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Old October 8, 2015   #15
nctomatoman
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Hendersonville, NC zone 7
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The first catalog listing I've found for Fejee Island is in an 1860 Thorburn catalog - as a "new" tomato. It is also listed in the 1860 Bliss - I didn't find it listed in the 1859 catalogs I've seen. By the early 1870s, it is often listed as a synonym for Lester's Perfected.

Descriptions are of a "large, solid crimson or pink or purple" tomato - after reading lots of catalogs, that means pink in our terminology today (clear skin over red flesh), and no mention of potato leaf foliage (Livingston's Potato Leaf and later, Henderson's Mikado, aka Burpee's Turner's Hybrid, from 1886 are the first of that type to be reported).

My suspicion is that Fejee Island is what possibly could have led to the well known large pink tomato Ponderosa (Henderson), later reselected and released as Winsall. Ferris Wheel, Buckeye State, other large regular leaf pinks started to emerge in the 1880s (whether they were renamings, slightly different reselections - we will never know).

I have some manuscripts of large scale comparative testing of all available named tomatoes carried out in the late 1800s, and even back then, there was serious doubt raised of the uniqueness of some of the varieties - and clearly, genetics wasn't fully understood in terms of how to best improve tomatoes (single fruit vs single plant selection) - meaning lots of variability. It isn't hard to understand why many of the varieties that emerged between 1860 and 1890 appear to be obsolete (at least under the original names).
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