The story of the Boll Weevil

Did you ever hear a story about a transformation of epic proportions?

This is one that I heard several years ago from my good friend Phil.

It's certainly worth repeating.

The Monument

In the town of Enterprise, Alabama there stands a most unusual, almost surreal statue. It has an associated plaque which reads:

"Boll Weevil Monument - December 11,1919. In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity this monument was erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama."

The lady in the statue is holding aloft a Boll Weevil as something that had caused a transformation, bringing economic prosperity to the region.

Her white marble arms stretch high above its head. Braced in the beautiful woman’s hands is a round bowl,  on top of which is perched this enormous bug. It’s the image of a Boll Weevil, to be precise—about 50 pounds in statue form, but an insect normally smaller than a thumbnail.

Enterprise’s boll weevil statue dates back to 1919, when "a local merchant commissioned the marbled figure from an Italian sculptor. Originally, the classical statue held a fountain above her head; the insect wasn’t added for another 30 years."

The Boll Weevil is an insect which rapidly breeds and devastates cotton plantations. It is a beetle which feeds on cotton buds and flowers. Thought to be native to Central Mexico, it migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s, devastating the industry and the people working in the American South.

The monument could be just another piece of quirky memorabilia, a town honoring a small aspect of its heritage in a unique way. But the impact the boll weevil has had across the United States is anything but small—and is far from positive. "

"Since its arrival from Mexico in 1892, the weevil has cost the American cotton industry not less than $23 billion in losses and prompted the largest eradication effort in the nation's history." 

Dominic Reisig, a professor of entomology (an insect expert) at Carolina State University said:

“I cannot think of another insect that’s displaced so many people, changed the economy of rural America, and was so environmentally injurious that everybody clearly rallied around and said we have to get rid of it.”

So why all the celebration of this pesky bug?

What makes the boll weevil so monumental?

Why would any town want to honor such a pest with an expensive statue, let alone call it a herald of prosperity?

To understand that requires jumping back over 100 years in history, to when the insect first invaded American farmland.

Backgound

"The boll weevil, lives almost exclusively on cotton plants. In the early season, adults feed on cotton leaves and then puncture the cotton “square”—the pre-floral bud of the plant—to lay their eggs. When the eggs hatch, the grubs chew their way through everything inside, and by the time the plants open up, the cotton lint that should be present is largely gone. In a single season, one mating pair can produce 2 million offspring."

Economists confirm that within 5 years of contact, total cotton production declined by about 50 percent.

Quest to irradicate it

Farmers tried everything to get rid of the weevils: they planted early-maturing varieties of cotton in hopes that they could increase yields before the weevils got to them, experimented with arsenic sprays and powders, and burned their cotton stalks after harvesting.

The Enterprise story

But the boll weevil’s story was different in Enterprise. By 1909, the weevil had reached nearby Mobile County, Alabama. Like elsewhere, cotton was the main cash crop, and with the weevils now in their fields, farmers were getting smaller and smaller yields.

The Enterprise cotton gin ginned only 5,000 bales [in 1915] compared to 15,000 the year before,” says Doug Bradley, president of the Pea River Historical and Genealogical Society.

The Seed broker saviour

H.M. Sessions, a man who lived in town and acted as a seed broker to farmers in need, saw the devastation and knew he needed to act.

Farmers could switch to other crops that wouldn’t support the boll weevil, but cotton generated the highest profits and grew on marginal land—“sandy, well-drained land that not a lot of crops can tolerate,” Reisig explains. One of the few crops that could tolerate those conditions: peanuts.

After visiting North Carolina and Virginia, where he saw peanuts being grown, Sessions came back with peanut seeds and sold them to area farmer C. W. Baston.

“In 1916, Mr. Baston planted his entire crop in peanuts. That year, he earned $8,000 from his new crop, and paid off his prior years of debt and still had money left over.” 

At the same time, Coffee County cotton production was down to only 1,500 bales.

Devastation to diversification

Word of Baston’s success spread quickly. Farmers who had once scorned the idea of growing anything other than cotton jumped on the peanut wagon, and "by 1917 regional farmers produced over 1 million bushels of peanuts that sold for more than $5 million."

"By 1919—right when the boll weevil scourge was reaching its peak elsewhere in the South—Coffee County was the largest producer of peanuts in the country, and shortly thereafter became the first in the region to produce peanut oil."

Many who worked in the cotton fields in the ’40s and ’50s, remember seeing the weevils and witnessed the havoc they wreaked. But by that point, Enterprise had diversified its crops.

In addition to peanuts and cotton, there were potatoes, sugar cane, sorghum and tobacco. It was really thanks to the boll weevil that Coffee County diversified at all, which is why Enterprise erected a statue in its honor.

As for the rest of the South, efforts to combat the weevil continued throughout the 20th century.

Today, the weevil has been eradicated from 98 percent of U.S. cotton land across 15 Southern states and parts of northern Mexico.

The town of Enterprise, teaches us a valuable lesson about becoming a catalyst for change.

People ask the question "why build a statue to honor something that did so much destruction?” The monument was one to recognize the fact that it was the destructive boll weevil that caused farmers to seek a better cash crop to replace cotton: peanuts.

This story challenges the statement "that noone likes change but a wet baby."

Isn't it interesting that the first word in the Gospel is the word "change" or repent. If we are to combat the destructive forces of darkness, maybe it's our time to diversify, accept a radical change of heart and embrace the transformative Kingdom of light?

Selah.