SMITH COLUMN: Vidalia, Sweet Onion city

Published 9:30 am Friday, February 28, 2025

This vibrant agri-business town, which is known far and wide for a vegetable that people can’t get enough of, is located on Georgia Highway 15 and U. S. 280.

Many travelers going north and south on state route 15 pass through this enterprising and industrious community. Vidalia was once known as “Jenkins Station” and now is billed as “The Sweet Onion City.”

If you are a native Georgian, you likely know what that means.  This is the home of the world-famous Vidalia onion which is grown in 13 counties and portions of seven other counties legally designated by the state of Georgia.

What gives the Vidalia onion its distinctive taste is the low sulfur content of the sandy Coastal Plains soil in this region. 

The first market for the product were tourists who traveled through the area on the way to Florida before the Interstate which included the heavily traveled U. S. 1 which runs through Lyons, the county seat, which is 5.5 miles to the east.

A few years ago, I became acquainted with the R. T. Stanley family, one of the biggest producers of Vidalia onions.  They are a hard-working and enterprising family who represent faith, hope, and charity in the highest tradition.  I have fished with them, hunted with them and enjoyed countless social outings with them.  

However, I have a system that does not tolerate onions—unless they are cooked.  Onion rings are okay, too.  Nonetheless, I am always high fiving the Stanley’s and the Vidalia sweet onion.  The Stanley’s are church going, do right by their neighbors, and follow the Georgia Bulldogs with an affection which is comparable to their love of the soil.

It didn’t hurt farmers in the sweet onion territory that the Piggly Wiggly food chain located its home office in Vidalia for years.  Store executives promoted the onions in their stores and the growers and producers organized an association and by 1986 an act of the state legislature authorized a trademark for the product.  In 1990 the Vidalia onion was named Georgia’s state vegetable.

You find a lot of pecan orchards in Vidalia and it once was a bastion for tobacco production.  It was fun to come here during tobacco season and listen to the auctioneer barking out numbers and concluding with a crescendo, “Sold.”  

Vidalia was a 12-million-pound market in its heyday in the fifties.  That was considered big for those times.  Tobacco production has declined almost 80 percent in Georgia in recent years.  

During a couple of summers when I was enrolled at the University of Georgia, I had a summer job with the Agricultural Research Service.  

In addition to a modest salary, I was paid $7.00 per diem per day.   Believe it or not, you could get a boarding house room for $4.00 or $5.00 which included breakfast.  Lunch was 75 cents and dinner $1.25.

A friend had relatives who were firemen in Fitzgerald and he told me that if I went by and asked them, they would let me sleep in the fire hall for free.  That worked a few times as I, and a co-worker, moved about the state.

There was no such luck when I got to Vidalia, so I went down to the city jail and they booked me into a cell for the night. I didn’t realize that many of those tobacco laborers, coming into money at peak tobacco season, really tied one on.

Many of them were thrown into the slammer for public drunkenness.  I made the mistake of telling one of the incarcerated about my scheme to pocket my hotel per diem.  

All through the night as a new town drunk was booked into the jail, he would bring the latest town drunk to my cell and disclose what “this crazy college boy is in jail for.”

The end of the story is that I bought a used ’50 Ford, much of it with my frugal enterprise in managing my government per diem money. I learned, however, don’t book yourself in small town jails to save a buck.