In Enterprise, Alabama one will find a Wal-Mart (of course) and all the things associated with a small southern town. But there’s more than just chain stores and the like, this is also the home of the Boll Weevil Monument as well as the Boll Weevil Inn, a street called Boll Weevil Circle, a strip mall called the Boll Weevil Plaza, and a radio station with the call letters WVVL that looks over said monument. It’s quite rare for a town to celebrate an insect pest, but Enterprise owes its prosperity to the boll weevil. Back in the 1800s, the chief source of revenue was cotton, but that all changed in 1915, when an infestation of boll weevils destroyed the crop and forced the farmers to diversify into other crops, like peanuts, or starve. To memorialize this devastating, yet life-changing, moment the town erected a 13-foot classical-looking monument of a robed woman on top of a circular fountain (along with historic plaque because, believe it or not, this shit is actually on the National Register of Historic Places) in the heart of the business district in 1919. But some thirty years later, a man named Luther Baker was not happy that the Boll Weevil Monument, which pays homage to the bug, did not have an actual boll weevil on it. So he created a huge life version of the pest, like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie. Words cannot describe the randomness of it all. Unfortunately, the current Boll Weevil Monument is an exact fiberglass replica of the original, which was badly damaged by two teen morons in 1998 (some people just don’t appreciate weird history, I guess…or really hate bugs). The shattered original is on display a block away in the town’s Depot Museum.
Boll Weevil Monument In Enterprise, Alabama
