August 3, 2021 • 34 mins
Enterprise, Alabama is home to a fascinating statue honoring the boll weevil, a tiny creature that once wreaked havoc across cotton country. So what inspired the good people of Enterprise to erect a statue honoring the insect that almost destroyed their town? Learn more in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so much
as always for tuning in. That's our one and only
super producer, Max Williams over there. I'm ben Uh No,
I gotta ask you what's here. When's the last time
you went to Alabama? Well? I lived in Alabama for
a time, in the iron city of Birmingham, Alabama, known
(00:49):
for its historical production of iron. Uh. There's a big
statue of Vulcan, the I believe, the Roman god of
fire and therefore the forge. Uh. That's a big feature
in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. And there's a real cool like
disused iron works called Sloss Furnaces where they actually do concerts.
(01:11):
I think they still do it. But I went to
like a like a metal type festival. They're called Furnace
Fest back in the day. So I'm a little bit
familiar with Alabama. The main export of Birmingham wasn't really
historically cotton, though, which is definitely something that a lot
of the other parts of the state relied on heavily historically. Yeah, yeah,
and I wasn't where you live there. I'm gonna have
(01:33):
to pick your brains about it later. I just I
know we got to get on with the show. But
what what time period in your life was this? Both
of my brains, you're gonna that's very kind of you been.
You're really giving me a lot. I think I'm a
little on the left side. It was my senior year
in high school, so to date myself, that would have
been around two thousand and one. Nice. Nice, well, uh,
(01:56):
congratulations to you, Birmingham for having one of all our
favorite uh favorite folks as a resident of your town.
We do expect you to build a memorial or a statue,
some sort of aunorary real uh well, a commemorative thing,
you know, a little plaque where it's like so and
so lived here. Do you know something? I don't know, Ben,
(02:17):
your freaking no. No, I've going somewhere with this though,
because this is what in the business we call a segue.
You see, Alabama, like many of US states, is very
pro statue, very pro memorial, very pro honoring important places,
things and events, and Enterprise Alabama is no different. If
(02:41):
you find yourself in the town of Enterprise, Alabama, you
might be surprised to learn that amidst their statuary, you
will find a statue erected in nineteen nineteen dedicated to
a little bitty beetle known as the bowl Weevil. Yeah,
and like when I first heard about this, I was
(03:01):
really hoping it was going to be some sort of
like you know, monster movie type massive sculpture of a
bowl week because you know those things. When you see them,
they're tiny and not particularly offensive looking, but if you
go in with a microscope, they're terrifying. They have crazy
mandibles and you know, really really like some hr Geeger
type alien stuff, you know, on their own, not particularly intimidating,
(03:24):
but they don't really hang out on their own, do
they been They they swarm, They hang out on mass
and they literally were responsible for decimating more than twenty
three billion dollars of American cotton, at least in terms
of how it translated to profits. And I believe that's
with with inflation considered US correct. But yeah, it is
(03:46):
absolutely wild. They came to this country from Mexico in
eighteen two and absolutely um decimated people's livelihoods. So why
might you ask did this town that were I'd like,
I said, so heavily on exporting and selling cotton. Why
would they want to commemorate such a horrible time in
(04:08):
their history. Uh, you know, I can understand the statue
of vulcan you know, I mean, I un that's their industry.
It's something that you want to be proud of and
show that it's part of your heritage or whatever. But
why the bull weevil, by the way, similar vibes. It
is not a massive monster movie bowl weevil. It is
a Greek goddess. Yes, that used to be holding a
like fountain aloft I believe, but instead they removed the
(04:29):
fountain and replaced it with the humble bull weevil. Yep, yep,
you will find a statue of this Greek woman with
her arms stretched above her head holding a bull, and
on top of that is a fifty pounds statue of
a bull weevil. I should say she's holding a bowl
and a bo l l weevil is on top of that.
(04:51):
This is I'm so glad you asked, because this is
the point of today's episode, right. So we were looking
into this with some fantastic help from Lorraine Balsagnew over
at Smithsonian, from the good folks at Wall Street Journal,
and of course our pals over at mental Floss fun Fact.
(05:12):
Our research associate Gabe used to work for Mental Floss himself,
and here's here's what we found. Like you said, Noel,
this statue appears to be celebrating a tremendous economic disaster.
The habit, the chaos that this creature wrought not just
(05:33):
on enterprise Alabama, but a large swath of the Southern
economy was so profound that even today some scholars will argue,
you can't just measure the cost in terms of finance
adjusted for inflation. They say that the bull Weevil disaster
was one of these sparks that led to what we
(05:54):
know is the Great Migration, the movement of six million
African Americans from the US South to urban areas in
the US North. And that makes sense because people have
to move where their jobs are, and there tend to
be more jobs in cities. Yeah, it certainly made the
folks that you know came up with the Industrial Revolution
feel like they were pretty smart, because it was just
(06:14):
a couple of folks that came up with that whole thing.
It was to everybody knows that. Uh, but yeah, totally
backchecking really quickly, I said, they removed the fountain, but
in fact, then the fountain was that bowl you speak up, um,
So they literally just perched the bulweevil add on on
top of that of that pre existing bow bull. So
so why why is the bull weevil so interested in cottonal?
(06:40):
I mean like to And I think that's part of
our that's part of what we have to answer when
we're answering how the statue came to be. Right, the
reason the bull weevil is uh such a character in
American history is for its insatiable appetite for and very specialized.
It's a real key eater. It only likes the very
(07:02):
silky fibrous bits inside of the bowl of the cotton,
which is that seed pot that everything you know kind
of springs from. Um. It is officially scientifically known as
autonomous grandest and as I said earlier, came from Mexico,
and it lives pretty much exclusively on cotton plants um
(07:24):
and every planting season or every cotton season, Uh, the
adults feed on the leaves and then they eat into
the cotton. It's called the cotton square, which is the bud.
When they say nipping in the bud, that's what they're
talking about. But you know, you don't want to nip
the cotton in the bugs. If you nip that budge,
you get no cotton. So it's the part that happens
before the plant flowers and they lay their eggs, and
(07:47):
then those eggs hatch, and it's the little babies, the
grubs that like eat their way out of the cotton
bowl from the inside like alien style, like literally like
face hugger style. They plant the seed inside of the
thing and then it eats its way out, killing the
thing and in the process. And if you're cotton, no
one can hear you scream to paraphrase, uh some horrid
(08:09):
You're welcome, Max, You're welcome. I saw that. I don't
think I'm not watching you or recording. Cotton screams are
very muffled. They are so uh nailed it. So we know,
we know, like you said, no, that the bullweevil originated
in Mexico, but we don't really know when and how
(08:32):
it got to the US because these little guys can't
fly very long distances. They were first they were first
spotted in Texas, like you said back in two they
saw have a mysterious origin story in Texas. But we
know despite their lack of long distance transportation. They were
(08:53):
incredibly effective. According to Fabian Lang, Alan Olmstead, and Paul W. Rowe,
three economists who sort of vultron up together for this.
