Tunis history
by Sonja Pyne
First Tunis ram in Arizona (1909).
Tunis sheep are a uniquely American breed developed as a result of 250 years of cross-breeding imported Barbary fat-tailed, broad-tailed, or broad -rumped sheep with locally available breeds to accentuate desired qualities. The early records of these efforts use the terms Tunis, Barbary, fat-tailed, broad-tailed, and even Persian or Russian sheep interchangeably. While interested parties have attempted to specify early breeds and genes, the earliest imported lineages are unclear, and any number of several Near Eastern sheep breeds may have been part of the make-up of what would become Tunis sheep, an American version of a very old breed.
Perhaps the earliest images of fat-tailed or broad-rumped sheep appear on a wall in Steenbokfontein Cave on the western Cape of Africa, their name rumbles through the Old Testament where a lamb, including its fat tail or rump, is a sacrifice required of Aaron’s sons as a peace offering to Yahweh; and images of these sheep decorate maps of Africa as early as the 16th century.[1] As the New World was settled, some of the large properties offered space to include exotic breeds of animals, and it wasn’t long until a few of these sheep were imported as curiosities, or as a kind of living trophy by wealthy landowners.
About the time of the Revolutionary War, at least one fat-tailed or Barbary ewe had been brought to the Colonies by unknown means and was owned by Henry Laurens, a well-to-do merchant of Carolina. John Adams was visiting Paris in 1782 as Minister Plenipotentiary for the fledgling United States, and the official diary for December 6 records his conversation with Laurens (who had been President of the Continental Congress) where he noted that “as Mr. Curson talked of going to Marseilles, Mr. Laurens advised him to send to America some Barbary sheep. He says he had one in Carolina, but never could make the American rams go to that sheep.”[2] On his Carolina Mepkin Plantation, Laurens had collected a number of desert plants and animals – hence his interest in the arid-lands Barbary sheep. If Mr. Curson acted on Laurens’ advice, there is no record of the fact. Tantalizingly, however, a ten-dollar reward “and reasonable charges” is offered in a 1797 New York newspaper advertisement for “twenty eight sheep of the fat tailed breed, otherwise called the Barbary sheep” that have strayed from the pasture of the heirs of Charles Ward Apthorp, Esq.[3] Apthorp had built for himself one of the grandest pre-Revolutionary War houses on the island of Manhattan (at various times the house served as headquarters to both British and Continental armies) and at his death owned 200 acres of land in the vicinity. Maps appear to indicate that his sheep pastures were in an area now claimed as part of Central Park.[4]
It is also reported that George Washington used a fat-tailed or broad-rumped ram in his efforts to “more than double” the wool production at Mt. Vernon. Pleased with the ram’s contribution to the quality of his flocks, in 1797 Washington obtained “another Persian [in this case meaning Barbary] ram and ewe.[5]” Although the flocks were dispersed after his death in 1799, grandson Washington Park Custis continued to cross this “Persian” ram on Bakewell-Liecester ewes producing excellent wool and mutton. In the South this cross became known as the Arlington.[6]
“Whoever acts like a sheep, the wolf will eat.”
–Barbary maxim
Sent to Tunis in 1797 as the U.S. Consul, General William Eaton was responsible for the delicate and on-going negotiations for a treaty designed to bring to an end piracy along the Barbary Coast of north Africa. On March 26, 1799, seemingly final alterations in official documents (including demands for diamond-encrusted watches and “military regalia”) were approved by Hamouda, Bey of Tunis, and sent on to Eaton as the official representative of the US government. In addition to codifying the demands of the US, Eaton included in the final give-and-take what was perhaps an act of diplomatic subtlety enforcing with the old wolf that a new wolf was now on the scene when “at his [Eaton’s] request and out of compliment to the United States, [Hamouda] permitted to be taken from his farm in the interior of the country a number of broad-tailed Barbary or Mountain Tunis sheep for shipment to the United States.”[7] Responsible for a cargo which included the signed treaty and “eight or ten” Barbary sheep, Captain Henry Geddes loaded the brig Sophia on May 3, 1799 and sailed for home. The sheep didn’t travel well and only two, a ram named Garamelli and a ewe named Selima, survived the voyage. Philadelphia, the capital of the US less than a decade before, still catered to official ships and business and it was there that the Sophia docked and there that the surviving sheep were presented to Secretary-of-State Timothy Pickering, a man who had little experience as a farmer until after his retirement from life in public office. Pickering promptly turned the ewe and the ram over to Judge Richard Peters who took them to Belmont, his family estate outside the city.
