The existence of the PurpleHull Pea Festival – and its tiller race as well – is due to one man.

In early 1990, Glen Eades decided his little community needed some shaking up.

“We were so boring we didn’t even have a cop,” says Glen.

(For more information about Glen, click on Glen’s Page. There you’ll also find some of the famous newspaper columns Glen wrote.)

Glen started to work to gain support for an idea he had. He approached then Mayor Joe Mullins about beginning a festival that would pay homage to the one major delicacy grown in every local backyard garden of any worth, the purple hull pea.

A meeting was called of some of the area’s finest citizens. And thus, the PurpleHull Pea Festival was born.

At one of those early meetings, Glen proposed the idea of a tiller race. Mayor Mullins remembers thinking, “Glen, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but you need to change brands.”

Thankfully, Glen’s ideas prevailed, and now Emerson is host to one of the most unusual – some would say weirdest – award-winning festivals in the south.