They they say that within five years of the bull
weavil landing state side, total cotton production, all of the
cotton production in the US declined by at least or
(09:16):
around totally and so consequently land values took a dive
and the U. S d. A chief in the Bureau
of Plant Industry, called them a wave of evil. Um,
which is not I mean, it's not terribly hyperbolic. I mean,
this really was doing great evil to people's lives and
their ability to earn for their families. Um. This is
(09:38):
a nineteen o three, by the way, and it just
got worse. By nineteen twenty or the early nineteen twenties,
bullweevils were absolutely wrecking shop in the South. This is
really interesting. I didn't know this, but in the Smithsonian
mag article we reference, uh, they talk about the kind
of life cycle of the bowlweevil, and you know, in
the cold season they're actually able to hibernate and kind
(09:59):
of go dormant in woods wooded areas nearby. They like
to live in things like Spanish moss and even debris
I guess, sort of like dead leaves and such um.
And then they you know, wake up and find their
way back to the fields and just you know, have
a have a real go of it. I'm laughing because
I think the specific phrase the Smithsonian uses is field
(10:23):
trash and uh, that's what That's what Max, who is
a big sports fan, uh calls it when fans of
opposing sports teams make it onto the field, right Max.
And the what you call them called field trashs absolutely not.
I don't know where you get that from. Okay, I
mean when I when I was in little league baseball,
I was field trash. I was like the you know
(10:45):
outfielder that just was a total turd and just didn't
really do anything, just kind of stood there. I would
say that would be a good example of a field trash.
I was, you know, I was in little league and uh,
I caught a fly ball once that was my own. Wait,
and I hit I did hit one home run, so
I got one for one and then I was out
of the game. You're welcome, other athletes. Is that the
(11:08):
one where you just kind of stuck your mitt out
and it just sort of found its way to you.
It's always a beautiful moment in the game and the
in the movies or whatever where the kind of ineffectual
outfielder gets his moment of glory literally just by shoving
his fist out into the air and it just kind
of finds its right right into that mip. I was
so out of it. I was so unexpected for me
to actually catch a ball, because you know, they stick
kids like us in the outfield for a reason. When
(11:29):
I caught the ball, I wasn't sure what to do.
I was like, it was like when you get to
a new level of a video, just one catching the ball.
Just what it's like. It's like if you only knew
the first part of CPR, you know what I mean,
You're not getting the job done. But the bullweevils certainly were.
And at this point there was path dependency for the farmers.
(11:51):
They literally could not afford to move to a different crop,
so they tried increasingly desperate solutions to get rid of
these weavils. This is happening across the cotton growing area
of the US, so they said, okay, maybe we can
get uh cotton that grows up more quickly. Maybe we
can spray some kinds of early pesticides on this, Maybe
(12:15):
we can burn the cotton at the right time. Theodore
Roosevelt was even like, I know, these pretty nasty ants
from Guatemala, but probably we evils. It sounds like a
great idea, Theodore Roosevelt. Let's just introduce like the murder
ants into the equation. That'll totally give the It's one
of those things where it's like the solution ends up
being worse than the problem. Um. But here's the thing.
(12:36):
You know, it seems as though enterprise kind of got
wise to this because again, we knew about this, or
at least, you know, American farmers knew about this for
going on twenty years, or at this point it was
almost ten years. So by nineteen o nine, Mobile Alabama,
Mobile County, Alabama rather had started to really feel the
sting of the dreaded bowl weevil, and like many other
(12:58):
places in the rural South, cotton was their main export,
their main cash crop, and now that they had the
weevils in the mix, these yields were getting smaller and
smaller and smaller. The numbers nationally really do match up
on what was going on more granularly in all these
(13:20):
individual areas. For sure. In nineteen fourteen, the Cotton gin
At Enterprise, Alabama processed around fifteen thousand bales of cotton,
and just the next year nine that number plummeted down
to five thousand bales. This comes to us from Doug Bradley,
(13:40):
president of the p River Historical and Genealogical Society. It's
p P e A. Just so you're not thinking, this
is like a river that everyone PE's in, right, right,
good note, good note. And so this this is strange
because according to Wall Street Journal, there was one guy
who lived in town named h Alm Sessions. I can't
say it with out really leaning into the southern accent.
(14:02):
He was, and he was a seed broker who you know,
sold sold seats to farmers. And he said, well, something
must be done. And uh he thought he realized the problem.
You know, Let's see, you're a farmer, you got cotton.
You can switch to another crop because the bowl weevil
(14:24):
has a very specific diet. It's a chooesy eater. But
the problem is cotton didn't just generate the highest profits.
It also grew on land that was unsuitable for a
lot of other crops, right, I mean that was the
thing that was done anyway, I think like crop rotation,
where you would like rotate out crops so that the
soil wouldn't get like totally decimated by one particular crop,
(14:47):
because I think things require different types of I'm not,
obviously not a farmer, but I know crop rotation was
already a popular method for making sure that you kept
your soil in good shape. Um, so this was more
of a move of death biration to be like, Okay,
we really need to up the anti on this rotation significantly.
But you're right. Then, the soil they were dealing with
was sandy and particularly dry soil, so there weren't a
(15:12):
ton of other crops that could handle that not incredibly
fertile soil. And one of them, the coold was peanuts. Yeah, exactly.
So picture agricultural crops as tenants in a neighborhood. Cotton
and peanuts are two of the tenants that can live
in a rough neighborhood and still be fine. So our
(15:33):
guy Sessions goes to visit North Carolina and Virginia and
then he sees peanuts being grown. This is largely, to
be sure, due to the efforts of George Washington Carver.
Sessions is on board. He gets sold and he comes back,
rememberies of seed broker. He comes back with peanuts seeds,
and that's when he sells them to a farmer in
(15:53):
the area named C. W. Boston. I can't believe we
didn't make this parallel. We just did the episode about
the uh potato evangelist in France. His name is already
giving me but he kind of was the like potato
equivalent of George Washington Carver Parmentier, I believe that's the man.
But sure, right, so we know George Washington Carver was
all about how diverse and useful and um versatile the
(16:18):
peanut was. So it was already starting to be on
the radars of a lot of farmers around the time.
And this guy Baston is willing to take a gamble
on peanuts. He doesn't. He doesn't just doubled out. He
turns his entire crop toward peanuts. He's not he's out
of the cotton game. He's spending the whole year of
(16:39):
nineteen sixteen just growing peanuts. And in the end, no,
he ends up walking away with eight thousand dollars in profit,
he could still pay off the debt he had racked
up during this ongoing bullweevil disaster and have money left over.
(16:59):
If we could inflation calculate, we'll see, we'll see some
interesting numbers here. So what do you say we we
fire up, fire up the old inflation calculator. Here, can
I get a boot? There we go. And so if
(17:19):
we calculate this, now, what we see is that eight
thousand dollars in nineteen sixteen had the purchasing power of
get this on four hundred and nine dollars and cents.
Can you believe it? Almost two hundred thousand dollars. Basically
imagine being someone else who's a farmer in enterprise at
(17:42):
that area. Like that is the talk of the town.
