Why We Carve Pumpkins, and Why Turnips Came First

Every October, someone at a carving table retells the same story. A man called Stingy Jack outwits the Devil, is turned away from both heaven and hell, and wanders the dark with a coal inside a hollowed turnip. Irish emigrants, the story goes, swapped the turnip for a pumpkin once they reached America. Parts of that account hold up against the written record. Others are much harder to pin down. The word, the vegetable and the legend each have their own dates, and they do not line up as neatly as the tale suggests.

The record in order

Laid out by year, the dated traces of the word, the vegetables and the legend look like this.

Dates as given by each source; OED dates are as reproduced in Wikipedia’s article on the jack-o’-lantern.

A night watchman and a marsh light before any vegetable

The phrase began as a name for a person and a natural light, not for a carved object. Merriam-Webster traces jack-o’-lantern to 17th-century Britain, where it was used for a man with a lantern, such as a night watchman.

The OED citations give two early senses. From 1658 the phrase named the ignis fatuus, or will-o’-the-wisp: the faint, flickering light sometimes seen over marshes at night. From 1663 to 1704 it named a man carrying a lantern. Both uses are older than any recorded carved vegetable.

The Halloween sense arrives much later. The same OED citations give 1837 as the first use of jack-o’-lantern for a lantern carved from a turnip or pumpkin. Merriam-Webster is cautious about that jump and says it is less certain how the name came to be applied to a hollowed-out pumpkin. No document records that moment.

Turnips, mangel-wurzels and a Donegal ghost turnip

Before pumpkins, carvers in Ireland and Britain worked with root crops. In the 19th century, hollowed turnips or mangel-wurzels, another root crop, were used at Halloween in parts of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. An earlier example comes from Worcestershire, where turnips served as “Hoberdy’s Lantern” at the end of the 18th century, according to an 1856 account by the writer Allies.

The most concrete evidence sits in a museum. The National Museum of Ireland holds a “ghost turnip” lantern, catalogue number F1943.350, received in 1943 from a schoolteacher near Fintown, County Donegal. The teacher said it was the kind always made locally around 1900. A candle went inside, and the lantern was used to frighten people on 31 October.

The object on display is a replica. National Geographic describes it as a plaster cast of the early-1900s turnip, shown at the museum’s Country Life site in County Mayo.

Why root vegetables at all? Nathan Mannion of the EPIC Irish Emigration Museum told National Geographic that metal lanterns were expensive, so people hollowed out root vegetables instead.

How an American squash took over the lantern

The pumpkin is an American plant. The common carving pumpkin is Cucurbita pepo, and squash seeds from Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, show that species was domesticated about 10,000 years ago. Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian dated the seeds directly with AMS radiocarbon dating, a method precise enough to date individual seeds, as Archaeology magazine reported in 1997.

In North America, the pumpkin lantern appears in print during the 19th century. American writers knew the word early. Nathaniel Hawthorne mentioned a jack-o’-lantern in his stories “The Great Carbuncle” (1835) and “Feathertop” (1852). Cindy Ott, quoted by National Geographic, points to an 1867 issue of Harper’s Weekly as the likely first image of a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. By 1892, the Atlanta Constitution was covering an “All Halloween” party at the home of Atlanta mayor William Hemphill.

National Geographic’s sources say Irish immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries found pumpkins better suited to carving than turnips or potatoes. That account is plausible, but it is an interpretation rather than a documented chain linking particular emigrants to particular lanterns.

Where Stingy Jack fits in the record

The Stingy Jack tale exists in many versions, and none is treated as the standard one. National Geographic calls it an 18th-century Irish folktale but gives no date for its first written appearance.

The datable traces are later. The Dublin Penny Journal printed a “Jack-o’-the-Lantern” legend dated 16 January 1836 on the page; its reference entry gives 1835. That story does not mention a carved vegetable. The next dated trace is an 1851 poem by Hercules Ellis.

The order of the evidence suggests the legend is a later explanation rather than the source. The phrase was naming marsh lights and night watchmen in the 17th century. Its carved-lantern sense appears in 1837. The legend surfaces in print in 1835 or 1836 and again in 1851, and its earliest printed version has no turnip at all. A story about a wandering soul carrying a light fits the will-o’-the-wisp meaning closely, so it may have grown up around a name that already existed.

None of this makes the tale worthless. Folk stories can travel by word of mouth for generations before anyone prints them, so a late record does not prove a late story. It does mean the legend cannot be shown to be where the word or the custom came from.

Gaps the documents leave open

Some popular accounts trace carved lanterns back to Samhain. The record of carved lanterns covered here begins with Worcestershire at the end of the 18th century, so that older link remains a matter of interpretation, not documentation.

The North American “firsts” also measure different things. The 1866 record is a Canadian newspaper, the 1867 picture does not use the word jack-o’-lantern, and the 1892 item is a party report. Newly digitized newspapers and letters could move any of these dates earlier.

Turnip carving has not vanished from Ireland and Britain, but no official count shows how common it is today. In the United States, the pumpkin is now the standard Halloween lantern. As a crop, US pumpkin production was about 1.47 billion pounds in 2025, up about 4% from 2024, and Illinois alone grew about 533 million pounds, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.