The WTXL Road Trip series continues in Jefferson County with a look at watermelons, the county's iconic crop. Next, our Jefferson County stories continue with a look at a famous World War II veteran who called Monticello home.
MONTICELLO, FL (WTXL) -- Last week, Jefferson County hosted its 66th annual Watermelon Festival.
The county was once the "Watermelon Seed Capital of the World," but in recent years, fewer and fewer people are growing the melons.
It's the ideal summertime treat, and in Jefferson County, you don't have to look far to find it.
"In Jefferson County, a watermelon is a kind of cultural icon," said Jack Carswell of the Jefferson County Historical Society. "In a lot of ways, a watermelon is kind of part of how you would describe us."
The annual Watermelon Festival only reinforces that, with signs and pictures on sidewalks and storefronts.
Watermelon farming in the county goes back decades, with generations of locals working in the summer.
"You had a pitchfork," Carswell recalls, "...and they had this machine that went round and round, and you had to take the pitchfork and throw the watermelon up into the machine, which ground it out and spit the pulp out on side and the seed out the other."
Aside from the seeds, the melons themselves are a hot item -- especially during the festival season.
Stewart Wheeler has sold them at the Marathon gas station by the Jefferson County Courthouse for 32 years.
"I enjoy doing it," Wheeler said. "It's something that I sort of like to do, but it sort of gets hard, and there's not a lot of money in them."
While it doesn't take too much effort to grab a watermelon from Wheeler's stand, he says the process to bring those melons from his farm to his stand takes a lot more work than people realize.
"You have to start in January," he said. "You have to get your land prepared. You got to put plastic down, drip irrigation..."
"In the trucks, you couldn't stay in there, but about two, three minutes," Carswell added. "They had people standing with stopwatches. You'd have to come out, because it was hot."
"Everybody always wants to argue about price," Wheeler said. "They want it cheap, everything cheaper. But if they had to get out and do the work, they would really understand then."
Though the work is hard and the profit might not match the effort, Stewart says he won't stop farming.
"When you been doing it all your life, it's all you know," he said.
