‘World’s largest peanut’ cracked by fierce winds. Will Georgians pay $20,000 to fix it?
You can imagine it.
There’s a hurricane roaring though Georgia. Winds scream and rain pelts the ground deep in the dead of night. Atop a tower overlooking a small, rural Georgia town, there sits a glorious roadside monument. The winds blow, and blow, and the monument teeters - and plummets to the ground.
Georgia’s giant peanut is no more.
The Ashburn, Ga., peanut was a casualty of Hurricane Michael as it sped through central Georgia, devastating the state’s pecan and peanut crops and plunging thousands into darkness for days.
The enormous legume was a monument for Turner County’s most important crop, the peanut, and was a local landmark for the area, according to Atlas Obscura. After the storm, the once-proud nut lay busted and broken on the ground.
“Poor peanut,” one person wrote on Instagram.
The peanut was built in 1975 and dedicated to Nora Lawrence Smith, a former editor of a newspaper in the area, according to the inscription on the tower.
It was made up of a steel frame covered with peanut-colored fabric, alongside a yellow crown that proclaimed “Georgia 1st in Peanuts,” WXIA reported.
“Occasionally, we’ll see where celebrities stop and have their picture made,” Gail Walls of the local merchant’s association said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They may post it somewhere saying that they were at the [world’s] largest peanut.”
The storm changed that. Now officials aren’t sure when they’ll be able to get the massive nut back up.
Turner County Commission chairman Nick Denham said it wasn’t a “priority” as the city recovered from the devastating effects of the storm, such as clearing debris and regaining power, according to the AJC. He told the paper it could cost between $10,000 and $20,000 to repair, probably with private money.
A GoFundMe for the peanut is attempting to do better and raise $50,000 for the monument.
“Any time a native Turner Countian is traveling away from home and tries to explain where they’re from, a go-to option is to say, “I’m from the town with the big peanut,.” Sarah Mastrario Cook of Ashburn wrote on the GoFundMe page. “The Ashburn peanut monument is a reminder of all of the hard-working farmers (peanut farmers especially but really all of them) that work in acres and not hours to feed our world. Please help us repair this important roadside site.”