Tunis

The Tunis is named for where its foundation stock came from. In the late 1700s the Bey of Tunis sent George Washington a gift of North African sheep, the fat-tailed or Barbary type. The pair went to Judge Richard Peters of Belmont, Pennsylvania, who put the rams out for use and gave lambs away to spread them.

They circulated among the agricultural set of the early republic. The sheep appear in the letters, journals and farm records of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Peters, Charles Roundtree and George Washington Custis.

Out of that stock an American breed formed. It was recognizable as its own thing by the turn of the nineteenth century, which makes the Tunis one of the oldest livestock breeds developed in this country.

It suited the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast, handled the heat and humidity, and became the mainstay of sheep production across the upper South until the Civil War, when nearly all Southern stock was destroyed.