The Big Red Apple

The Big Red Apple at the old railroad depot in Cornelia, Georgia is seven feet high, 22 feet around and weighs 5,200 pounds, and it sits on a concrete pedestal eight feet tall. It is steel and concrete, moulded in Winchester, Virginia in 1925 and shipped down by rail, a gift of the Southern Railway to the town that loaded its trains. It was unveiled at eleven in the morning on 4 June 1926 before a crowd of thousands, with bands, speeches and Senator Walter George in attendance, and the photograph ran in the Atlanta Constitution, which called it a fitting advertisement for the great Georgia apple belt. Habersham County planted its orchards as the railroads reached it, between about 1870 and 1900, and by 1920 it was among the leading apple regions in the country, with something like a thousand trees to the square mile. The timing turned out to be providential. The boll weevil had entered Georgia in 1915 and worked north, and extension agents were urging farmers off cotton by the end of the First World War; when the insect broke the state's cotton economy in the early 1920s, Habersham was already an orchard county and came through it. That is what the railway was congratulating. The reprieve did not last. In 1932 growers put an unsold crop into cold storage to wait for better prices, the buyers never came in the spring, and they lost the cost of growing the fruit and the cost of keeping it. Commercial orchards thinned out over the decades that followed. The monument stayed, beside a depot now restored, and the town holds an apple festival each autumn. It was repainted for its hundredth birthday in June 2026, with the leaves and stem picked out in gold.