People who once said, you know, cotton is the way
to go are immediately a hundred percent on board with peanuts. Right, Yeah,
it's true. And by nineteen seventeen, farmers in the area
produced over a million bushels of peanuts that's sold for
more than five million dollars. And our boy Bradley from
(18:05):
the Pee River Society, UM, he has memories actually of
working in the cotton fields when he was a young boy,
in the forties and fifties, because I mean, it wasn't
like things completely pivoted away from cotton. There was still
a huge thing, and the bullw weevils were absolutely still
a scourge that late in the game in the nineties
and fifties, but he remembers seeing how awful it was,
(18:28):
and he said, by that point, Enterprise uniquely had diversified
even beyond peanuts into potatoes, sugarcane, tobacco, and sorghum. I
always forget exactly what sorghum is. You can use it
to make bread, uh, you can use it in couscous. Uh.
You can also make some different kinds of beverages with it,
(18:49):
and some people eat it as a fresh vegetable. Yeah,
it looks kind of like a grain, and I guess
it comes off the buds in these tiny little pods
that almost looked like couscous already or like uh, risotto
or something right exactly, So people were people were into
this and they had experienced of financial rebound. Folks looked
(19:09):
around and said, you know, we wouldn't have reached this
level of success or diversity if we hadn't been forced
to change our tune due to the bull weevil. So
as peanuts become you know, number one with a bang
in Coffee County, where Enterprise Alabama is located. There's a
guy who comes to the picture named Roscoe Owen Fleming,
(19:31):
and he says, and we think he was joking at first,
by the way he says, you know what we should do.
We should really just own up to it, the bull.
We will save the town, right, folks, Let's make a
statue about it. And and uh, he's even though he
said this is a joke, it caught on, and you know,
all those conversations go Eventually. Fleming is like doubling down.
(19:55):
He's the guy who buys that original statue of the
Grecian woman and he gets it from Italy. And I
think originally she was holding something else over her head,
right Aha, Ben see, I I shouldn't have corrected myself
in the first place. So there was something else in
the bowl before the weevil made its appearance, and it
was like a trophy. And so the trophy is what
(20:16):
the fountain was, and the bowl just caught the excess
overflow water. Um, so okay, I was I was right
in the first place. Sorry about that, but Yeah, that's
exactly right. It was this kind of flowing classic Greek
goddess type figure holding this trophy over over her head,
and there were two street lights next to it, and
kind of an array that lit up this you know,
(20:37):
column um that she was standing on. It was around
thirteen feet tall, and it was three thousand dollars to
erect at the time, including materials today that'd be roughly
a forty grand, and it was personally paid out of
Fleming's own pocket for the most part. Yeah, talk about
committing to the bit. Huh. Now, we've had we've had
(20:59):
our kind of in jokes that we go with, but
I don't think any of us has ever put forty
grand down on it yet. We'll see, so you're absolutely right.
December eleventh, nineteen nineteen, there's a dedication ceremony. A ton
of people show up, five thousand people. George Washington Carver
was scheduled to speak at it about the you know,
(21:20):
thanking the bullweevil, extolling the glory of the peanut, but
unfortunately floods complicated his transit and he wasn't unable to
make it, but they still partied. It wasn't until thirty
years after this dedication ceremony that someone said, Hey, you know,
it's weird. We got a statue that's all about the
(21:42):
Bowl Weevil, but we don't have a Bowl Weevil on
our Bowl Weevil Appreciation statue. Yeah, so they popped one
up there, um and uh, it kind of made it
a bit of a target for vandals and you know,
people wanted to pull pranks and all that. So it
was something that was on occasion damaged and it actually
(22:02):
has been stolen, which is interesting. I wonder how they
have just like pride it off or whatever. That seems
like a lot of effort. It does, it does, and
it's weird what what people will do to vandalize statues.
You know, my grandfather's region was a regional sculptor and
he had a statue in a bank where somebody stole
the head and he suspected frat rose. But yeah, so
(22:24):
this was this was stolen and the the original one
was first stole in the nineteen fifties. It was never found,
which means the odds are that there is someone, maybe
even in Enterprise, Alabama, who has a fifty pound statue
of a bull weevil. Today. It reminds me of isn't
(22:49):
there a plot in The Simpsons where the statue of
Jebediah Springfield's head is removed? Yes, yes, your spot odd,
which just shows us that this is a not uncommon practice.
And so what what the city did when the original
guy was stolen is they said, all right, we're gonna
replace this bullweevil. We're gonna make it larger, we're gonna
(23:12):
make it more anatomically correct, and uh several you know,
a couple of decades past, nineteen four, thieves strike again,
but this time they don't steal just the bull weevil.
Do they know it's true? Yeah, we're talking the seventies now.
It seems like they had a good little period of
of peace towards the statue. But in nineteen seventy four,
(23:35):
you know, in the same way they needed a double
down by making a bigger and better bulwevil. The thieves
had to double down to you know, they had to
one up their their predecessors. And they didn't just steal
the weevil. They stole the whole damn thing, the whole statue,
which is imp you know, just logistically, it's it's it
would be a real feat to pull off and not
(23:56):
to get caught in the act, right, that's you have
to get a jack m are something to get that
thing out of the ground. It is much more difficult
than that heist of potatoes that we talked about in
our partimentier episode, you know where we where we got
together and the guards let us get away. These guys
made off with a whole statue anyhow, and they get it.
The town gets it back, but it's badly damaged because
(24:19):
it turns out, you know, stealing a statue under cover
of night is kind of tough and you have to
move quickly. Just the bug gets stolen, they just take
the evil again again and it also disappears, which means
I pause it that it is possible someone maybe in
the area of Enterprise, Alabama, has not one, but two
(24:42):
ginormous statues of a bowl weevil. At this point, it's
probably getting weird when you have to explain that to
your friends as they come over. No joke or it's
a point of pride, and you have it like prominently
featured in your living room. Exactly is that? Well, do
come into the hall. I believe a Ganda will explain
(25:03):
it all because they still talked like that. Sure which
is where we are now, because they finally were like,
you know, the people that have to deal with this
stuff understandably, we're a little bit fed up. So they
moved it to a museum, you know, so it could
be like guarded um. And in its place, they created
(25:24):
a resin replica that was made from a cast that
was used to make another replica as they submission to
the Southern History Exhibit at the nineteen ninety Summer Olympics
here in Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah, and b oh and by
the way, was also stolen again in nineteen two. Like
this went on for a while, but the resident, the
(25:45):
resident replica seems to be the solution here. And if
you are planning to make your own Bullweevil heist, do
be warned. The Bullweevil Statue and Enterprise, Alabama is now
monitored twenty four seven by security cameras, which I think
means there just might be a real Mexican get a
(26:08):
dumb sound crime movie sound cube Bull Weevil Force law.
