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JULY 2019 / SOUTHERNLIVING.COM
84
Salad with shaved fennel, arugula, and
toasted hazelnuts had already sold out.
“It’s so good,” whispered a diner at
the bar, who’d snagged the last plate.
But she didn’t mean to brag. She just
couldn’t help marveling at the water-
melon’s sweetness, its delicate texture
and edible rind like a cucumber.
Meanwhile, the run on specials
prompted the bartender to regale
customers with the tale of the Bradford
melon. His story involved a prisoner
of the Revolutionary War named John
Franklin Lawson, who scored a wedge
of watermelon as a water source on a
pirate ship bound for the West Indies. It
tasted so good that he saved the seeds
for his eventual return to the States.
Around 1840, Nathaniel Napoleon
Bradford crossed the Lawson water-
melon with the Mountain Sweet, and
the Bradford was born.
“How many people do you get
to believe that?” a customer asked,
teasing the bartender.
Sure enough, the Bradford water-
melon’s epic history could have faded
into obscurity. The melon’s thin skin
kept it from being shipped, so it fell out
of favor with commercial growers, who
preferred types with sturdier rinds.
Then along came Nat Bradford,
the great-great-great-grandson of that
watermelon’s developer.
Today, visitors to Bradford’s farm-
house in Sumter, South Carolina, a
sleepy town about 45 miles from
Columbia, have to step over water-
melons covering the front porch. It’s
all melons all the time in late harvest as
he decides which ones to save seeds
from and which ones to process as
pickled rinds or red molasses (an
old-fashioned recipe that took him
two years to perfect). Every year
before harvest, he allots just about
500 melons that get snatched up
during presale.
He might also deliver some of the
watermelons to restaurants within
a few hour’s drive. But otherwise,
these fruits can’t be shipped, their
elusive nature making them even
more special.
“Last year, the first folks who
showed up drove down from Long
Island, New York, loaded up 15
melons, took a few pictures, turned
around, and drove back,” Bradford
says. “I’m not sure what they did with
them... They wanted to be part of the
story, which is humbling.”
Growing up, Bradford remembers
his family planting just a small patch
in the front yard and saving water-
melon seeds in Mason jars. His father
worked as a dermatologist and was
the first generation to deviate from the
farming business.
Bradford thought about farming
after high school in the early 1990s,
but he didn’t know about many career
possibilities in heirloom or organic
agriculture at the time, so he went into
landscape architecture instead.
Then in 1997, he discovered an
Home Patch In the fall of 2012, Nat Bradford got the itch to revive the family watermelon, so
he planted his first crop in the spring of 2013. After a successful harvest, he and his wife, Bette,
moved their five children to the Sumter family farm in 2014. He continued his desk job until 2018.
IT WAS
just
7:36
on a
SUNDAY NIGHT
at
MOTOR SUPPLY COMPANY BISTRO
in
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA,
BUT
the
BRADFORD WATERMELON
