an American gentleman farmer, historian, horticulturalist, judge, soldier and statesman who lived in Salem, New Jersey. He is especially renowned for the apocryphal story that he publicly ate a basket of tomatoes at the Old Salem County Courthouse in 1820 to demonstrate that they were not poisonous, as was supposedly commonly thought at the time. He was a keen antiquarian and wrote a history of Salem – An Historical Account of the First Settlement of Salem, in West Jersey – which was published by Orrin Rogers in 1839.
