The most luscious watermelon the Deep South has ever produced was once so coveted, 19th-century growers used poison or electrocuting wires to thwart potential thieves, or simply stood guard with guns in the thick of night. The legendary Bradford was delectable — but the melon didn't ship well, and it all but disappeared by the 1920s. Now, eight generations later, a great-great-great-grandson of its creator is bringing it back.
The Bradford boasted fragrant red flesh, pearly seeds and a rind so soft you could slice it with a butter knife. The fruit was more than just a savory summer treat — its sweet juice was routinely boiled into molasses or distilled into brandy for cocktails garnished with fruit and syrup, and the smooth soft rinds were pickled. Home cooks often turned to watermelon molasses to preserve fresh fruit for the winter.
But the oblong, soft-skinned Bradford was never suited to stacking and long-distance shipping. In 1922, the last commercial crop was planted, and the melon wholly gave way to varieties with tough rinds. For the rest of the century, the Bradford survived only because family members went on planting it in their backyards and saving seeds — making sure to plant it at least a mile from any other melon, so that it wouldn't cross-pollinate and lose its purity.
Meanwhile, around 2005, David Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina, began hunting without much hope for a surviving Bradford melon. Shields is author of Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, and his current mission is to restore antebellum cultivars and foodways. He'd been researching important melons of the 19th century and concluded the precious melon was extinct. Says Shields: "I checked germ plasm banks, seed saver's exchanges, read original seed catalogs from the 1800s, and wrote watermelon growers in the boondocks rumored to have old melons. They tended to have old bad melons, though. I almost lost hope."
That all changed on Oct. 31, 2012, when Shields woke up to an email response from Nat Bradford, a landscape architect in Sumter, S.C., inquiring whether his family's backyard melon was the famous Bradford.