And it's very specific. It's very specific. You wouldn't it
went to seven seas now, you would? Uh, it didn't
seem like it jumped the shark though. Around season three
that's gonna lie. It seems like they were coasting a
(26:30):
little bit, but it's it's a really interesting story. And
today the bull weevil is still a thing. Like, we
didn't completely eradicate this, Uh, the species of insect that
you know feeds exclusively on the cotton, the copious amounts
of cotton that are still planted and harvested in the
South today. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely right. This this is
(26:50):
a serious issue and it's gone on for decades and
eventually scientists realized that they could influence insects behaviors by
exposing them to send athetic pheromones. These pheromones were used
to lure the weevils into traps and then from there
they were sprayed with pesticides. Thankfully, the weevil has been
(27:10):
eradicated from nine percent of the what's called the cotton
land where they grow cotton in the US and in
parts of northern Mexico. Yeah, but that two percent still
like there's the most hardcore of the weevils because they're
obviously what resistant or they just you know, you can't
lure me with those fake you know la la scents. No, no,
thank you. I will eat your cotton if you please,
(27:32):
it's funny. There's I mean, that's practically but I still
gotta wonder about the last remaining three percent, the last
stand of the bull Weevil. You know, it's funny. Been
in my hometown in Augusta, Georgia, which I don't believe
was necessarily a huge cotton producing town. But there's a
little cafe called the Bullweevil and they have a really
lovely selection of cakes and pies. Um. And then they're
(27:56):
shaped shaped like bowl weevils. Not the pies or the cakes. No,
they have a little cartoon bowlweevil mascot that I always
thought was very uh, let's just say hideous. Um. But
it's something I remember growing up, and I was like, oh, okay,
I guess this is like a tongue in cheek way
of acknowledging something that was, you know, ultimately very disastrous.
But it seems like Enterprise Alabama with a name like enterprise,
(28:18):
you've gotta be enterprising. It seems like they made a
they turned lemons into lemonade or bowlweevils into weavenade. Yeah,
that's that's a thing. Oh no, I agree, I thought
you landed that one. The also, uh, a lot of
this is coming from a professor of entomology at North
Carolina State University named Dominic re Sick, who is a
(28:38):
go to authority on this, and you can find him
interviewed in the Smithsonian that we mentioned earlier, as well
as the several other places for him. For re Sich,
this is a story of a town beating the odds,
beating enormous odds, and also getting assistance from government, from scientists.
Everybody was on ward with fixing this problem, which doesn't
(29:02):
always happen. So there's a lot of fortune in here
wrapped up in this misfortune. And if you ask Bradley
the p River story we mentioned earlier, we asked, if
you ask him what the lesson is, what the takeaway is,
he would say, so many people think, why did you
build a statue to honor something that did so much destruction?
It was more to recognize the fact that the bullweevil
(29:25):
cause farmers to seek a better cash crop to replace cotton. Yeah,
and to this day, enterprise is really leaning into that history.
And it's also kind of lucky because you know how
a lot of statues and monuments that were so fond
of here in the South again pulled down because it
turns out there a little more than a little racist
uh not a racist bone in the stone body. That
(29:45):
is the Bowl Weevil statue. Yeah yea. And Alabama is
still a big producer of peanuts. And if you go
to Enterprise right now, Enterprise Alabama, not the rental car place,
then you can they'll see this statue. And uh, you
can find pictures of it online. It's uh, it's it's
(30:07):
an interesting reason to build a statue, and honestly, I
think it's a pretty cool reason. I think Roscoe would
be impressed that his joke had expanded so well over
the decades. And you know another thing we love in
the South is a good summer festival, uh, and they
have one there in Enterprise, the annual Bowl Weevil Fall Festival,
(30:29):
where a fall a follow or a summer festival, whatever,
they're both equally good. Prefer a fall festival personally because
the weather is nicer. But that is on October of
this year, so if you want to, you can go
on over to visit Enterprise dot com and look up
vendors and all that good stuff will be at the
two thousand twenty one Bowl Weevil Festival, So mark your
(30:50):
calendars folks, and let us and let us know if
you have any stories that are similar to this from
your neck of the Globe woods. What a ride? No,
I I don't know if I've ever seen a Bowlweevil
in person? Have you know? But you say what a ride?
And I immediately picture like a Bowlweevil themed you know,
(31:11):
Tilt a Whirl at the Bowlwevil Festival. That'd be fun.
It's funny you say that. I've been trying to figure
out a place to pitch this, so I'll just do
it now. Is we're wrapping up, you know, they are
all these amusement parks, right, I was thinking, what do
you what do you guys think of? Like a confusedment park?
Go on? So, so like tell me that ends. There's
(31:34):
there's bigger stuff next, put your hand down. There's uh,
there's more to it than that. I am just still
working out some of the details. You know, what are
the rides? Like? What? Like? You you could go a
million directions. Well, it reminds me of this really cool
art collective called Me a Wolf that started out just
doing like this one particular installation in San Antonio, Texas
(31:55):
or Santa Fe. Rather, excuse me, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
and they did this like basically weird artsy psychedelic haunted house.
They got so popular that George RR. Martin caught wind
of it and like bought them a bowling alley. So
they did essentially what you're describing, sort of an indoor
weird Alice in Wonderland type art slash amusement situation. And
(32:16):
they got so popular, especially a documentary about this collective,
that they have gone completely corporate and they have like
a fake grocery store in Vegas that's like I forget
what it's called, but it's like got all the products
are weird and psychedelic and strange and very like that. Um,
what's that thing they used to do the deep dream,
you know, like the weird filtered googly I like psychedelic
(32:38):
dogs on everything. Not quite like that, but it's got
definitely like it's like an Alice in Wonderland grocery store.
And then they have ones in Dubai and there's ones
and I believe l A anyway, it's a massive undertaking.
So they might have beaten you to the punch on
the confusement park, Ben, but I'm sure that you can
come up with something to make it stand alone. Right,
we got, we got Today, We're gonna we're gonna ask
(33:00):
you for help. Ridiculous Histories as always, thank you for
tuning in. Uh, if you're with meal Wolf, you know,
let's have a conversation. If you're George rr Martin, or
if you're just a fan of a show, let us
know what should be in a confusement park. Very interested
to hear the very interested to hear the answers, and nol.
I hope that Neal Wolf builds a builds a little
(33:22):
pop up over here at our fairte Metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia.
These are really high production value and like you know,
permanent installations, but they do do little one off events
here and there, so that would be super cool. But yeah,
let us know what are your confusement park ideas. What
are your experiences with the Bowlweevil or like farming or whatever?
You can write us. It's true. We've confirmed this at
Ridiculous at I heart media dot com. Uh, swear to
(33:45):
god it works. Give it a try, test us put
us to the test. You can also find us on
the internet. We've got the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group. It's
a lot of fun meme sharing and his conversations around
new episodes and all of that. And you can also
find Ben and I individually as human people on the Internet.
I am how now Noel Brown on Instagram and you
can find me on Instagram as well, getting into all
(34:05):
kinds of misadventures at my handle at Ben bullan bow
l I n Thanks as always to Casey Pagraham, Thanks
as always to Max Williams uh and I got I
gotta say it, thanks her own old people who made
the town of our show a little bit better. Yep.
