The Seguin Pecan

A pecan 16 feet long and eight feet wide stands outside the Big Red Barn on Cordova Road in Seguin, Texas, just off State Highway 123. It is a fiberglass shell over a welded steel frame packed with wire mesh, built in 2011 by John Pape at his farm equipment yard with the shell applied by Red Ewald Incorporated of Karnes City, and funded and organised by that year's Leadership Seguin class, who raised something around 5,000 dollars for it. It sits at the Texas Agricultural Education and Heritage Center, which also houses the Pecan Museum of Texas, and it exists to win back a title the town lost in 1982. Seguin's first pecan is still four miles south, on the north lawn of the Guadalupe County courthouse. A local dentist, Edmund Darilek, built it in 1962 out of concrete, five feet long and about a thousand pounds, a few years after planting his own pecan orchard, to advertise the town as a centre of the trade. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca is said to have called the Guadalupe the river of nuts, and Seguin has leaned on that ever since. In 1982 George and Elizabeth James of Brunswick, Missouri built a concrete replica of a pecan variety George had found growing on his own land, seven feet by twelve and weighing six tons, and took the record. Seguin's answer in 2011 is longer, and being a hollow fiberglass shell it is very much lighter. Brunswick now advertises its own as the world's largest pecan of the twentieth century, which is a graceful way to keep a claim.