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No one really knows where this term for the morel mushroom came from. “The term molly moocher appears to be unique to central Appalachia,” says Mary Hufford, in ‘Molly Mooching on Bradley Mountain.’https://www.sas.upenn.edu/folklore/faculty/mhufford/MollyMooching.pdf'>1
Given the thick brogue traditionally heard in what today is southern WV, it’s possible that the phrase is just a localized transformation of ‘morel mushroom.’
That theory would address the illogicality of the word ‘moocher’—someone who asks others for things without intending to pay for those things— being applied to a thing that doesn’t mooch.
The word ‘mooching’ has a second definition: to walk or do things slowly and without much purpose. Anyone who’s hunted morels for the first time has probably experienced this feeling! Morels are hard to find, it takes time to learn their habitats and how to spot them. You have to hunt slowly as you’re first getting used to locating them, and a novice can quickly feel like they’re just weaving around back and forth in the woods. Morel mushrooming—“Molly Mooching”—makes sense in this instance.
“Perhaps molly, the Irish nickname for Mary,” says Hufford, “is a play on the French word for morel—morille—which might have sounded like “Maria” to the ears of the Irish who came to the region in the 1840s to work on the railroad. But that is, of course, sheer speculation.”2
Yes, it does seem like sheer speculation. French was not widely spoken in the 1840s across what was still far western Virginia. The French-Indian War saw to it that any of the region’s original French settlers were thinned out. Not till the first decade of the 20th century was French again spoken with any frequency in WV, and then in specific pockets: South Charleston, the North View section of Clarksburg, and the small town of Salem, neighborhoods that shared a connection to the glass industry.https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/433'>3
A more likely avenue to explore on where this phrase came from is the human tendency to name things after what’s familiar.
The Cherokee, for example, who rolled morels in cornmeal and fried them, knew them as Ahawi sayoniyusti, meaning “like a deer antler.”
Likewise, the Scots-Irish who populated the territory of modern day WV used nature references, Bible references, and their own cultural references to name the plants around them: red trillium: (“wake robin”) — dubbed thus because the flowers traditionally bloomed about the same time that the first robins of spring were sighted; sprouting cow parsnip (“woolen britches”): the stem is woolly, hollow, stout; puttyroot or Adam-and-Eve root: so called because the “roots” (actually rounded underground stems called corms) contain a glutinous substance used in former times as an adhesive to mend broken pottery. And the “Adam and Eve” tag? The corms are usually paired.https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/adam-and-eve-orchid#:~:text=Human%20connections,the%20corms%20are%20usually%20paired'>4
We need to take a look for a moment now at one Mary Ludwig Hays (1754-1832) of Carlisle, PA. This woman reportedly brought water to the troops at the Battle of Monmouth during the Revolutionary War, and worked the cannon after her husband was wounded.https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-ludwig-hays'>5
It was very common for soldier’s wives to follow their husbands when they enlisted in the army. Mary Hays decided to join her husband at the Continental Army camp where she often washed clothes and cared for the sick. Historians note that this is where the nickname “Molly Pitcher” could have originated from. “Molly” was a common nickname given to women that were named Mary. “Pitcher” represented the buckets women would carry for cleaning.
Another possible origin for the nickname, one that’s more germain to the discussion about morels, is that it came from the soldiers’ cry, “Molly! Pitcher!” meaning “we need a bucket of water over here” when they were thirsty or when their overheated cannons needed to be cooled down.https://www.revolutionary-war.net/molly-pitcher/'>6
Gradually any woman who brought food and /or water to the soldiers was called Molly Pitcher. The name Molly Pitcher is a collective generic term inasmuch as “G.I. Joe” was a moniker for a soldier or soldiers in World War II.https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1999/summer/pitcher.html'>7 Historians say that “Molly Pitcher” is a fictional woman who represented the many women working on the battlefields. Yet, there is historical evidence that Mary Ludwig Hays was the real “Molly Pitcher.”
So. Post war, Revolutionary War veterans head down the Great Valley Trail to settle the backcountry. They know about ‘Molly Pitcher’ and that the phrase represents a camp follower, a helper who steps in with vital supplies right as things are running lowest and most desperate.
Not only is the morel the first mushroom of spring, but it’s one of the first fresh foods to appear after a long winter of non-fresh dried meats, dried corn, leather britches, and squash. And if a settler had been dealt crop failures the previous year, foraged foods like the morel could literally be life savers.
It’s conceivable, then, that settlers would personify the morel by naming it after Molly Pitcher, bringer of water & food to parched, starving soldiers. “Molly Pitcher mushrooms” is a mouthful though. Human speech patterns being what they are, it’s not a far leap to think the phrase ended up, over the course of 7 or 8 generations, as a portmanteau (a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others). Perhaps ‘Pitcher Mushrooms’ became ‘pitchermush,’ became ‘musher’ became ‘moocher.’
I expect Mary Ludwig Hays would be amused.
More articles on morel mushrooms:
Land fishing for Molly Moochers(Opens in a new browser tab)
Hickory chickens are underfoot this month(Opens in a new browser tab)
The post Why are they called ‘Molly Moochers’? appeared first on Appalachian History.