(34:26):
Jonathan Stricklin, Yeah, that's what. That's what I always Where
were you going eats? Because he eats us alive from
the inside. Yes, we're overdue to hang out with him again. Yep,
overdu Indeed, we'll see you next time. Books For more
(34:47):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you so much
as always for tuning in. That's our one and only
super producer, Max Williams over there. I'm ben Uh No,
I gotta ask you what's here. When's the last time
you went to Alabama? Well? I lived in Alabama for
a time, in the iron city of Birmingham, Alabama, known
(00:49):
for its historical production of iron. Uh. There's a big
statue of Vulcan, the I believe, the Roman god of
fire and therefore the forge. Uh. That's a big feature
in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. And there's a real cool like
disused iron works called Sloss Furnaces where they actually do concerts.
(01:11):
I think they still do it. But I went to
like a like a metal type festival. They're called Furnace
Fest back in the day. So I'm a little bit
familiar with Alabama. The main export of Birmingham wasn't really
historically cotton, though, which is definitely something that a lot
of the other parts of the state relied on heavily historically. Yeah, yeah,
and I wasn't where you live there. I'm gonna have
(01:33):
to pick your brains about it later. I just I
know we got to get on with the show. But
what what time period in your life was this? Both
of my brains, you're gonna that's very kind of you been.
You're really giving me a lot. I think I'm a
little on the left side. It was my senior year
in high school, so to date myself, that would have
been around two thousand and one. Nice. Nice, well, uh,
(01:56):
congratulations to you, Birmingham for having one of all our
favorite uh favorite folks as a resident of your town.
We do expect you to build a memorial or a statue,
some sort of aunorary real uh well, a commemorative thing,
you know, a little plaque where it's like so and
so lived here. Do you know something? I don't know, Ben,
(02:17):
your freaking no. No, I've going somewhere with this though,
because this is what in the business we call a segue.
You see, Alabama, like many of US states, is very
pro statue, very pro memorial, very pro honoring important places,
things and events, and Enterprise Alabama is no different. If
(02:41):
you find yourself in the town of Enterprise, Alabama, you
might be surprised to learn that amidst their statuary, you
will find a statue erected in nineteen nineteen dedicated to
a little bitty beetle known as the bowl Weevil. Yeah,
and like when I first heard about this, I was
(03:01):
really hoping it was going to be some sort of
like you know, monster movie type massive sculpture of a
bowl week because you know those things. When you see them,
they're tiny and not particularly offensive looking, but if you
go in with a microscope, they're terrifying. They have crazy
mandibles and you know, really really like some hr Geeger
type alien stuff, you know, on their own, not particularly intimidating,
(03:24):
but they don't really hang out on their own, do
they been They they swarm, They hang out on mass
and they literally were responsible for decimating more than twenty
three billion dollars of American cotton, at least in terms
of how it translated to profits. And I believe that's
with with inflation considered US correct. But yeah, it is
(03:46):
absolutely wild. They came to this country from Mexico in
eighteen two and absolutely um decimated people's livelihoods. So why
might you ask did this town that were I'd like,
I said, so heavily on exporting and selling cotton. Why
would they want to commemorate such a horrible time in
(04:08):
their history. Uh, you know, I can understand the statue
of vulcan you know, I mean, I un that's their industry.
It's something that you want to be proud of and
show that it's part of your heritage or whatever. But
why the bull weevil, by the way, similar vibes. It
is not a massive monster movie bowl weevil. It is
a Greek goddess. Yes, that used to be holding a
like fountain aloft I believe, but instead they removed the
(04:29):
fountain and replaced it with the humble bull weevil. Yep, yep,
you will find a statue of this Greek woman with
her arms stretched above her head holding a bull, and
on top of that is a fifty pounds statue of
a bull weevil. I should say she's holding a bowl
and a bo l l weevil is on top of that.
(04:51):
This is I'm so glad you asked, because this is
the point of today's episode, right. So we were looking
into this with some fantastic help from Lorraine Balsagnew over
at Smithsonian, from the good folks at Wall Street Journal,
and of course our pals over at mental Floss fun Fact.
(05:12):
Our research associate Gabe used to work for Mental Floss himself,
and here's here's what we found. Like you said, Noel,
this statue appears to be celebrating a tremendous economic disaster.
The habit, the chaos that this creature wrought not just
(05:33):
on enterprise Alabama, but a large swath of the Southern
economy was so profound that even today some scholars will argue,
you can't just measure the cost in terms of finance
adjusted for inflation. They say that the bull Weevil disaster
was one of these sparks that led to what we
(05:54):
know is the Great Migration, the movement of six million
African Americans from the US South to urban areas in
the US North. And that makes sense because people have
to move where their jobs are, and there tend to
be more jobs in cities. Yeah, it certainly made the
folks that you know came up with the Industrial Revolution
feel like they were pretty smart, because it was just
(06:14):
a couple of folks that came up with that whole thing.
It was to everybody knows that. Uh, but yeah, totally
backchecking really quickly, I said, they removed the fountain, but
in fact, then the fountain was that bowl you speak up, um,
So they literally just perched the bulweevil add on on
top of that of that pre existing bow bull. So
so why why is the bull weevil so interested in cottonal?
(06:40):
I mean like to And I think that's part of
our that's part of what we have to answer when
we're answering how the statue came to be. Right, the
reason the bull weevil is uh such a character in
American history is for its insatiable appetite for and very specialized.
It's a real key eater. It only likes the very
(07:02):
silky fibrous bits inside of the bowl of the cotton,
which is that seed pot that everything you know kind
of springs from. Um. It is officially scientifically known as
autonomous grandest and as I said earlier, came from Mexico,
and it lives pretty much exclusively on cotton plants um
(07:24):
and every planting season or every cotton season, Uh, the
adults feed on the leaves and then they eat into
the cotton. It's called the cotton square, which is the bud.
When they say nipping in the bud, that's what they're
talking about. But you know, you don't want to nip
the cotton in the bugs. If you nip that budge,
you get no cotton. So it's the part that happens
before the plant flowers and they lay their eggs, and
(07:47):
then those eggs hatch, and it's the little babies, the
grubs that like eat their way out of the cotton
bowl from the inside like alien style, like literally like
face hugger style. They plant the seed inside of the
thing and then it eats its way out, killing the
thing and in the process. And if you're cotton, no
one can hear you scream to paraphrase, uh some horrid
(08:09):
You're welcome, Max, You're welcome. I saw that. I don't
think I'm not watching you or recording. Cotton screams are
very muffled. They are so uh nailed it. So we know,
we know, like you said, no, that the bullweevil originated
in Mexico, but we don't really know when and how
(08:32):
it got to the US because these little guys can't
fly very long distances. They were first they were first
spotted in Texas, like you said back in two they
saw have a mysterious origin story in Texas. But we
know despite their lack of long distance transportation. They were
(08:53):
incredibly effective. According to Fabian Lang, Alan Olmstead, and Paul W. Rowe,
three economists who sort of vultron up together for this.
