Mortgage Lifter (often called Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter) is one of the most famous and beloved heirloom tomatoes in American gardening history, renowned for both its flavor and the heartwarming Depression-era story behind it.
 
A vigorous, indeterminate heirloom tomato with tall (7–10 ft) vines needing strong support. Highly productive once fruit set begins, it produces huge, pink, mildly ribbed beefsteak fruits averaging 1–1½ lb., with dense, meaty, nearly seedless flesh and an exceptionally sweet, rich, low-acid flavor consistently ranked among the best-tasting tomatoes available.
 
 
HISTORY: In the heart of the Great Depression, in Logan, West Virginia, a radiator repairman named Marshall Cletis “M.C.” Byles—known locally as “Radiator Charlie”—decided to breed a tomato that could save his home. With no formal training in plant breeding and facing a $6,000 mortgage, Charlie used simple ingenuity: he selected the ten largest and best-tasting tomatoes he could find (including German Johnson, Beefsteak, and an unnamed Italian variety), planted them in a circle around a common small-fruited tomato as the pollen parent, and hand-pollinated using a baby’s ear syringe.
 
For six to seven years he repeated the process, always saving seed from the biggest, most flavorful fruits. By the late 1930s he had stabilized a remarkable new variety: a gigantic, pink, meaty beefsteak that regularly weighed over a pound and often reached two pounds or more. In 1940 he began selling the seedlings for $1 apiece—an astonishing price at the time—from the back of his shop at the foot of a steep mountain road. Word spread quickly, and gardeners drove hundreds of miles, lining up along the switchbacks, to buy Radiator Charlie’s plants.
 
Within about six years he had sold enough seedlings to completely pay off his $6,000 mortgage. The tomato earned its legendary name—Mortgage Lifter—and Charlie’s success story became one of the most enduring and beloved tales in American gardening history, still celebrated more than eighty years later.
 
Sold as a single plant in a 3.5" pot.