The Ponchatoula Strawberry

A fiberglass strawberry nine feet seven inches tall stands on West Hickory Street in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, across from the city hall. It was unveiled on 2 April 2018, a fortnight before that year's Strawberry Festival. Valek Sykes, a sculptor and film prop builder from Covington, made it from about 25 gallons of resin and gave it 120 seeds, and he settled on that height deliberately: any bigger, he said, and it would be hard to take a selfie with. It is bolted to the sidewalk and partly filled with sand to keep it there. The idea came from Karen Pfeifer, who runs Middendorf's restaurant at nearby Akers and had seen towns in Germany marking themselves with outsized versions of what they grow. She organised it with Kim Zabbia, and local businesses paid for it, their names set into bricks around the base. Ponchatoula calls itself the Strawberry Capital of the World, a title fixed by city ordinance. Growers here have shipped berries by rail since about 1900, off the sandy soil north of Lake Pontchartrain, and hundreds of railcars once left each spring. The Strawberry Festival has been held every April since 1972, apart from two years lost to the pandemic. For most of that time the town's mascot was not the statue but Ole Hardhide, a live alligator kept in a pen by the railroad tracks on Pine Street. The first died in 1985 and was carried to his grave on a horse drawn wagon while a jazz band played, with several thousand people following. Successors held the post until 2023, when the last of them, a female of sixty five, was retired to a private pond after the state found her enclosure out of compliance.