Haisten Willis
Haisten Willis was born in Columbus, Georgia, and grew up hearing a lot about Tom’s Foods—no fewer than nine of his relatives worked there at one time or another. Later, he spent summers riding in a Tom’s delivery truck and learning the business from his dad. Willis is a journalist who has written for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, and the Washington Examiner. He is the editor of Commonplace magazine and works in Washington, DC. He joins us with his book A Legacy in Peanuts: Tom's Foods and the Transformation of the Twentieth-Century South.
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Haisten Willis
A Legacy in Peanuts: Tom's Foods and the Transformation of the Twentieth-Century South
The story of a business that helped transform the South in the early twentieth century and stood as a symbol of the region for six decades
In A Legacy in Peanuts, Columbus, Georgia native Haisten Willis tells the story of Columbus's own Tom's Foods, a firm that aided the South’s industrialization and played a major role in establishing the humble peanut as a cash crop. In the 1920s, founder Tom Huston revolutionized both the manufacturing and marketing of peanuts through his patented shelling machines and the creation of the company’s signature product, Tom’s Toasted Peanuts. With an assist from legendary scientist George Washington Carver, Huston turned Tom’s into a multimillion-dollar business in just a few years—before losing it all on another big business bet. Future Columbus mayor Walter Richards then took over, stabilizing Tom’s and expanding its lineup to include crackers and candy during his three decades at the helm.
The stuff of childhood memories, lazy afternoons, and countless workplace break rooms, the story of Tom's Foods reveals fundamental truths about business, farming, factory labor, race relations, innovation, and class in the twentieth-century South. By following the four largest players in the company's history—Huston, Richards, longtime president J. W. "Bill" Feighner, and midwestern billionaire Michael Heisley, who purchased Tom's as a distressed asset in 1993 and proved to be its final owner before a 2005 bankruptcy—Willis illuminates a complex story of the modernizing South.
