Hope, Arkansas: Watermelons, a Railroad, and a President

A small city in southwest Arkansas has produced two things the world did not see coming: the world's largest watermelons, and the forty-second President of the United States.

Hope was founded as a railroad town. When the Cairo and Fulton Railroad pushed through Hempstead County in the eighteen seventies, a land commissioner named James Loughborough laid out a town site and named it for his daughter. The first passenger train pulled into Hope Station on February first, eighteen seventy-two. The railroad gave the community a reason to exist and a way to ship crops to distant markets.

The crop that made Hope famous was the watermelon. The sandy ridge soil east of town turned out to be unusually well suited to growing enormous specimens, and in the nineteen twenties a local grower named John Gibson organized a watermelon-growing contest to promote the regional economy. The Hope Chamber of Commerce launched the first official Watermelon Festival in nineteen twenty-six. The competition drew growers who pushed the limits of what a melon could weigh. In two thousand five, a Hope-area farmer named Lloyd Bright cut a melon from the vine that weighed two hundred sixty-eight point eight pounds. The Guinness Book of World Records certified it the following year as the largest watermelon ever grown, a record a Tennessee grower topped in two thousand thirteen.

On August nineteenth, nineteen forty-six, a boy named William Jefferson Blythe the Third was born in that same town. His father had been killed in a car accident three months before the birth, and the child spent his earliest years in his grandparents' home at one-seventeen South Hervey Street while his mother trained as an anesthetist in New Orleans. When he later took his stepfather's surname Clinton, he became the person the world would come to know as the forty-second president. At the nineteen ninety-two Democratic National Convention, candidate Clinton introduced himself to the country with the phrase, it all started in a place called Hope. The house on Hervey Street is now a National Historic Site.

For a town of fewer than ten thousand people, Hope has made an outsized impression.