On December 11, 1919, the people of Enterprise, Alabama gathered to dedicate a monument giving thanks for the devastation of the boll weevil. If this sounds strange, it’s because it very much is. This rapturously invasive insect made growing and harvesting cotton nearly impossible for the farmers of the south, and yet this small town near the border with Florida went to great expense to build it a monument, bringing life to the adage that when God closes a door he opens a window.
The boll weevil is small but effective. Each one is just about a quarter of an inch long, meaning if you lined them up you could fit around 24 across the length of a dollar bill. Each female lays about 200 eggs at a time, and after three weeks of growing and feasting on cotton plants, those new weevils are ready to lay eggs of their own. In a given growing season it’s estimated that weevils will procreate through ten generations. That’s a lot of bugs and a lot of big appetites for the silky fibers that are one of the most important cash crops throughout the world.
It’s generally agreed that boll weevils originated in Central America and followed the delicious cotton crop north through Mexico, across the Rio Grande, and into the southern United States in the late 1800’s. By 1914 they had reached the cotton fields of Enterprise and began to have a disastrous effect on the harvests. Within a year, cotton output from the town had dropped by over 60% according to some estimates and the local economy was in serious trouble. Some farmers simply planted more, hoping that these rapidly reproducing menaces had a finite appetite and that the remaining share of cotton would be enough to live on. Others, less hopeful and more entrepreneurial, ventured out of the south in search of a new cash crop that wouldn’t fall prey to weevils.
They found peanuts. One enterprising farmer, perhaps just fed up with the incessant weevils, decided to plant his entire plot with peanuts that year. Suffice it to say that he was the only farmer in Enterprise who had a good year. His crop was mostly sold after harvest as seeds to the rest of Enterprise, and within a few years the town had almost entirely switched to this new crop. Not only did peanuts, which were unattractive to the weevils as food, solve the immediate problem and bring money into Enterprise, but they also proved far more lucrative than cotton had ever been. By 1919, the town was doing so well and was so grateful for their forced changes they decided to erect a monument of Italian stone to honor the mighty boll weevil and thank it for the change it brought to the town of Enterprise.