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Satanic Tomatoes and Other Weird Details Not Taught in History Class

Khalid Elhassan July 4, 2020 33 min

South Lawn - Goat — Wilson's sheep. Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum

34. Scared Sheep

President Wilson’s White House sheep could be said to have been scared, literally, shitless. As The Washington Post described their plight: “Two of the sheep developed serious illness yesterday and are under the care of specialists from the Department of Agriculture … The animals had been getting along nicely, until yesterday. The fact that one of the sheep has the “dips” is said to be due to the fact that it became frightened by passing automobiles and similar noises to which it was not accustomed.“

By 1920, the flock had grown to 48 sheep, and had destroyed the White House’s back lawn. So they were moved to the front lawn, and promptly began destroying the rose gardens, prompting a frantic fencing operation to save the flower beds and more delicate trees from the flock’s depredations. By August of that year, Wilson had finally had enough and brought the weird experiment to an end. As The Washington Post put it: “President Wilson has decided to retire from the sheep business“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.