Let’s Hear It For The Boll Weevil

Let’s Hear It for the Boll Weevil

If you’ve ever been down to Coffee County in Southeastern Alabama, you know that there’s not much to see. But it’s worth the trip to stop off in the small town of Enterprise. There’s not a whole lot to see there, either. But there is one attraction you won’t see anywhere else in the world.

In the town square there is a thirteen-foot-high marble statue of a woman standing in splendor atop an ornate base in the middle of a fountain. Her arms stretch up in a pose of worship. This classic sculpture, looking like something you might see in Rome, seems strangely out of place in rural Alabama. But then you see what she holds in her hands as an offering to heaven: a giant, black boll weevil. More astounding are the words inscribed on her base: “In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the Herald of Prosperity.”

Wait a minute! In profound appreciation of the boll weevil? The boll weevil is a herald of prosperity? Certainly not where there is cotton! And cotton was king for two hundred years in Coffee County. Boll weevils are especially fond of cotton. An infestation of these black devils can strip a cotton field bare in a few days. So why build a statue in “profound appreciation” of these voracious pests?

You have to go back to the late 1800s to answer that question. That’s when a plague of boll weevils crossed over from Mexico, eating a destructive swath across the cotton patch of Southeastern America. By the time the insects reached Coffee County, panic was in the air. Cotton was the engine that drove the economy. There wasn’t a living soul that didn’t depend on cotton. By 1910 boll weevils covered Alabama like a swarming, crawling, devouring black flood. The annual yield of cotton was cut by 40 percent. Statewide revenue losses were more than 70 percent. Farmers lost whole crops. Many had to abandon farms that had been in their families for generations. Historians agree that, other than the Civil War, nothing devastated the South like the boll weevil.

To survive, cotton farmers had to turn to more diversified farming. Most of all they planted peanuts. By 1917, some twenty-four years after the first boll weevils arrived, Coffee County was producing more than one million bushels of peanuts annually. Enterprise had become known as the peanut capital of the world. Coffee County was more prosperous than it had ever been when cotton was king.

In that year of unprecedented prosperity, the grateful citizens of Enterprise erected their shrine to the boll weevil—the only memorial to an insect anywhere in the world. It was dedicated with a prayer of thanksgiving to God for allowing the greatest crisis in their history. Sometimes things have to fall apart before they can fall together. We may have to lose good things so that we can get better things. The folks in Enterprise would say amen to something Coach John Wooden often said:

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while.

1 Peter 1:6