Water Valley hosts 49th Annual Watermelon Carnival

WATER VALLEY, Miss. (WCBI)- What’s better on a hot summer day than a fresh watermelon? The go-to place to get one this weekend is Water Valley.

It was a packed out event.

There was musical entertainment.

The kids could rock climb or get on a bungee cord, and there were plenty of vendors.

This was the annual Water Valley Watermelon Carnival, an event that has been taking place here for nearly a half-century.

“The whole community comes together to get this ready from the city workers to the sponsors, to the chamber. The chamber board does a great job of organizing and getting it all together,” said Sandra Walker.

“It’s a great event for our town. We bring in thousands of people from all over. This is the 49th annual Water Valley Carnival,” said Mayor Donald Gray.

It seems that every community in Northeast Mississippi wants to have their own niche.

In Houston, it’s steam engines, in Bruce Saw Mills, and in Vardaman the sweet potato.

But here in Water Valley, the watermelon is king.

“Well, we do have the best venue of all. We have gentlemen that grow the biggest watermelons. It’s a big competition every year. We have local growers that sell their watermelons. And everything in town is all about watermelons,” said Walker.

The Mayor says Water Valley traces it’s watermelon connection back to the 1930’s.

“This was the watermelon capital of the world. Watermelon loaded up on train cars and sent to restaurants in Chicago, New York and it’s just continued. World War Two kind of interrupted it, and we started it back, and we have several growers,” said Mayor Gray.

“We’ve grown watermelons off and on over the years for the last seventy years. We enjoy growing watermelons. It’s a lot of fun. There is a lot of comradery between watermelon growers to see who has the biggest watermelons and the best tasting,” said Daryl Burney.

And these three monster melons were the finalists for this year’s competition.

What does one do to grow a bigger melon?

“One of the growers I talked to babied the watermelon he would feed it fertilizer and kept water on it full time. He would build a fence around it to keep the animals from biting into it and damaging it,” said Burney.

And the winner of this year’s competition, the melon in the middle.

After this weekend’s event, it won’t be too long before they start planning for the big 50th annual Water Valley Water Melon Carnival.