Antoine of Oak Alley, at the age of 38, was the first person to successfully graft the paper-shell pecan resulting in trees producing uniform fruits with thinner shells. Success came with trunk ...

He was an enslaved man and a talented gardener at Oak Alley plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, in the mid-18th century. He developed a method of propagating individual pecan trees using a grafting ...

Master Gardener Volunteers member Tara Gill traces the first named pecan variety's discovery back to mid-1800s slave named Antoine of Oak Valley.