America was founded by rule-breakers. So we named our strains after eight of them — and then we did the homework, because a renegade brand doesn’t peddle myths.
Every April, the internet drags out the same tired memes: Washington the pothead, Jefferson smoking hemp on his veranda, the Declaration “written on hemp paper.” Most of it is nonsense. The real story is better. Hemp — industrial Cannabis sativa, the fiber, not the high — was woven into the founding of this country at every level: the rope that rigged the Navy, the sailcloth that moved its ships, the tariffs that protected its farmers, and the machines its greatest minds tried to build. We went to the primary sources — Founders Online, Mount Vernon, Monticello, the major biographies — and wrote the honest version, warts and all.
Here are the eight, one per strain:
- George Washington — Rope, Not Dope: the farmer-general who grew hemp on all five Mount Vernon farms and referenced it 90+ times in his diaries.
- John Adams: the pseudonymous “Humphrey Ploughjogger” who got the Continental Congress to pass a hemp bill four months before independence.
- Samuel Adams: the maltster-not-brewer whose revolution literally ran on Boston’s hemp ropewalks.
- Thomas Jefferson: the fake veranda quote, the real horse-powered hemp brake he tried to open-source, and the man who contained multitudes.
- Paul Revere: the ride they got wrong and the copper mill they forgot — plus the hemp that rigged Old Ironsides.
- John Hancock: the merchant king who funded a revolution on a hemp-rigged fleet and signed his name like a dare.
- Alexander Hamilton: the orphan immigrant who wrote hemp into federal law in the Report on Manufactures.
- James Madison: the 5’4″ bookworm who out-thought everyone and tracked the hemp market like a CEO.
What we cut, and why
A renegade brand tells the truth even when a myth would sell better. So: we researched a ninth founder, John Jay, and cut him — a thorough sweep of his papers turned up no credible hemp connection, and we won’t fabricate one. We also flagged the popular claim that Benjamin Franklin ran “18 hemp paper mills” as overstated; colonial paper was mostly linen and cotton rag. And across the series we debunked the greatest hits: the spurious Jefferson veranda quote (first seen online around 2008), the “Declaration on hemp paper” myth (it’s animal parchment), and the idea that any founder used cannabis recreationally (no primary-source evidence exists). Industrial hemp was everywhere in early America. Getting high off it was not the point — building a country was.
Eight founders. Eight strains. One declaration: we’d rather be right than be loud. Read the series, and meet the renegades who built the place.
