When a Baptist Preacher Gave Thomas Jefferson a 1,200-Pound Gift
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a Founding Father, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the nation’s third president. He is also one of the most important historical figures when it comes to religious freedom in America.
In 1802, that commitment to religious liberty inspired one of the strangest thank-you gifts in presidential history. A Baptist preacher from Massachusetts organized his congregation to create a massive wheel of cheese and send it to the White House in Jefferson’s honor. The so-called “mammoth cheese” became one of the most unusual events in early American history. Historian Clay S. Jenkinson shares the story.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.4 | This is our American stories and up next. |
| 0:18.4 | Well, it's a story about our history. |
| 0:20.3 | Today, Robbie brings us the story |
| 0:22.4 | about a piece of history you've probably never heard before, and it comes from one of our |
| 0:27.2 | favorite contributors, Clay Jenkinson. |
| 0:33.2 | While the wise ruler, a priest, a four-foot block of cheese and a giant loaf of bread baked by the Navy may sound like the makings of a fairy tale. |
| 0:41.1 | It's actually a true story about our third president, Thomas Jefferson. |
| 0:45.0 | Here's Clay Jenkinson to tell us more about it. |
| 0:50.9 | Really, he regarded his election as the Second American Revolution, and he meant it, that we'd had a revolution in 1776, and then we'd created and installed a government. |
| 1:01.0 | But that government moved in the wrong direction towards monarchy and aristocracy and a strong central government, and we needed to restore the principles of 1776. |
| 1:13.3 | So he reluctantly stood for the presidency in 18001. |
| 1:17.4 | There was such anger against Jefferson in federalist circles. |
| 1:22.5 | People thought that he was a dangerous man. |
| 1:25.2 | He'd spent too much time in France. |
| 1:27.3 | He'd been infected by the radical principles |
| 1:30.3 | of the French Revolution, that he was unreliable and that he might destroy the country. |
| 1:35.3 | The great majority of the American people wanted a restoration of the more democratic principles of 1776. |
| 1:43.3 | One of the places where Jefferson was weak, principles of 1776. |
| 1:54.0 | One of the places where Jefferson was weak was in Massachusetts and Connecticut and New England, basically. And so in 1801, after his installation as president, a minister up in the Cheshire Hills decided that he would make a great tribute to Thomas Jefferson by way of creating the world's largest cheese. |
| 2:13.6 | And so the Reverend Leland decided that he would pay tribute to Jefferson by getting the people of his district to milk their cows and present all of that milk to create this cheese. And they did it. They claimed that they only milked Republican cows, never federalist cows, and most of this was collected in a single day. |
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