“The idea of the carnival was to look for ways to make money and help the farmers by coming up with a needed product at the time,” Water Valley native and former photographer and journalist Jack Gurner says. Photo courtesy Water Valley Watermelon Carnival The original organizers of the Water Valley Watermelon Carnival founded the event in 1931 as a way to help farmers sell produce and to boost the northern Mississippi town’s local economy during the Great Depression. Ultimately, the answer they came up with was watermelons, and they organized the inaugural Water Valley Watermelon Carnival in August 1931.
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In the midst of the crisis, the then-editor of the local newspaper, the Yalobusha Democrat, rallied young businessmen from the Junior Chamber of Commerce to come up with a way to both raise locals’ morale and to find something of value the town could use to draw attention to itself and attract business. The People’s Bank that served the local area closed its doors, and rail companies that had been key to the town’s prosperity since the 1800s began pulling out, leading unemployment to hit the town hard. When the Great Depression began gripping the United States in the early 1930s, the small town of Water Valley in northern Mississippi quickly felt its effects.
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Watermelons Preserved Water Valley’s Economy The two-day event will include a street dance, a fireworks display, a watermelon drop, watermelon eating and seed-spitting contests, a car show, a barbecue contest, food and craft vendors, a 3k run and walk, and more. This year’s Water Valley Watermelon Carnival will take place from Friday, Aug. The largest melon Vaughn ever managed to grow, which he presented during the 2018 Watermelon Carnival, weighed 202 pounds.ĭo you think our journalism is essential? Give today and support our work. He previously won the contest from 2017 to 2019 and came in second place in 2021. Vaughn is currently preparing for his fifth consecutive year of entering the event’s largest-watermelon competition. Vaughn, who worked as a railroad engineer for 40 years before retiring in 2002, makes these specific preparations for one particular purpose: creating loose and nutrient-rich soil perfect for supporting the roots of giant watermelons weighing several hundred pounds for the annual Water Valley Watermelon Carnival. After leaving the fish to rot in the soil for some time, Vaughn adds to the mix what he refers to as “gin trash,” which is the refuse left over after using a cotton gin to separate the actual cotton from the rest of the plant, as well as a generous amount of phosphate and potash.
Junior miss pageant 2002 series Patch#
Instead, he takes them out to a patch of farmland on his property and buries them in a specially prepared patch of loose, sandy soil. Water Valley native and retired railroad engineer Hal Vaughn uses his own signature soil-treatment methods to grow his giant watermelons, including the 202-pound one he submitted to the annual Water Valley Watermelon Carnival’s largest-watermelon competition in 2018, which he won. He, however, does not eat the shad or even use them as catfish bait as is a common practice among fishermen. These girls are better-looking and more polished than the usual Home Ec girls, but theyÃÂre just as stuck.Every year, Water Valley native Hal Vaughn makes the drive out to the Grenada Reservoir Spillway to spend the day fishing for shad to take home with him. They show how limited the possibilities were for girls from rural and small town America.
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In a way, this film is similar to the Home Economics films in the Archive. ThatÃÂs enough to make any girl want to grab a pageant form and get out of town. The film touts traveling as one of the primary reasons to become a Junior Miss.Īnother girl is featured in a clip alongside a ÃÂFuture Homemakers of AmericaÃÂ banner.
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As one girl says, once you get into the state finals you could even go someplace ÃÂhundreds of milesÃÂ from home. ItÃÂs to get away from their dreary small towns. But itÃÂs easy to see why these girls would enter the Junior Miss pageant. ItÃÂs tempting to look down on the obsessively well-groomed and polite girls in this 1970 film who (outside of the one African-American girl) seem oblivious the racial and political turmoil that the rest of America was going through at the time. Amazingly, this pageant still exists and lives on in small town America (the current winner is from Garland, Texas). High school girls explain why they entered the Junior Miss pageant.