They they say that within five years of the bull
weavil landing state side, total cotton production, all of the
cotton production in the US declined by at least or
(09:16):
around totally and so consequently land values took a dive
and the U. S d. A chief in the Bureau
of Plant Industry, called them a wave of evil. Um,
which is not I mean, it's not terribly hyperbolic. I mean,
this really was doing great evil to people's lives and
their ability to earn for their families. Um. This is
(09:38):
a nineteen o three, by the way, and it just
got worse. By nineteen twenty or the early nineteen twenties,
bullweevils were absolutely wrecking shop in the South. This is
really interesting. I didn't know this, but in the Smithsonian
mag article we reference, uh, they talk about the kind
of life cycle of the bowlweevil, and you know, in
the cold season they're actually able to hibernate and kind
(09:59):
of go dormant in woods wooded areas nearby. They like
to live in things like Spanish moss and even debris
I guess, sort of like dead leaves and such um.
And then they you know, wake up and find their
way back to the fields and just you know, have
a have a real go of it. I'm laughing because
I think the specific phrase the Smithsonian uses is field
(10:23):
trash and uh, that's what That's what Max, who is
a big sports fan, uh calls it when fans of
opposing sports teams make it onto the field, right Max.
And the what you call them called field trashs absolutely not.
I don't know where you get that from. Okay, I
mean when I when I was in little league baseball,
I was field trash. I was like the you know
(10:45):
outfielder that just was a total turd and just didn't
really do anything, just kind of stood there. I would
say that would be a good example of a field trash.
I was, you know, I was in little league and uh,
I caught a fly ball once that was my own. Wait,
and I hit I did hit one home run, so
I got one for one and then I was out
of the game. You're welcome, other athletes. Is that the
(11:08):
one where you just kind of stuck your mitt out
and it just sort of found its way to you.
It's always a beautiful moment in the game and the
in the movies or whatever where the kind of ineffectual
outfielder gets his moment of glory literally just by shoving
his fist out into the air and it just kind
of finds its right right into that mip. I was
so out of it. I was so unexpected for me
to actually catch a ball, because you know, they stick
kids like us in the outfield for a reason. When
(11:29):
I caught the ball, I wasn't sure what to do.
I was like, it was like when you get to
a new level of a video, just one catching the ball.
Just what it's like. It's like if you only knew
the first part of CPR, you know what I mean,
You're not getting the job done. But the bullweevils certainly were.
And at this point there was path dependency for the farmers.
(11:51):
They literally could not afford to move to a different crop,
so they tried increasingly desperate solutions to get rid of
these weavils. This is happening across the cotton growing area
of the US, so they said, okay, maybe we can
get uh cotton that grows up more quickly. Maybe we
can spray some kinds of early pesticides on this, Maybe
(12:15):
we can burn the cotton at the right time. Theodore
Roosevelt was even like, I know, these pretty nasty ants
from Guatemala, but probably we evils. It sounds like a
great idea, Theodore Roosevelt. Let's just introduce like the murder
ants into the equation. That'll totally give the It's one
of those things where it's like the solution ends up
being worse than the problem. Um. But here's the thing.
(12:36):
You know, it seems as though enterprise kind of got
wise to this because again, we knew about this, or
at least, you know, American farmers knew about this for
going on twenty years, or at this point it was
almost ten years. So by nineteen o nine, Mobile Alabama,
Mobile County, Alabama rather had started to really feel the
sting of the dreaded bowl weevil, and like many other
(12:58):
places in the rural South, cotton was their main export,
their main cash crop, and now that they had the
weevils in the mix, these yields were getting smaller and
smaller and smaller. The numbers nationally really do match up
on what was going on more granularly in all these
(13:20):
individual areas. For sure. In nineteen fourteen, the Cotton gin
At Enterprise, Alabama processed around fifteen thousand bales of cotton,
and just the next year nine that number plummeted down
to five thousand bales. This comes to us from Doug Bradley,
(13:40):
president of the p River Historical and Genealogical Society. It's
p P e A. Just so you're not thinking, this
is like a river that everyone PE's in, right, right,
good note, good note. And so this this is strange
because according to Wall Street Journal, there was one guy
who lived in town named h Alm Sessions. I can't
say it with out really leaning into the southern accent.
(14:02):
He was, and he was a seed broker who you know,
sold sold seats to farmers. And he said, well, something
must be done. And uh he thought he realized the problem.
You know, Let's see, you're a farmer, you got cotton.
You can switch to another crop because the bowl weevil
(14:24):
has a very specific diet. It's a chooesy eater. But
the problem is cotton didn't just generate the highest profits.
It also grew on land that was unsuitable for a
lot of other crops, right, I mean that was the
thing that was done anyway, I think like crop rotation,
where you would like rotate out crops so that the
soil wouldn't get like totally decimated by one particular crop,
(14:47):
because I think things require different types of I'm not,
obviously not a farmer, but I know crop rotation was
already a popular method for making sure that you kept
your soil in good shape. Um, so this was more
of a move of death biration to be like, Okay,
we really need to up the anti on this rotation significantly.
But you're right. Then, the soil they were dealing with
was sandy and particularly dry soil, so there weren't a
(15:12):
ton of other crops that could handle that not incredibly
fertile soil. And one of them, the coold was peanuts. Yeah, exactly.
So picture agricultural crops as tenants in a neighborhood. Cotton
and peanuts are two of the tenants that can live
in a rough neighborhood and still be fine. So our
(15:33):
guy Sessions goes to visit North Carolina and Virginia and
then he sees peanuts being grown. This is largely, to
be sure, due to the efforts of George Washington Carver.
Sessions is on board. He gets sold and he comes back,
rememberies of seed broker. He comes back with peanuts seeds,
and that's when he sells them to a farmer in
(15:53):
the area named C. W. Boston. I can't believe we
didn't make this parallel. We just did the episode about
the uh potato evangelist in France. His name is already
giving me but he kind of was the like potato
equivalent of George Washington Carver Parmentier, I believe that's the man.
But sure, right, so we know George Washington Carver was
all about how diverse and useful and um versatile the
(16:18):
peanut was. So it was already starting to be on
the radars of a lot of farmers around the time.
And this guy Baston is willing to take a gamble
on peanuts. He doesn't. He doesn't just doubled out. He
turns his entire crop toward peanuts. He's not he's out
of the cotton game. He's spending the whole year of
(16:39):
nineteen sixteen just growing peanuts. And in the end, no,
he ends up walking away with eight thousand dollars in profit,
he could still pay off the debt he had racked
up during this ongoing bullweevil disaster and have money left over.
(16:59):
If we could inflation calculate, we'll see, we'll see some
interesting numbers here. So what do you say we we
fire up, fire up the old inflation calculator. Here, can
I get a boot? There we go. And so if
(17:19):
we calculate this, now, what we see is that eight
thousand dollars in nineteen sixteen had the purchasing power of
get this on four hundred and nine dollars and cents.
Can you believe it? Almost two hundred thousand dollars. Basically
imagine being someone else who's a farmer in enterprise at
(17:42):
that area. Like that is the talk of the town.
