Creekbank Stories Curt Iles, Storyteller
Sugartown Watermelons
I grew up in eastern Beauregard Parish, the home of Sugartown Watermelons.
Our loamy sandy soil is perfect for melons.
What a perfect name for a variety of melon.
A Sugartown Watermelon.
It makes my mouth water.
Sugartown is a crossroads (La 112 and La 113) village that was once a thriving community on the road between Alexandria and the lower Sabine at the Texas border.
It was known as the “Queen of the Frontier” with shops, general stores, doctors, and a Grades 1-12 school. It was also home of the prestigious Baldwin Academy for Men and Women Boarding School.
Sugartown is the ancestral home of my Iles family line. I often say that the greatest concentration of Iles’s in American is in Sugartown Cemetery.
Sadly, Sugartown is now like a Louisiana ghostown.
No stores, no school, no gas pumps, and no post office.
Now, there are only scattered homes, a small Baptist church, and a Masonic Lodge.
The only time when it comes to life is when the Sugartown Watermelon Stand opens in mid-summer, with the peak week being the July 4th weekend.
Summer is when “Sugartown Watermelons” signs sprout throughout the hinterlands well removed from “The Queen.”
It always amuses me to see a Sugartown Watermelon sign on Memorial Day (or earlier).
True Sugartown melon plants in May are just beginning to vine with no visible “melonettes” (not in any dictionary. I made it up).
I’ll be adding questions, myths, and stories about Sugartown and its delicious melons. You’re invited to join in on the fun.
Question: what is the furthest from Sugartown you’ve seen a sign for “Sugartown Watermelons”?
There’s always more at The Creek. www.creekbank.net
