One of those varieties is Arcadian, which was grown in New York State as recently as the 1920s; it had gone so thoroughly out of fashion that when officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture sought it for their seed bank in 1991, they had to get it from Russia. (And even that, he says, may not be identical to the New York strain.)
Well of course I’ve needed much less encouragement than that provided by this snippet from a Smithsonian Magazine piece on artisanal wheats in the US to don the fireproof suit and venture into Genebank Database Hell. Especially with Eurisco launching a new website on the same day and all.
So here’s what I found out. The USDA National Small Grains Collection did indeed receive in Oct. 1991 the accession WIR 22038 from the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR), being a sample of the wheat variety “Arcadian”, released in New York in 1895. It was given the number PI 565362 in 1993. There’s now a bunch of evaluation data on it in GRIN.
But where did VIR get it from? Well, Eurisco does have a record of a VIR100022038, ((Ah, ok, that doesn’t work, does it. You need to go back to the search page and insert the accession number VIR100022038.)) collected in 1928, country of origin the USA, but that’s about all. So was it collected by Vavilov himself? There’s nothing on the identity of the collector on VIR’s own online database. Vavilov visited the USA in 1921 and 1930, going to New York on the first occasion, but that seems too early compared to the VIR acquisition date of 1928. Maybe he sent a request for additional material to the contacts he had made? And with that I leave it to the Vavilov experts (or my next visit to St Petersburg) to continue following the trail…