Marietta in History
Farmers' Market
Circa 1934
Marietta is proud of her thriving Farmers' Market, the latest manifestation of a long custom of town produce sales. Since the days when Cherokee Indians came to sell their baskets and venison, summer Saturday mornings in the square have resembled an open air cornucopia of plenty.
In the 1930s, principal crops were listed as cotton, corn, hay, truck-garden crops and sweet potatoes. Marietta citizens complained about the traffic as they threaded their way through cars, trucks and wagons brimming with fruits, vegetables, live chickens, eggs packed individually in cotton-seed hulls, butter, cider and stove wood.
Sweet potato varieties Nancy Hall and Puerto Rico, grown in the Lost Mountain area, were roundly praised as being the most delicious to be found anywhere. Cobb County sorghum was declared the unsurpassable complement to hot buttered biscuits.
Shoppers thumped watermelons, squeezed peaches and checked out the silk on the ears of Golden Bantam or Country Gentleman sweet corn as they filled their baskets. There may have been a Depression on, but the people of Marietta lived in the midst of a garden.
Temple, Sarah Blackwell Gober. The First Hundred Years.