More than 2,000 mouths chomped down on the world’s largest pear pie at the 1936 Pear and Tomato Festival in Talent, Ore. Festival-goers consumed it in the evening after admiring it all day as the fair’s central attraction.
During the depression years, businesses had to find new customers or face store closures. The president of the Talent Chamber of Commerce, Ray Schumacher, hit upon the idea of a pear and tomato festival to celebrate the region’s abundance of the two local products. As many as 3,000 attended the early October event.
Besides the pear pie, the fair featured a baseball game between the Medford Craters and the Grants Pass Cavemen, although who won has been lost over time. Tomato growers from one end of the valley to the other competed for agricultural prizes. The majority went to a Central Point tomato farmer, Otto Bohnert.
With the 1936 election only a month away, a candidate for the State Legislature, James Stevens of Medford, sang several solos for the crowd.
Planning for the following year’s festival began before the first very successful one had closed.
Source: "3000 Attend Talent Pear Festival." Medford News, 9 Oct. 1936, p. 6.