People who once said, you know, cotton is the way
to go are immediately a hundred percent on board with peanuts. Right, Yeah,
it's true. And by nineteen seventeen, farmers in the area
produced over a million bushels of peanuts that's sold for
more than five million dollars. And our boy Bradley from
(18:05):
the Pee River Society, UM, he has memories actually of
working in the cotton fields when he was a young boy,
in the forties and fifties, because I mean, it wasn't
like things completely pivoted away from cotton. There was still
a huge thing, and the bullw weevils were absolutely still
a scourge that late in the game in the nineties
and fifties, but he remembers seeing how awful it was,
(18:28):
and he said, by that point, Enterprise uniquely had diversified
even beyond peanuts into potatoes, sugarcane, tobacco, and sorghum. I
always forget exactly what sorghum is. You can use it
to make bread, uh, you can use it in couscous. Uh.
You can also make some different kinds of beverages with it,
(18:49):
and some people eat it as a fresh vegetable. Yeah,
it looks kind of like a grain, and I guess
it comes off the buds in these tiny little pods
that almost looked like couscous already or like uh, risotto
or something right exactly, So people were people were into
this and they had experienced of financial rebound. Folks looked
(19:09):
around and said, you know, we wouldn't have reached this
level of success or diversity if we hadn't been forced
to change our tune due to the bull weevil. So
as peanuts become you know, number one with a bang
in Coffee County, where Enterprise Alabama is located. There's a
guy who comes to the picture named Roscoe Owen Fleming,
(19:31):
and he says, and we think he was joking at first,
by the way he says, you know what we should do.
We should really just own up to it, the bull.
We will save the town, right, folks, Let's make a
statue about it. And and uh, he's even though he
said this is a joke, it caught on, and you know,
all those conversations go Eventually. Fleming is like doubling down.
(19:55):
He's the guy who buys that original statue of the
Grecian woman and he gets it from Italy. And I
think originally she was holding something else over her head,
right Aha, Ben see, I I shouldn't have corrected myself
in the first place. So there was something else in
the bowl before the weevil made its appearance, and it
was like a trophy. And so the trophy is what
(20:16):
the fountain was, and the bowl just caught the excess
overflow water. Um, so okay, I was I was right
in the first place. Sorry about that, but Yeah, that's
exactly right. It was this kind of flowing classic Greek
goddess type figure holding this trophy over over her head,
and there were two street lights next to it, and
kind of an array that lit up this you know,
(20:37):
column um that she was standing on. It was around
thirteen feet tall, and it was three thousand dollars to
erect at the time, including materials today that'd be roughly
a forty grand, and it was personally paid out of
Fleming's own pocket for the most part. Yeah, talk about
committing to the bit. Huh. Now, we've had we've had
(20:59):
our kind of in jokes that we go with, but
I don't think any of us has ever put forty
grand down on it yet. We'll see, so you're absolutely right.
December eleventh, nineteen nineteen, there's a dedication ceremony. A ton
of people show up, five thousand people. George Washington Carver
was scheduled to speak at it about the you know,
(21:20):
thanking the bullweevil, extolling the glory of the peanut, but
unfortunately floods complicated his transit and he wasn't unable to
make it, but they still partied. It wasn't until thirty
years after this dedication ceremony that someone said, Hey, you know,
it's weird. We got a statue that's all about the
(21:42):
Bowl Weevil, but we don't have a Bowl Weevil on
our Bowl Weevil Appreciation statue. Yeah, so they popped one
up there, um and uh, it kind of made it
a bit of a target for vandals and you know,
people wanted to pull pranks and all that. So it
was something that was on occasion damaged and it actually
(22:02):
has been stolen, which is interesting. I wonder how they
have just like pride it off or whatever. That seems
like a lot of effort. It does, it does, and
it's weird what what people will do to vandalize statues.
You know, my grandfather's region was a regional sculptor and
he had a statue in a bank where somebody stole
the head and he suspected frat rose. But yeah, so
(22:24):
this was this was stolen and the the original one
was first stole in the nineteen fifties. It was never found,
which means the odds are that there is someone, maybe
even in Enterprise, Alabama, who has a fifty pound statue
of a bull weevil. Today. It reminds me of isn't
(22:49):
there a plot in The Simpsons where the statue of
Jebediah Springfield's head is removed? Yes, yes, your spot odd,
which just shows us that this is a not uncommon practice.
And so what what the city did when the original
guy was stolen is they said, all right, we're gonna
replace this bullweevil. We're gonna make it larger, we're gonna
(23:12):
make it more anatomically correct, and uh several you know,
a couple of decades past, nineteen four, thieves strike again,
but this time they don't steal just the bull weevil.
Do they know it's true? Yeah, we're talking the seventies now.
It seems like they had a good little period of
of peace towards the statue. But in nineteen seventy four,
(23:35):
you know, in the same way they needed a double
down by making a bigger and better bulwevil. The thieves
had to double down to you know, they had to
one up their their predecessors. And they didn't just steal
the weevil. They stole the whole damn thing, the whole statue,
which is imp you know, just logistically, it's it's it
would be a real feat to pull off and not
(23:56):
to get caught in the act, right, that's you have
to get a jack m are something to get that
thing out of the ground. It is much more difficult
than that heist of potatoes that we talked about in
our partimentier episode, you know where we where we got
together and the guards let us get away. These guys
made off with a whole statue anyhow, and they get it.
The town gets it back, but it's badly damaged because
(24:19):
it turns out, you know, stealing a statue under cover
of night is kind of tough and you have to
move quickly. Just the bug gets stolen, they just take
the evil again again and it also disappears, which means
I pause it that it is possible someone maybe in
the area of Enterprise, Alabama, has not one, but two
(24:42):
ginormous statues of a bowl weevil. At this point, it's
probably getting weird when you have to explain that to
your friends as they come over. No joke or it's
a point of pride, and you have it like prominently
featured in your living room. Exactly is that? Well, do
come into the hall. I believe a Ganda will explain
(25:03):
it all because they still talked like that. Sure which
is where we are now, because they finally were like,
you know, the people that have to deal with this
stuff understandably, we're a little bit fed up. So they
moved it to a museum, you know, so it could
be like guarded um. And in its place, they created
(25:24):
a resin replica that was made from a cast that
was used to make another replica as they submission to
the Southern History Exhibit at the nineteen ninety Summer Olympics
here in Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah, and b oh and by
the way, was also stolen again in nineteen two. Like
this went on for a while, but the resident, the
(25:45):
resident replica seems to be the solution here. And if
you are planning to make your own Bullweevil heist, do
be warned. The Bullweevil Statue and Enterprise, Alabama is now
monitored twenty four seven by security cameras, which I think
means there just might be a real Mexican get a
(26:08):
dumb sound crime movie sound cube Bull Weevil Force law.