Peters considered the sheep “burdensome, but not regretted” and gave full and free use of the rams to anyone who cared to bring ewes to his pastures. For twenty years he built up and freely dispersed flocks of Tunis sheep – pure-bred and cross-bred – locally and as far away as the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. Peters teamed with a neighbor Thomas Bones and acquired some excellent sheep of their own from the original ram, and then Garamelli was sent as a gift to Peters’ friend General Edward Hand for “his own use and that of the farmers of Lancaster County.” The staid German farmers of the area were extremely suspicious of the different looking ram and considered him to be “an unnatural connection” for their more familiar looking ewes. Notwithstanding the clamoring of the “victualers of Philadelphia” who had discovered the superiority of Tunis mutton “over that of all other sheep,” General Hand was obliged to purchase 30 or 40 of the Tunis off-spring to set an example of their marketability.[8] Garamelli and Selima were each killed by dogs – Selima after “weaning a lamb at [age] 16.”[9]
While these early sheep likely wouldn’t be recognized as Tunis today, many of the traits they exhibited remain ones showcased by the breed, and with the gradual addition of traits from other breeds a uniquely American breed was established. The sheep attracted a strong following throughout South, and men such as Thomas Jefferson and Commodore James Barron of Chesapeake Bay fame dabbled with improving their flocks through the addition of Tunis animals. Sheep brought by Barron ended up in Virginia and the District of Columbia; Jefferson received his when navel hero Commodore John Rogers returned from Tripoli with “some Barbary Broad-tailed rams and ewes” in the hold of his ship. Jefferson became quite enamored of his and wrote that raising the breed “pure” was a “favorite object,” and especially valued the Tunis for their meat, “the most delicious I have ever tasted.” His sheep grazed the lawns of both the White House and his Monticello plantation. Unfortunately, two of Jefferson’s Tunis rams were killed by a Shetland ram – “[an] abominable animal,” he raged.[10]
Another of Rogers’ rams ended up at Brookland Woods Farm, nine miles from Baltimore, Maryland where by 1835 there was a small Tunis flock, a cross between Leicester sheep and the Barbary. By then the original ram had died, of course, but “his brown-legged and brown-faced sons and daughters remained; they are hardy and thrifty animals, bear a fruitful fleece, and yield for the shambles a carcass at once sweet, juicy, and savory.”[11]
Random notes about crosses with these early proto-Tunis document some of the evolution of the new breed. In the spring of 1809 “Dr. Kent of Prince George County, Maryland sheared 11 pounds of fine wool” (when the accepted standard was five pounds or less) from a yearling cross of “a common sheep and a half-blood Tunis ram.”[12]Virginia, too, was proving fertile ground for acceptance of the new breed. Here in 1810, John Taylor of Richmond offered for sale “a beautiful flock of rain lambs from the Barbary he had mixed with “the finest Virginia ewes,” and William Fontaine of Hanover offered for sale from his flock of 300 “of the Barbary breed” yearling rams for $10, ram lambs at $8, and “second choice rams” and ewes at $5.” He explained that the sheep were of his own breeding from a pair presented by General Eaton and “a ram of Commodore Barron’s importation.”[13] Cross-breeding strides were also being made in the North where “the [Barbary] Ram now at E. Hersy Derby’s and at the disposal of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society will be delivered to any gentleman who is desirous to obtain a cross from this breed, free of cost, and upon sole condition of good treatment of the animal, and to be kept within the State.”[14]
By 1822, Judge Peters’ own Tunis flock had “somewhat deteriorated” but at that year’s Pennsylvania Cattle Show, John H. Powell exhibited 21 Tunis sheep which, although he had crossed with mixed Leicester and Southdown stock, “retained a large portion of the excellence of the original importation.” Powell was delighted with his sheep, saying that “they arrived early at maturity, carried good fleeces, afforded delicate mutton, laid their fat well within, and except the Southdown and the Leicester, were more easily kept than any sheep he could find.”[15] In the spring of 1825, a wether four-year-old Leicester-Tunis cross sold in the market at Trenton, New Jersey for $90 (or approximately $1,700 in current dollars), and when retailed brought the butcher $122.40, or just under $2,300 in current dollars.
Recapping the characteristics that made the early Tunis valuable, later newspaper articles noted that “the pure-bred sheep are hornless and of small bone, with flesh that was of an inviting color and highly marbled.” Further, the sheep were hardy, “bearing heat or cold better than common sheep.” The Tunis was reported as “generally quiet,” kept in good condition upon “coarse food,” and were remarkable healthy “disease being vary rare among them.” Lambs were recorded as “white, red, tawny, bluish, or black. All but the black [become] white in general color of fleece as they grew older, though most commonly colored in spots, and either tawny or black on the cheeks and shanks, and sometimes the whole head and face.”[16] In addition to a tendency to produce twin lambs, the developing breed was aseasonal, meaning that a careful husbandman might expect three lamb crops in two years. At the 1841 Philadelphia Agricultural Exhibition, Nicholas Diddle of Ohio reported “a less-known breed coming into reputation; it is the Tunisian, or broad-tailed sheep, originally sought mainly for the carcass, but having proved itself very hardy, well-acclimated when crossed with other breeds so as to acquire finer wool, it may become a standard stock among us.”[17]
This introductory period for Tunis successfully established the sheep as a viable breed in both the North and the South. However, reminiscent Holland’s tulip bulb mania, a Merino sheep craze was sweeping the U.S. about this time, and interest in other breeds was nearly non-existant. It was noted however, that without this single-minded fixation, “Tunisian sheep would have probably been disseminated throughout the United States, and in some of them have become the prevailing flocks.”[18] With interest languishing, record of the sheep becomes spottier.
