Honoring the Boll Weevil

On the Road 1 Minute

On a trip to Montgomery, I insisted Jim and I stop to see the boll weevil statue. Apparently it is the only monument built in the nation to honor an agricultural pest.

The City of Enterprise, Alabama, erected the Greek goddess holding up a large boll weevil beetle after the insect showed the wiregrass region the road to prosperity.

This happened when the pesky Mexican bug invaded and chomped its way through whole cotton fields and forced the area to find a new cash crop.

And peanuts proved so profitable that Enterprise is thriving to this day.

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Published by Robert Craig Waters

Robert Craig Waters is a Florida writer. After leaving journalism in the early 1980s, he worked as an attorney, communications director, and public spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee for 35 years. He grew up on a family farm in Beulah, Florida, not far from the Alabama border, before attending Brown University in the 1970s. His mother's family traces its roots to Weaverville, North Carolina. His father's family is from the small village of Burnt Corn, Alabama, where Mr. Waters spent part of his childhood.

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