And it's very specific. It's very specific. You wouldn't it
went to seven seas now, you would? Uh, it didn't
seem like it jumped the shark though. Around season three
that's gonna lie. It seems like they were coasting a
(26:30):
little bit, but it's it's a really interesting story. And
today the bull weevil is still a thing. Like, we
didn't completely eradicate this, Uh, the species of insect that
you know feeds exclusively on the cotton, the copious amounts
of cotton that are still planted and harvested in the
South today. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely right. This this is
(26:50):
a serious issue and it's gone on for decades and
eventually scientists realized that they could influence insects behaviors by
exposing them to send athetic pheromones. These pheromones were used
to lure the weevils into traps and then from there
they were sprayed with pesticides. Thankfully, the weevil has been
(27:10):
eradicated from nine percent of the what's called the cotton
land where they grow cotton in the US and in
parts of northern Mexico. Yeah, but that two percent still
like there's the most hardcore of the weevils because they're
obviously what resistant or they just you know, you can't
lure me with those fake you know la la scents. No, no,
thank you. I will eat your cotton if you please,
(27:32):
it's funny. There's I mean, that's practically but I still
gotta wonder about the last remaining three percent, the last
stand of the bull Weevil. You know, it's funny. Been
in my hometown in Augusta, Georgia, which I don't believe
was necessarily a huge cotton producing town. But there's a
little cafe called the Bullweevil and they have a really
lovely selection of cakes and pies. Um. And then they're
(27:56):
shaped shaped like bowl weevils. Not the pies or the cakes. No,
they have a little cartoon bowlweevil mascot that I always
thought was very uh, let's just say hideous. Um. But
it's something I remember growing up, and I was like, oh, okay,
I guess this is like a tongue in cheek way
of acknowledging something that was, you know, ultimately very disastrous.
But it seems like Enterprise Alabama with a name like enterprise,
(28:18):
you've gotta be enterprising. It seems like they made a
they turned lemons into lemonade or bowlweevils into weavenade. Yeah,
that's that's a thing. Oh no, I agree, I thought
you landed that one. The also, uh, a lot of
this is coming from a professor of entomology at North
Carolina State University named Dominic re Sick, who is a
(28:38):
go to authority on this, and you can find him
interviewed in the Smithsonian that we mentioned earlier, as well
as the several other places for him. For re Sich,
this is a story of a town beating the odds,
beating enormous odds, and also getting assistance from government, from scientists.
Everybody was on ward with fixing this problem, which doesn't
(29:02):
always happen. So there's a lot of fortune in here
wrapped up in this misfortune. And if you ask Bradley
the p River story we mentioned earlier, we asked, if
you ask him what the lesson is, what the takeaway is,
he would say, so many people think, why did you
build a statue to honor something that did so much destruction?
It was more to recognize the fact that the bullweevil
(29:25):
cause farmers to seek a better cash crop to replace cotton. Yeah,
and to this day, enterprise is really leaning into that history.
And it's also kind of lucky because you know how
a lot of statues and monuments that were so fond
of here in the South again pulled down because it
turns out there a little more than a little racist
uh not a racist bone in the stone body. That
(29:45):
is the Bowl Weevil statue. Yeah yea. And Alabama is
still a big producer of peanuts. And if you go
to Enterprise right now, Enterprise Alabama, not the rental car place,
then you can they'll see this statue. And uh, you
can find pictures of it online. It's uh, it's it's
(30:07):
an interesting reason to build a statue, and honestly, I
think it's a pretty cool reason. I think Roscoe would
be impressed that his joke had expanded so well over
the decades. And you know another thing we love in
the South is a good summer festival, uh, and they
have one there in Enterprise, the annual Bowl Weevil Fall Festival,
(30:29):
where a fall a follow or a summer festival, whatever,
they're both equally good. Prefer a fall festival personally because
the weather is nicer. But that is on October of
this year, so if you want to, you can go
on over to visit Enterprise dot com and look up
vendors and all that good stuff will be at the
two thousand twenty one Bowl Weevil Festival, So mark your
(30:50):
calendars folks, and let us and let us know if
you have any stories that are similar to this from
your neck of the Globe woods. What a ride? No,
I I don't know if I've ever seen a Bowlweevil
in person? Have you know? But you say what a ride?
And I immediately picture like a Bowlweevil themed you know,
(31:11):
Tilt a Whirl at the Bowlwevil Festival. That'd be fun.
It's funny you say that. I've been trying to figure
out a place to pitch this, so I'll just do
it now. Is we're wrapping up, you know, they are
all these amusement parks, right, I was thinking, what do
you what do you guys think of? Like a confusedment park?
Go on? So, so like tell me that ends. There's
(31:34):
there's bigger stuff next, put your hand down. There's uh,
there's more to it than that. I am just still
working out some of the details. You know, what are
the rides? Like? What? Like? You you could go a
million directions. Well, it reminds me of this really cool
art collective called Me a Wolf that started out just
doing like this one particular installation in San Antonio, Texas
(31:55):
or Santa Fe. Rather, excuse me, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
and they did this like basically weird artsy psychedelic haunted house.
They got so popular that George RR. Martin caught wind
of it and like bought them a bowling alley. So
they did essentially what you're describing, sort of an indoor
weird Alice in Wonderland type art slash amusement situation. And
(32:16):
they got so popular, especially a documentary about this collective,
that they have gone completely corporate and they have like
a fake grocery store in Vegas that's like I forget
what it's called, but it's like got all the products
are weird and psychedelic and strange and very like that. Um,
what's that thing they used to do the deep dream,
you know, like the weird filtered googly I like psychedelic
(32:38):
dogs on everything. Not quite like that, but it's got
definitely like it's like an Alice in Wonderland grocery store.
And then they have ones in Dubai and there's ones
and I believe l A anyway, it's a massive undertaking.
So they might have beaten you to the punch on
the confusement park, Ben, but I'm sure that you can
come up with something to make it stand alone. Right,
we got, we got Today, We're gonna we're gonna ask
(33:00):
you for help. Ridiculous Histories as always, thank you for
tuning in. Uh, if you're with meal Wolf, you know,
let's have a conversation. If you're George rr Martin, or
if you're just a fan of a show, let us
know what should be in a confusement park. Very interested
to hear the very interested to hear the answers, and nol.
I hope that Neal Wolf builds a builds a little
(33:22):
pop up over here at our fairte Metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia.
These are really high production value and like you know,
permanent installations, but they do do little one off events
here and there, so that would be super cool. But yeah,
let us know what are your confusement park ideas. What
are your experiences with the Bowlweevil or like farming or whatever?
You can write us. It's true. We've confirmed this at
Ridiculous at I heart media dot com. Uh, swear to
(33:45):
god it works. Give it a try, test us put
us to the test. You can also find us on
the internet. We've got the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group. It's
a lot of fun meme sharing and his conversations around
new episodes and all of that. And you can also
find Ben and I individually as human people on the Internet.
I am how now Noel Brown on Instagram and you
can find me on Instagram as well, getting into all
(34:05):
kinds of misadventures at my handle at Ben bullan bow
l I n Thanks as always to Casey Pagraham, Thanks
as always to Max Williams uh and I got I
gotta say it, thanks her own old people who made
the town of our show a little bit better. Yep.
(34:26):
Jonathan Stricklin, Yeah, that's what. That's what I always Where
were you going eats? Because he eats us alive from
the inside. Yes, we're overdue to hang out with him again. Yep,
overdu Indeed, we'll see you next time. Books For more
(34:47):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
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