The Great American Ginseng Rush

In 1824, the young United States shipped nearly 400 tons of ginseng across the ocean in a single year.

No trucks. No highways. Just families climbing into the Appalachian hills, digging a gnarled root by hand, and hauling it down rivers and across the sea to a market half a world away. The effort alone tells you how badly the world wanted it. This is America's almost forgotten ginseng rush.

A root the New World didn't know it had

Ginseng wasn't only an Asian story. A close cousin, American ginseng, grew wild in the forests of eastern North America, and Native peoples had long known the plant. The link to Asia was made in 1715, when a Jesuit missionary in North America connected the local root to the famous ginseng of the East. That single observation lit a fuse. If the wider world prized this root, and it grew wild in American soil, then the forest floor was suddenly paved with opportunity.

When Daniel Boone dug for "sang"

The names attached to early American ginseng read like a frontier hall of fame. The legendary woodsman Daniel Boone made a real part of his fortune not from furs alone but from ginseng. In the late 1780s he hired crews of "sangers" to gather the root and shipped barge-loads to market in Philadelphia.

The trade was so valuable that losing a load was a small catastrophe. In one often-told mishap, Boone is said to have lost tons of dried ginseng when his boat overturned in the rapids of a West Virginia river. A barge of roots, gone in the current. People didn't risk that for a worthless weed. They risked it because, pound for pound, "sang" was some of the most valuable cargo a backwoods family could carry.

The famous names on the ledger

The deeper you dig into early American history, the more ginseng turns up:

• George Washington
  Noted ginseng in his diary, encountering diggers hauling the root as he traveled the frontier.
• Daniel Boone
  The frontier legend traded ginseng by the barge-load and built part of his fortune on it.
• John Jacob Astor
  Often called America's first millionaire; ginseng exports to China were part of how he built his early fortune.

For ordinary mountain families, ginseng money was the difference between getting by and going without. Across Appalachia, digging "sang" in the autumn bought school shoes, salt, and winter staples. The root is so woven into the region that it left its mark on the map itself, in place names like Seng Branch and Sang Camp Creek.

Why this corner of history still resonates

Here's what's striking about all of it. Long before modern marketing, before supplements had an aisle, people on two continents went to extraordinary lengths for this root. They crossed oceans for it, built fortunes on it, and named their hills after it. A plant doesn't earn that kind of devotion by accident.

And through all of it, one origin held a special place. Of all the world's ginsengs, Korean ginseng was the one the trade treated as the standard, the original the others were measured against. The American rush was, in a sense, the world chasing a value that Korea had been cultivating for centuries.

That's the lineage Dr. Choi's belongs to. Our roots come from Geumsan, a historic heartland of Korean cultivation. The same root the world once crossed oceans for, made the traditional way, for your everyday.

This article is a historical and cultural overview drawn from published trade and folk histories and is for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice and makes no health claims. References to traditional uses are historical, not statements of effectiveness. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.