By Grace Thornton
The Alabama Baptist
Most Alabamians who head for the beach have places they always stop for snacks. For some, it’s peach ice cream or flavored pecans.
And for others, the have-to stop is for boiled peanuts.
It’s those people Evelyn Allen caters to every day as she opens up Allen’s Dry Creek Market on Highway 331 between Brantley and Luverne, where she sells the boiled peanuts her husband, John, got up at 4 a.m. to boil.
“I used to come here and get boiled peanuts when I was a little kid, back when it was called Findlay’s Curb Market,” Allen said.
So after she retired from phone company work in Florida, she and her husband moved north and reopened the old Findlay building with a new market selling produce, plants and of course, boiled peanuts.
New hobby
“I’m not into knitting or crocheting, so I had to do something,” Allen said with a laugh.
One of the defining traits of their peanuts is that they boil them from green peanuts, not from dried ones. The area itself is on the country’s road trip radar for boiled peanuts — it’s home to the World’s Largest Peanut Boil festival put on by the Shrine Club on Labor Day weekend.
The giant peanut the festival uses for decoration sits outside Allen’s Dry Creek Market the rest of the year.
Dianne Catrett, a member of nearby Chapel Hill Baptist Church, Rutledge, said Evelyn’s peanuts are some of her favorites — “they’re very good,” she said.
The two are in garden club together.
‘Always loved them’
“I grew up on boiled peanuts,” Catrett said.
“A lot of our social life here was peanut boiling. I’ve always loved them.”
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