In Sumter County, South Carolinia, Colonel Richard Singleton (whose daughter married the son of President Martin Van Buren) was perhaps the last of the old Revolutionary War aristocracy to have been kept a flock of Tunis, or what he called “African Broad Tail” sheep. The source of his breeding stock is blurred, but it is possible that Singleton himself imported the sheep from what he called “the coast of Africa” and crossed them with his own “common sheep.” Near Columbia, South Carolina in 1840, planter Benjamin F. Taylor maintained a “magnificent flock of Merino-African or Broad tailed [cross] which have shown themselves to be extremely active and prolific” and James W. Watts had descendants from Singleton’s flock in Cartersville, Georgia during the 1850s.[19] At about this same time William McDonald of Baltimore was traveling in the Orient and made arrangements for the shipment of “two broad tailed sheep” which were delivered to Boston with a shipment of Angora, or Cashmere goats and sent on to Maryland as the foundation of a flock he wished to create.[20] In California’s Gold Rush years, a notice placed by “Messers. Rowe and Parker” at San Francisco’s Pacific Market advertised the availability of “Chinese Mutton made from broad-tailed sheep very few of which have been brought to this country.”[21]
Then came the Civil War, and all bets were off. For both North and South, the need for food of any sort, the decimation of plantations and farms, no gentlemen breeders available to indulge their passion for curiosities, no small farmers wishing to build up flocks with new desirable traits, little available forage or feed, and few people available to shepherd the remaining sheep flocks culminated in the near decimation of the Tunis breed. There were hold-outs, however, that allowed the breed’s quiet survival. Thought to have been “exterminated” except for a flock owned by Colonel Maynard R. Speigler of Columbia, South Carolina, at least one other flock survived in the state. James Washington Watts brought his sheep back from Georgia to his former residence in Laurens County when he returned during the war’s upheaval. There as late as 1877, he was still breeding the “African Broad Tail” as a cross with Cotswold as the ideal sheep “for all the range of the country here this side of the Blue Ridge.”[22]
It appears that the 1893 Chicago Exposition may have been the springboard for a Tunis resurgence. An unnamed man from Columbia, South Carolina brought “a few sheep” to exhibit there, and they caught the attention of James A. Gulliams of Putnam County, Indiana, who purchased some of the exhibited sheep. Shortly afterwards, Charles Roundtree of Crawfordsville, Indiana, traveled to South Carolina and bought ten of a flock of twenty-five and became chief promoter of the breed.[23] An alternate scenario says that “through correspondence” Gulliams contacted Washington Watts in South Carolina and learned of a flock of pure bred Tunis on the plantation of Colonel Speigler and he purchased the ten sheep. In this scenario, it wasn’t until after Roundtree saw them exhibited at a fair near Crawfordsville that he became interested and then purchased a few additional animals from Speigler. Roundtree added one-sixteenth Southdown blood to his Tunis flock and the Roundtree variety through his exceptional ram Ben-Hur,became the accepted standard.[24] Either scenario is possible.
The American Tunis Sheep Breeders Association was organized in Indiana in 1896 for maintaining and promoting the breed as well as administering a flock book; the first rule of the standard adopted by the association awarded 20 points for a pedigree that could be traced back unbroken to Judge Peters’ original flock. A year later, a big attraction in the Chicago stockyards was the appearance “of a small lot of lambs” consigned by Roundtree.[25] And within a decade, flocks were popping up all over – even in Hawaii where, in 1900, the captain of the British ship “Restorer” exchanged some for mutton from the American Sugar Company of Molokai. These sheep did very well and about 1904 and 1910 two other groups were imported from Charles Roundtree in Indiana. The sheep were not continued there because of reduced grazing possibilities and a “poor wool market.”[26] On the mainland, W. I. Wood of Williamsport, Ohio was breeding and selling lambs in 1903, Tunis were exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Roundtree’s own flock expanded to include other champion rams such as Gladstone #7, and Tunis were widely advertised in Maryland in 1908. In 1911 “Mr. Whitter” of Maryland displayed a flock “causing much comment among the sheep fanciers,” and three Tunis sheep widely touted as “the first in Maine,” had been imported from Canada by Stephen C. Horn. A year later, J.N. McPherson, a New York farmer hopped on the Tunis bandwagon.[27]
When state fairs opened in the fall of 1915, Tunis showed up in several states for the first time including Iowa where a “drove of Tunis sheep” were entered to be judged and “was bound to cause interest in this section;” Donald Ellis took his Tunis to the Rockingham Fair in Salem, New Hampshire, and in the years immediately following new flocks and breeders regularly popped up. There was C. C. Kerglow, “breeder of mule-foot hogs and Tunis sheep” in De Graff Ohio, an Ohio State Fair showing in 1926, Penn State College began experimenting with Tunis in 1927, and E. C. Carr was noted to have the Michigan’s only flock of Tunis in 1929.[28]
The American Tunis Sheep Breeders’ Association disappeared into the maw of the Great Depression, but the National Tunis Sheep Registry emerged in its place charged first and foremost to guard and maintain the purity of Tunis sheep. At 1936 New York State Fair, the registry gave $10 in prizes to the three best pens of four lambs of either sex in the breed.[29]
In 1990, the Tunis Registry recorded 605 sheep, and in 2006 recorded more than double that number to 1,475 registrations which upgraded the sheep from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy’s “Threatened” list to its “Watch” list.[30] Interest in Arizona is an example of the spreading popularity of Tunis sheep. Attracted by the breed’s hot climate origins, in 1909, the state’s agricultural college experiment station began to work with Tunis near Mesa, and developed a champion ram named Gay Lad “for improving the sheep of Arizona.” Eventually the experimental flock numbered 176 sheep which were noted as “exterminators of Johnson Grass along five miles of weedy ditches during the entire growing season.”[31] In 1911, a “Tunis-Native sheep” cross was developed and named “Phoenix” or “Early Desert;” eventually 25 of these yearling rams were sent to the flocks of C.C. Hutchison near Seligman, Arizona to cross with his ewes, but results were mixed. With no especial interest from a small and widely disbursed population, and with World War I re-defining the nation’s wool and meat needs, local breeders lost interest and the experiment station moved on to other things. In the spring of 2010, the first known registered Tunis returned to Arizona when German and Maria Sierra of Snowflake purchased a ram and four ewes from Cunnington Farms in Moab, Utah. A few months later, Woolhalla Tunis in Queen Creek, Arizona purchased sheep from CCC Tunis in Fontanelle, Iowa, and now in 2011 both flocks have lambs for sale.
