Mr. Jefferson, a Mammoth Cheese, and the "Wall of Separation Between Church and State": A Bicentennial Commemoration

Two hundred years ago, Pres Thomas Jefferson received as a gift a huge Cheshire cheese from a small Baptist community in western Massachusetts, which made the cheese to celebrate Jefferson's election and commemorate his devotion to religious liberty. Dreisbach compares this little-remembered event with an address on the same day in which Jefferson said that the First Amendment built "a wall of separation between church and state," a metaphor that still informs church-state discourse and policy today.