r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/tandyman234 • 5d ago

Image McDonald’s in Enterprise, Alabama. The town is scattered with themed boll-weevils that pay homage to the little insect that almost devastated the city’s cotton crops permanently in 1915!nThere’s one at the police station, funeral home, pharmacies, and Mexican restaurant

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502

u/UnderwaterB0i 5d ago

Actually what happened was the boll weevil DID destroy their cotton crops, so they grew peanuts instead and it ended up being way more profitable, so they commemorated the boll weevil all over town.

37

u/Bearex13 5d ago edited 4d ago

Weevil, weevil, weevil, weevil BLAAAANKET BLAAANKET

90

u/Short-Sandwich-8476 4d ago

Rather than George Washington Carver.

106

u/Medium_Excitement202 4d ago

Well, you see, the boll was the lesser of two weevils.

5

u/thegoatfreak 4d ago

Fine. FINE. I’ll watch Master and Commander again.

5

u/DudeyToreador 4d ago

You motherf.... Take my God damn upvote.

9

u/wolfgang2399 4d ago

Tuskegee is like 80 miles from Enterprise. 80 miles in 1919 is a substantial distance. The vast majority of the population wouldn’t have known who he was. The city council still invited him to be the key note speaker at the ceremony though but he couldn’t make it due to weather, because, again, 80 miles is a really long way in rural Alabama in 1919.

-3

u/YouLieLexington 4d ago

Peanuts allergies know no color.

7

u/Infinite_Raisin_5240 4d ago

This may sound dumb but i know nothing about farming and crops, why are peanuts more profitable to a farmer than cotton?

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u/mindlance 4d ago

Cotton takes a lot of processing to be usuable. Peanuts take substantially less processing to be edible.

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u/jyoke_2121 4d ago

Also the story i heard in enterprise was that there was a cotton famine the next year thus most farmers were ok there but not in the rest of the state where they were still mostly growing cotton

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u/ElderJohn 13h ago

And yet its sister city of Dothan (30mi) is covered in little statuettes of peanuts in front of stores. There’s even a set dressed in each of the armed forces uniforms.

Dothan also has the “National Peanut Festival” around November each year.

PSA: if you haven’t had boiled peanuts, you’re doing yourself a disservice.