Currently there are flocks registered in 32 states, as well as an organization in South Africa and Australia. Renowned for its looks, its heritage, fiber, healthy meat, and all around easy keeping, Tunis is clearly the breed to succeed.
Woolhalla Tunis – Queen Creek, Arizona – July, 2011
[1] “The First Account of Fat-Tailed Sheep in the Rock Paintings of the Western Cape Coast,” by Antonieta Jerardino in The South African Archaeological Bulletin, vol. 54, no. 169, page 64-66, June, 1999; http://makingmaps.net/2009/06/08/fat-tailed-sheep-on-maps-other-curios-the-map-collector/ 2010; Leviticus 3:9.
[2] “Special Report on the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United States,” by D.E. Salmon, page 78, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1892.
[3] Minerva (New York), August 11, 1797, page 5.
[4] “End 100 Year Fight Over Apthorp Land,” New York Times, July 24, 1910.
[5] There is a fat-tailed black-headed Persian sheep breed in South Africa, but it is a hair sheep and Washington was breeding for wool.
[6] The Encyclopedia of Historic and Endangered Livestock and Poultry Breeds, by Janet Vorwald Dohner, page 144, Yale University Press, 2001.
[7] “Special Report on the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United States,” by D.E. Salmon, page 78, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1892.
[8] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[9] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[10] http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Sheep, 2010.
[11] Farmer and Gardner, September 29, 1835, Baltimore, Maryland.
[12] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[13] “Barbary Sheep,” in Virginia Patriot, June 12, 1810.
[14] “Long Wooled and Broad Tailed Sheep of Africa,” Haverhill Gazette, July 26, 1822.
[15] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[16] “Tunis Sheep,” The Homestead, August 17, 1894, page 18.
[17] “Address,” Huron Reflector, February 16, 1841, page 4.
[18] USDA, 1892, op cit
[19] “Sheep News,” Augusta Chronicle, July 9, 1845.
[20] “Angora Goats,” Baltimore Sun, January 26, 1858.
[21] “Chinese Mutton,” Daily Placer Times and Transcript, June 30, 1855.
[22] “Improved Types of Sheep for the Southwest with a Chapter on the Sheep of Tunis and Algeria,” Bulletin #69, page 634, Arizona Experiment Station, Tucson, Arizona, 1911; USDA, 1892, op cit.
[23]Types and Breeds of Farm Animals, by Charles Sumner Plumb, page 426, Country Life Education Series, Ginn and Company, New York, 1906.
[24] Arizona State Experiment Station Bulletin #69, op cit.
[25] “Quiet on ‘Change,” The Burlington Hawk-Eye, April 7, 1897, page 5.
[26] “A Survey of Livestock in Hawaii,” by L.A. Henke, page 18, University of Hawaii Reseqarch Publication #5, August, 1929, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii.
[27] “Field Notes,” The Homestead, November 26, 1903, page 26; “Sheep at the Fair,”Frederick (Maryland) News, November 28, 1903, page 7; “Females” The Homestead,October 13, 1904; “The Tunis Sheep,” Frederick Maryland News, April 15, 1905, page 3;Daily Kennebec Journal, May 18, 1911, page 2; The Daily News, September 30, 1911, page 5; “The Sheep As a Soil Conserver” The Indiana (Pennsylvania Evening Gazette, October 4, 1912, page 7.
[28] “Ohio State Fair Livestock Show Program Given,” The Coshocton Tribune, August 27, 1926, page 6; “Give Schedule Fair Judgings,” The Register, August 28, 1926, page 6; “Shavers Creek Valley,” Huntingdon Daily News, November 8, 1927, page 6;”Tunis Sheep,” The Evening Chronicle, December 7, 1929, page 4
[29] “State Fair’s Special Prize List Mounts,” Syracuse Herald, page 8-C, August 9, 1936.
