The Giant Watermelon Slice

The giant watermelon slice of Green River, Utah is a hollow wooden wedge about 20 feet long and 10 feet high, painted in green rind and red flesh with black seeds, that spends most of the year under an open shed beside the John Wesley Powell River History Museum on Main Street. It was built in 1960 by members of the Green River Chamber of Commerce as a parade float for Melon Days, and it doubled as a fruit stand, with a door in the side to sell melons through. It sat on a car chassis and could once be driven around town; when the engine failed nobody repaired it, and a John Deere tractor pulls it in the parade now. Green River has grown melons since about 1900, on irrigated bottomland in a desert, and the town has celebrated the harvest since 1906, when a newspaper recorded a baseball game, a brass band from Price and a cantaloupe feast at the Palmer House hotel. The first Melon Queen was crowned in 1947. Melon Days is held on the third weekend of September, and the slice leads the parade. In 2023 Muscatine, Iowa installed a 40 foot slice that took the size title, and Green River's is now sometimes billed as the second largest in the world. There is no plaque, and the float has been photographed at the police station and at the truck stop as well as at the museum, so its address is only approximate.