text: United States The earliest reference to tomatoes being grown in British North America is from 1710, when herbalist William Salmon reported seeing them in what is today South Carolina. They may have been introduced from the Caribbean. By the mid-18th century, they were cultivated on some Carolina plantations, and probably in other parts of the Southeast as well. Thomas Jefferson, who ate tomatoes in Paris, sent some seeds back to America. Some early American advocates of the culinary use of the tomato included Michele Felice Cornè and Robert Gibbon Johnson. Many Americans considered tomatoes to be poisonous at this time and, in general, they were grown more as ornamental plants than as food. In 1897, W. H. Garrison addressed the Medico-Legal Society of New York stating, "The belief
  was once transmitted that the tomato was sinisterly dangerous." He recalled in his youth tomatoes were dubbed "love-apples or wolf-apples" and they were shunned as "globes of the devil."
  Alexander W. Livingston receives much credit for developing numerous varieties of tomato for both home and commercial gardeners.
  Early tomato breeders included Henry Tilden in Iowa and a Dr. Hand in Baltimore.
  The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1937 yearbook declared that "half of the major varieties were a result of the abilities of the Livingstons to evaluate and perpetuate superior material in the tomato." Livingston's first breed of tomato, the Paragon, was introduced in 1870, the beginning of a great tomato culture enterprise in the county. In 1875, he introduced the Acme, which was said to be involved in the parentage of most of the tomatoes introduced by him and his competitors for the next twenty-five years.