[30] http://www.countryfolks.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=Features&&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&id=75A97A13A7F2455B871188592DEA1649&tier=4, 2010.
[31] Indiana Pennsylvania Evening Gazette, op cit; “Johnson Grass Exterminators,” The Standard Sentinel, December 10, 1914, page 4; Arizona State Experiment Station Bulletin
Perhaps the earliest images of fat-tailed or broad-rumped sheep appear on a wall in Steenbokfontein Cave on the western Cape of Africa, their name rumbles through the Old Testament where a lamb, including its fat tail or rump, is a sacrifice required of Aaron’s sons as a peace offering to Yahweh; and images of these sheep decorate maps of Africa as early as the 16th century.[1] As the New World was settled, some of the large properties offered space to include exotic breeds of animals, and it wasn’t long until a few of these sheep were imported as curiosities, or as a kind of living trophy by wealthy landowners.
About the time of the Revolutionary War, at least one fat-tailed or Barbary ewe had been brought to the Colonies by unknown means and was owned by Henry Laurens, a well-to-do merchant of Carolina. John Adams was visiting Paris in 1782 as Minister Plenipotentiary for the fledgling United States, and the official diary for December 6 records his conversation with Laurens (who had been President of the Continental Congress) where he noted that “as Mr. Curson talked of going to Marseilles, Mr. Laurens advised him to send to America some Barbary sheep. He says he had one in Carolina, but never could make the American rams go to that sheep.”[2] On his Carolina Mepkin Plantation, Laurens had collected a number of desert plants and animals – hence his interest in the arid-lands Barbary sheep. If Mr. Curson acted on Laurens’ advice, there is no record of the fact. Tantalizingly, however, a ten-dollar reward “and reasonable charges” is offered in a 1797 New York newspaper advertisement for “twenty eight sheep of the fat tailed breed, otherwise called the Barbary sheep” that have strayed from the pasture of the heirs of Charles Ward Apthorp, Esq.[3] Apthorp had built for himself one of the grandest pre-Revolutionary War houses on the island of Manhattan (at various times the house served as headquarters to both British and Continental armies) and at his death owned 200 acres of land in the vicinity. Maps appear to indicate that his sheep pastures were in an area now claimed as part of Central Park.[4]
It is also reported that George Washington used a fat-tailed or broad-rumped ram in his efforts to “more than double” the wool production at Mt. Vernon. Pleased with the ram’s contribution to the quality of his flocks, in 1797 Washington obtained “another Persian [in this case meaning Barbary] ram and ewe.[5]” Although the flocks were dispersed after his death in 1799, grandson Washington Park Custis continued to cross this “Persian” ram on Bakewell-Liecester ewes producing excellent wool and mutton. In the South this cross became known as the Arlington.[6]
“Whoever acts like a sheep, the wolf will eat.”
–Barbary maxim
Sent to Tunis in 1797 as the U.S. Consul, General William Eaton was responsible for the delicate and on-going negotiations for a treaty designed to bring to an end piracy along the Barbary Coast of north Africa. On March 26, 1799, seemingly final alterations in official documents (including demands for diamond-encrusted watches and “military regalia”) were approved by Hamouda, Bey of Tunis, and sent on to Eaton as the official representative of the US government. In addition to codifying the demands of the US, Eaton included in the final give-and-take what was perhaps an act of diplomatic subtlety enforcing with the old wolf that a new wolf was now on the scene when “at his [Eaton’s] request and out of compliment to the United States, [Hamouda] permitted to be taken from his farm in the interior of the country a number of broad-tailed Barbary or Mountain Tunis sheep for shipment to the United States.”[7] Responsible for a cargo which included the signed treaty and “eight or ten” Barbary sheep, Captain Henry Geddes loaded the brig Sophia on May 3, 1799 and sailed for home. The sheep didn’t travel well and only two, a ram named Garamelli and a ewe named Selima, survived the voyage. Philadelphia, the capital of the US less than a decade before, still catered to official ships and business and it was there that the Sophia docked and there that the surviving sheep were presented to Secretary-of-State Timothy Pickering, a man who had little experience as a farmer until after his retirement from life in public office. Pickering promptly turned the ewe and the ram over to Judge Richard Peters who took them to Belmont, his family estate outside the city.
