Feb. 14, 2011

EXCLUSIVE: How the 'Crappie Capital' came to be

By Roy Mitchell

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CEDAR BLUFF — Cherokee County and its fish-filled billboards, scaly statues and signs at motels, and crappie-covered water tower leave little doubt as to Weiss Lake's nickname of “The Crappie Capital of the World.”

The popular moniker has reeled in tourists for over 30 years, even garnering a measure of out-of-state publicity. On the Memphis Edge website, for example, Bryan Brasher states to his on-line audience about Weiss: “I think the title 'Crappie Capital of the World' is ... a fantastic marketing ploy designed to lure anglers to a beautiful lake in a beautiful region of the world.”

So what is the story behind this “fantastic marketing ploy?” Actually, no advertising agency ever penned the nickname. The famous slogan's curious derivation stems from an art fair, a T-shirt, and a teenager's quick wit.

The first in the series of events that would result in Weiss Lake's nickname began from over the state line in Rome, Ga., at the General Electric plant. For years, GE used PCBs to make huge electric transformers, a practice outlawed in the late 1970s. Through the years, PCB's were released into the environment via streams and the Coosa River, which feeds Weiss.

Though GE reportedly stopped using the toxic chemicals, the public discovered Weiss Lake had been exposed. As a result, tourism around Weiss Lake suffered.
“The marinas were just going broke,” recalled Nell Oliver, who co-owned Little River Marina at the time. “The fishing was off so much.”

Consequently, local businesses formed a tourist association to help revive the flow of visitors. An event the group promoted was the Cornwall Furnace Art Fair, supervised at the time by local artists Mark and Becky Clayton. In their preparations, two tourist association officers, Oliver and Cedar Bluff resident Sue Young, worked on the design for an art fair T-shirt. In doing so, they realized the lake itself needed a slogan to promote area events such as the art fair.

Shortly thereafter, Young, who worked at Harton's Grocery, was sitting at a desk in the back of the store with owners Tom and Mary Harton, trying to come up with such a phrase.

“We were trying to come up with a slogan for us to use that would be catchy,” Oliver remembered. “We tossed around 'Crappie Capital of Alabama,' 'Crappie Capital of America,' 'Crappie Capital of the United States.' Tim Harton [the owners' teenaged son] came walking through and said, why not Crappie Capital of the World? We liked it.”

Young recalled the moment, as well.

“Tim just said, 'of the World,' and I said, 'You're wanting to really get far,' and he said, 'If you want to go all the way, go all the way,' and that's how it came about.”
The logo soon graced the art fair shirt and thousands of brochures, and the rest is Weiss Lake history.

For nearly two generations, fishing guides, marinas, motels, and other Cherokee County entities have used the nickname “Crappie Capital of the World” to attract tourist dollars to Weiss Lake and the surrounding communities, even becoming fodder for tongue-in-cheek internet jabs.

Impactlab.net recently compiled “The Eight Most Insane Wikipedia Entries,” and “Crappie Capital of the World” actually made number two on the list. The site gave credit where it was due.

“There's a town in Alabama that went out of its way to declare itself the 'Crappie Capital of the World?',” the article read. “Okay, we may owe this [place] an apology because that's actually pretty awesome.”