National Cherry Pie Day is an unofficial food-recognition holiday of obscure origin that is celebrated annually on February 20.
☞Cherry pie has been popular in America since British Colonial times, & it is a contender along with apple pie for the title of the quintessential “Great American Dish.” Prior to the advent of mechanical refrigeration, cherry pie was most commonly eaten around Mid-Summer, as the cherry harvest in North America coincides with U.S. Independence Day on the Fourth of July.
☞The date of National Cherry Pie Day, occurring very near President George Washington’s birthday, may stem from the association of cherries with America’s first president, which itself stems from the “George Washington & the Cherry Tree” anecdote, first appearing in an apocryphal story by noted American author & book agent Mason Locke “Parson” Weems (1759-1825).
☞Cherry pie figures prominently in the traditional American Folk song “Billy Boy,” a humorous courtship song which is believed by some musicologists to be related to the old British-Isles murder ballad “Lord Randall” -- a traditional Folk song that relates the story of a suitor who is poisoned by the woman whom he visits.
☞Excerpt from the “Billy Boy” song:
Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?
Yes, she can bake a cherry pie,
Quick as a cat can wink her eye.
She’s a young thing & cannot leave her mother.
☞The photograph depicts a souvenir-postcard view of the famous 1939 oil-on-canvas painting entitled “Parson Weems’s Fable” by famous American Regionalist artist Grant DeVolson Wood (1891-1942.) Grant Wood’s famous satiric painting, depicting both Parson Weems & his “Cherry Tree Story,” is now in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art at Fort Worth, Texas. Kuva vähem
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MOUNT VERNON :
Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, was an American author who wrote several biographies of historical figures, the most famous of which was his 1800 biography of George Washington, The Life of Washington. Written a year after Washington's death, Weems's biography served as the point of origin for many long-held myths about Washington, in particular the famous cherry tree myth.
In that vignette, a six year-old Washington, overly enthusiastic in the use of his new hatchet, cuts up his father's prized young cherry tree. When his father demands to know what happened to his tree, young George, "looking at his father with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth," admits that it was his fault. His father is overjoyed with George's expression of virtuous honesty, and all is forgiven.1 Weems is also considered the originator of the story of Washington praying at Valley Forge, as well as many other lesser-known mythological anecdotes that became part of Americans' fundamental understanding of Washington.
Weems's books recieved some criticism at the time. One reviewer characterized the first edition as "eighty pages of as entertaining and edifying matter as can be found in the annals of fanaticism and absurdity."2 Despite such critiques, Weems's approach proved very popular; his books became bestsellers and are largely responsible for the creation of the image of Washington most widely known today. Weems stands at the forefront of Washington’s long, steady transformation into an American icon, and studying his work and its reception reveals a great deal about the American public and its relationship with its national heroes.
Katie Uva The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Notes:
1. Mason Locke Weems, The Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself, and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Company, 1858), 16.
2. Quoted in Scott E. Casper, American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 69.
Bibliography:
Lawrence Counselman Wroth. Parson Weems: A Biographical and Critical Study. Eichelberger Book Company, 1911.

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