Peters considered the sheep “burdensome, but not regretted” and gave full and free use of the rams to anyone who cared to bring ewes to his pastures. For twenty years he built up and freely dispersed flocks of Tunis sheep – pure-bred and cross-bred – locally and as far away as the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. Peters teamed with a neighbor Thomas Bones and acquired some excellent sheep of their own from the original ram, and then Garamelli was sent as a gift to Peters’ friend General Edward Hand for “his own use and that of the farmers of Lancaster County.” The staid German farmers of the area were extremely suspicious of the different looking ram and considered him to be “an unnatural connection” for their more familiar looking ewes. Notwithstanding the clamoring of the “victualers of Philadelphia” who had discovered the superiority of Tunis mutton “over that of all other sheep,” General Hand was obliged to purchase 30 or 40 of the Tunis off-spring to set an example of their marketability.[8] Garamelli and Selima were each killed by dogs – Selima after “weaning a lamb at [age] 16.”[9]
While these early sheep likely wouldn’t be recognized as Tunis today, many of the traits they exhibited remain ones showcased by the breed, and with the gradual addition of traits from other breeds a uniquely American breed was established. The sheep attracted a strong following throughout South, and men such as Thomas Jefferson and Commodore James Barron of Chesapeake Bay fame dabbled with improving their flocks through the addition of Tunis animals. Sheep brought by Barron ended up in Virginia and the District of Columbia; Jefferson received his when navel hero Commodore John Rogers returned from Tripoli with “some Barbary Broad-tailed rams and ewes” in the hold of his ship. Jefferson became quite enamored of his and wrote that raising the breed “pure” was a “favorite object,” and especially valued the Tunis for their meat, “the most delicious I have ever tasted.” His sheep grazed the lawns of both the White House and his Monticello plantation. Unfortunately, two of Jefferson’s Tunis rams were killed by a Shetland ram – “[an] abominable animal,” he raged.[10]
Another of Rogers’ rams ended up at Brookland Woods Farm, nine miles from Baltimore, Maryland where by 1835 there was a small Tunis flock, a cross between Leicester sheep and the Barbary. By then the original ram had died, of course, but “his brown-legged and brown-faced sons and daughters remained; they are hardy and thrifty animals, bear a fruitful fleece, and yield for the shambles a carcass at once sweet, juicy, and savory.”[11]
Random notes about crosses with these early proto-Tunis document some of the evolution of the new breed. In the spring of 1809 “Dr. Kent of Prince George County, Maryland sheared 11 pounds of fine wool” (when the accepted standard was five pounds or less) from a yearling cross of “a common sheep and a half-blood Tunis ram.”[12]Virginia, too, was proving fertile ground for acceptance of the new breed. Here in 1810, John Taylor of Richmond offered for sale “a beautiful flock of rain lambs from the Barbary he had mixed with “the finest Virginia ewes,” and William Fontaine of Hanover offered for sale from his flock of 300 “of the Barbary breed” yearling rams for $10, ram lambs at $8, and “second choice rams” and ewes at $5.” He explained that the sheep were of his own breeding from a pair presented by General Eaton and “a ram of Commodore Barron’s importation.”[13] Cross-breeding strides were also being made in the North where “the [Barbary] Ram now at E. Hersy Derby’s and at the disposal of the Massachusetts Agricultural Society will be delivered to any gentleman who is desirous to obtain a cross from this breed, free of cost, and upon sole condition of good treatment of the animal, and to be kept within the State.”[14]
By 1822, Judge Peters’ own Tunis flock had “somewhat deteriorated” but at that year’s Pennsylvania Cattle Show, John H. Powell exhibited 21 Tunis sheep which, although he had crossed with mixed Leicester and Southdown stock, “retained a large portion of the excellence of the original importation.” Powell was delighted with his sheep, saying that “they arrived early at maturity, carried good fleeces, afforded delicate mutton, laid their fat well within, and except the Southdown and the Leicester, were more easily kept than any sheep he could find.”[15] In the spring of 1825, a wether four-year-old Leicester-Tunis cross sold in the market at Trenton, New Jersey for $90 (or approximately $1,700 in current dollars), and when retailed brought the butcher $122.40, or just under $2,300 in current dollars.
Recapping the characteristics that made the early Tunis valuable, later newspaper articles noted that “the pure-bred sheep are hornless and of small bone, with flesh that was of an inviting color and highly marbled.” Further, the sheep were hardy, “bearing heat or cold better than common sheep.” The Tunis was reported as “generally quiet,” kept in good condition upon “coarse food,” and were remarkable healthy “disease being vary rare among them.” Lambs were recorded as “white, red, tawny, bluish, or black. All but the black [become] white in general color of fleece as they grew older, though most commonly colored in spots, and either tawny or black on the cheeks and shanks, and sometimes the whole head and face.”[16] In addition to a tendency to produce twin lambs, the developing breed was aseasonal, meaning that a careful husbandman might expect three lamb crops in two years. At the 1841 Philadelphia Agricultural Exhibition, Nicholas Diddle of Ohio reported “a less-known breed coming into reputation; it is the Tunisian, or broad-tailed sheep, originally sought mainly for the carcass, but having proved itself very hardy, well-acclimated when crossed with other breeds so as to acquire finer wool, it may become a standard stock among us.”[17]
This introductory period for Tunis successfully established the sheep as a viable breed in both the North and the South. However, reminiscent Holland’s tulip bulb mania, a Merino sheep craze was sweeping the U.S. about this time, and interest in other breeds was nearly non-existant. It was noted however, that without this single-minded fixation, “Tunisian sheep would have probably been disseminated throughout the United States, and in some of them have become the prevailing flocks.”[18] With interest languishing, record of the sheep becomes spottier.
