ISSUE 42, MELONS, Part 4: Kleckley Sweet Watermelon
Kleckley Sweet Watermelon
William Alexander Kleckley (1856-1921), the breeder of the Kleckley’s Sweet Watermelon, was born in Georgia, orphaned at an early age, and raised by the Shealy family, South Carolina rleations, who had migrated from Lexington County SC to Bibb County Georgia in the early 1850s with Kleckly’s parents. The watermelon he perfected in Sumpter County, GA, in the 1880s, had the hallmarks of the family of Carolina watermelons developed in the South Carolina midlands earlier in the 19th century—oblong “long” configuration, white seeds, red flesh, thin rind, and sweet taste. Only in the surface markings of the rind did it visibly depart from the Carolina Long, Bradford, and the Ravenscroft melons.
Kleckley became famous for his watermelons in Columbus Georgia in the late 1880s and early 1890s. On July 27, 1895, the editor of the Columbus Enquirer-Sun published an appreciation for the gift of a melon. “Mr. Kleckley is gaining quite a reputation as a melon grower, and finds a ready sale in the Columbus market for the famous Kleckley sweets. His wagon, which is appropriately placarded, is on the street every day. Kleckley was a chancer, with an eye toward the next advantageous deal or land buy. 1896 found him in Phenix, Alabama, as a proprietor of a farm there, but his stay there was short, for better deals were to be had further west. He migrated to Montgomery County, Texas, North of Houston, sometime in 1898, where he farmed until his death in 1921.
Intellectual property rights for plant breeders in the 19th century were not enforced by litigation so much as by the promise of authenticity and quality. Once a plant creation gained a public reputation, numbers of people saved seeds and commercial plant breeders sometimes appropriated the cultivar. If the company wished to bank on the aura of a breeder’s good name, they contracted with him or her; if that name was insufficiently auspicious, they simply rebranded the seed as their own. This melon appeared under the names “Monte Christo” and “Wonder Moon” in the period between 1895 and the First World War.
Kleckley made a concerted effort to make the seed public in 1894, sending it to the agricultural experimental stations and to the W. Atlee Burpee seed company. After he moved to Alabama in 1896, Kleckley tried selling his watermelon seed via newspaper advertisements, but after his move to Texas, the marketing of the variety had fallen entirely to other hands.
In particular it became commodity cropped by the community of melon growers in Rocky Ford Colorado, who adopted it as their signature picnic melon early in the 20th century. It became a standard market melon in the West and available as far east as St. Louis and Chicago in great numbers until the 1930s.
A February 1911 notice in The Garden Magazine spoke to the fame of the melon:
“The Kleckley Sweets Watermelon, which originated in Sumpter County, Georgia in 1894, is the most popular melon in the south to-day, and is generally considered the sweetest of all melons. It is ready for use in one hundred days from planting. ((p. 13)”.
It supplanted the tenderer Bradford and disease vulnerable Rattlesnake watermelons in the South for local eating, just as the Kolb’s Gem a generation before had supplanted them as shipping melons for northern markets. But after World War II its disease vulnerabilities and a turn in taste toward round melons marginalized the Kleckley. It remains a favorite among heirloom gardeners and seedsavers.