Georgia’s Big Apple — Maybe Home of Elvis’ Toenail

Blink and you’ll miss it but a visit to Cornelia, Georgia, will be entertaining.

I had a job interview in Cornelia, Georgia last week. You’ll know if I got the job because, after nearly a year of underemployment, everyone on the planet will hear my joyous holler once I get full-time work again.

Cornelia is a pretty town of just over 4,000 Georgians in the northeast corner of the state. The home of the world’s largest apple sculpture, conveniently called the Big Red Apple, which was honestly a bit underwhelming but, like with so much else in Georgia, came with a more complicated provenance than one might assume of a bright red steel and concrete homage to a fruit.

Cornelia’s Big Red Apple. Courtesy Georgia Rail.

I asked an old woman walking her dog nearby why Cornelia has a monument to apples. Her terse response, “The boll weevil killed cotton.” While not the whole truth, local lore so rarely is, Google confirmed the deadly beetle theory. Almost exactly a century ago, towards the end of the First World War, local officials began pushing for northeast Georgia to diversify its agricultural economy. Nearly simultaneous with this effort, a boll weevil infestation, in fact, did devastate cotton crops throughout the state. The switch to apples helped Cornelia escape the economic ruin endured by so many other…