In Sumter County, South Carolinia, Colonel Richard Singleton (whose daughter married the son of President Martin Van Buren) was perhaps the last of the old Revolutionary War aristocracy to have been kept a flock of Tunis, or what he called “African Broad Tail” sheep. The source of his breeding stock is blurred, but it is possible that Singleton himself imported the sheep from what he called “the coast of Africa” and crossed them with his own “common sheep.” Near Columbia, South Carolina in 1840, planter Benjamin F. Taylor maintained a “magnificent flock of Merino-African or Broad tailed [cross] which have shown themselves to be extremely active and prolific” and James W. Watts had descendants from Singleton’s flock in Cartersville, Georgia during the 1850s.[19] At about this same time William McDonald of Baltimore was traveling in the Orient and made arrangements for the shipment of “two broad tailed sheep” which were delivered to Boston with a shipment of Angora, or Cashmere goats and sent on to Maryland as the foundation of a flock he wished to create.[20] In California’s Gold Rush years, a notice placed by “Messers. Rowe and Parker” at San Francisco’s Pacific Market advertised the availability of “Chinese Mutton made from broad-tailed sheep very few of which have been brought to this country.”[21]
Then came the Civil War, and all bets were off. For both North and South, the need for food of any sort, the decimation of plantations and farms, no gentlemen breeders available to indulge their passion for curiosities, no small farmers wishing to build up flocks with new desirable traits, little available forage or feed, and few people available to shepherd the remaining sheep flocks culminated in the near decimation of the Tunis breed. There were hold-outs, however, that allowed the breed’s quiet survival. Thought to have been “exterminated” except for a flock owned by Colonel Maynard R. Speigler of Columbia, South Carolina, at least one other flock survived in the state. James Washington Watts brought his sheep back from Georgia to his former residence in Laurens County when he returned during the war’s upheaval. There as late as 1877, he was still breeding the “African Broad Tail” as a cross with Cotswold as the ideal sheep “for all the range of the country here this side of the Blue Ridge.”[22]
It appears that the 1893 Chicago Exposition may have been the springboard for a Tunis resurgence. An unnamed man from Columbia, South Carolina brought “a few sheep” to exhibit there, and they caught the attention of James A. Gulliams of Putnam County, Indiana, who purchased some of the exhibited sheep. Shortly afterwards, Charles Roundtree of Crawfordsville, Indiana, traveled to South Carolina and bought ten of a flock of twenty-five and became chief promoter of the breed.[23] An alternate scenario says that “through correspondence” Gulliams contacted Washington Watts in South Carolina and learned of a flock of pure bred Tunis on the plantation of Colonel Speigler and he purchased the ten sheep. In this scenario, it wasn’t until after Roundtree saw them exhibited at a fair near Crawfordsville that he became interested and then purchased a few additional animals from Speigler. Roundtree added one-sixteenth Southdown blood to his Tunis flock and the Roundtree variety through his exceptional ram Ben-Hur,became the accepted standard.[24] Either scenario is possible.
The American Tunis Sheep Breeders Association was organized in Indiana in 1896 for maintaining and promoting the breed as well as administering a flock book; the first rule of the standard adopted by the association awarded 20 points for a pedigree that could be traced back unbroken to Judge Peters’ original flock. A year later, a big attraction in the Chicago stockyards was the appearance “of a small lot of lambs” consigned by Roundtree.[25] And within a decade, flocks were popping up all over – even in Hawaii where, in 1900, the captain of the British ship “Restorer” exchanged some for mutton from the American Sugar Company of Molokai. These sheep did very well and about 1904 and 1910 two other groups were imported from Charles Roundtree in Indiana. The sheep were not continued there because of reduced grazing possibilities and a “poor wool market.”[26] On the mainland, W. I. Wood of Williamsport, Ohio was breeding and selling lambs in 1903, Tunis were exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Roundtree’s own flock expanded to include other champion rams such as Gladstone #7, and Tunis were widely advertised in Maryland in 1908. In 1911 “Mr. Whitter” of Maryland displayed a flock “causing much comment among the sheep fanciers,” and three Tunis sheep widely touted as “the first in Maine,” had been imported from Canada by Stephen C. Horn. A year later, J.N. McPherson, a New York farmer hopped on the Tunis bandwagon.[27]
When state fairs opened in the fall of 1915, Tunis showed up in several states for the first time including Iowa where a “drove of Tunis sheep” were entered to be judged and “was bound to cause interest in this section;” Donald Ellis took his Tunis to the Rockingham Fair in Salem, New Hampshire, and in the years immediately following new flocks and breeders regularly popped up. There was C. C. Kerglow, “breeder of mule-foot hogs and Tunis sheep” in De Graff Ohio, an Ohio State Fair showing in 1926, Penn State College began experimenting with Tunis in 1927, and E. C. Carr was noted to have the Michigan’s only flock of Tunis in 1929.[28]
The American Tunis Sheep Breeders’ Association disappeared into the maw of the Great Depression, but the National Tunis Sheep Registry emerged in its place charged first and foremost to guard and maintain the purity of Tunis sheep. At 1936 New York State Fair, the registry gave $10 in prizes to the three best pens of four lambs of either sex in the breed.[29]
In 1990, the Tunis Registry recorded 605 sheep, and in 2006 recorded more than double that number to 1,475 registrations which upgraded the sheep from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy’s “Threatened” list to its “Watch” list.[30] Interest in Arizona is an example of the spreading popularity of Tunis sheep. Attracted by the breed’s hot climate origins, in 1909, the state’s agricultural college experiment station began to work with Tunis near Mesa, and developed a champion ram named Gay Lad “for improving the sheep of Arizona.” Eventually the experimental flock numbered 176 sheep which were noted as “exterminators of Johnson Grass along five miles of weedy ditches during the entire growing season.”[31] In 1911, a “Tunis-Native sheep” cross was developed and named “Phoenix” or “Early Desert;” eventually 25 of these yearling rams were sent to the flocks of C.C. Hutchison near Seligman, Arizona to cross with his ewes, but results were mixed. With no especial interest from a small and widely disbursed population, and with World War I re-defining the nation’s wool and meat needs, local breeders lost interest and the experiment station moved on to other things. In the spring of 2010, the first known registered Tunis returned to Arizona when German and Maria Sierra of Snowflake purchased a ram and four ewes from Cunnington Farms in Moab, Utah. A few months later, Woolhalla Tunis in Queen Creek, Arizona purchased sheep from CCC Tunis in Fontanelle, Iowa, and now in 2011 both flocks have lambs for sale.
Currently there are flocks registered in 32 states, as well as an organization in South Africa and Australia. Renowned for its looks, its heritage, fiber, healthy meat, and all around easy keeping, Tunis is clearly the breed to succeed.
Woolhalla Tunis – Queen Creek, Arizona – July, 2011
[1] “The First Account of Fat-Tailed Sheep in the Rock Paintings of the Western Cape Coast,” by Antonieta Jerardino in The South African Archaeological Bulletin, vol. 54, no. 169, page 64-66, June, 1999; http://makingmaps.net/2009/06/08/fat-tailed-sheep-on-maps-other-curios-the-map-collector/ 2010; Leviticus 3:9.
[2] “Special Report on the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United States,” by D.E. Salmon, page 78, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1892.
[3] Minerva (New York), August 11, 1797, page 5.
[4] “End 100 Year Fight Over Apthorp Land,” New York Times, July 24, 1910.
[5] There is a fat-tailed black-headed Persian sheep breed in South Africa, but it is a hair sheep and Washington was breeding for wool.
[6] The Encyclopedia of Historic and Endangered Livestock and Poultry Breeds, by Janet Vorwald Dohner, page 144, Yale University Press, 2001.
[7] “Special Report on the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United States,” by D.E. Salmon, page 78, US Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., 1892.
[8] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[9] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[10] http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Sheep, 2010.
[11] Farmer and Gardner, September 29, 1835, Baltimore, Maryland.
[12] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[13] “Barbary Sheep,” in Virginia Patriot, June 12, 1810.
[14] “Long Wooled and Broad Tailed Sheep of Africa,” Haverhill Gazette, July 26, 1822.
[15] USDA, 1892, op cit.
[16] “Tunis Sheep,” The Homestead, August 17, 1894, page 18.
[17] “Address,” Huron Reflector, February 16, 1841, page 4.
[18] USDA, 1892, op cit
[19] “Sheep News,” Augusta Chronicle, July 9, 1845.
[20] “Angora Goats,” Baltimore Sun, January 26, 1858.
[21] “Chinese Mutton,” Daily Placer Times and Transcript, June 30, 1855.
[22] “Improved Types of Sheep for the Southwest with a Chapter on the Sheep of Tunis and Algeria,” Bulletin #69, page 634, Arizona Experiment Station, Tucson, Arizona, 1911; USDA, 1892, op cit.
[23]Types and Breeds of Farm Animals, by Charles Sumner Plumb, page 426, Country Life Education Series, Ginn and Company, New York, 1906.
[24] Arizona State Experiment Station Bulletin #69, op cit.
[25] “Quiet on ‘Change,” The Burlington Hawk-Eye, April 7, 1897, page 5.
[26] “A Survey of Livestock in Hawaii,” by L.A. Henke, page 18, University of Hawaii Reseqarch Publication #5, August, 1929, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii.
[27] “Field Notes,” The Homestead, November 26, 1903, page 26; “Sheep at the Fair,”Frederick (Maryland) News, November 28, 1903, page 7; “Females” The Homestead,October 13, 1904; “The Tunis Sheep,” Frederick Maryland News, April 15, 1905, page 3;Daily Kennebec Journal, May 18, 1911, page 2; The Daily News, September 30, 1911, page 5; “The Sheep As a Soil Conserver” The Indiana (Pennsylvania Evening Gazette, October 4, 1912, page 7.
[28] “Ohio State Fair Livestock Show Program Given,” The Coshocton Tribune, August 27, 1926, page 6; “Give Schedule Fair Judgings,” The Register, August 28, 1926, page 6; “Shavers Creek Valley,” Huntingdon Daily News, November 8, 1927, page 6;”Tunis Sheep,” The Evening Chronicle, December 7, 1929, page 4
[29] “State Fair’s Special Prize List Mounts,” Syracuse Herald, page 8-C, August 9, 1936.
[30] http://www.countryfolks.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=Features&&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&id=75A97A13A7F2455B871188592DEA1649&tier=4, 2010.
[31] Indiana Pennsylvania Evening Gazette, op cit; “Johnson Grass Exterminators,” The Standard Sentinel, December 10, 1914, page 4; Arizona State Experiment Station Bulletin