The city of Avery loves the tomato and celebrates it every summer on the Saturday before July 4th with a Tomato Queen Pageant, lawnmower races, music and two salsa contests, one red, one green.

The northeast corner of Texas likes its festivals, and the Avery Tomato Festival is just one local tradition. The towns of Linden, Avinger and Hughes Springs host the Wildflower Trails of Texas festival each April, showcasing literally thousands of varieties.

Hopkins County has a Dairy Festival each June with a homemade ice cream contest and a folk festival in May. Each November, Texarkana has a Mistletoe Fair.

And in this region of Texas, the cooking festivals are about stew, not chili.

The Fall Festival in Sulphur Springs draws 120 cooking teams for the annual stew cook-off, with separate categories for chicken and beef. The stew tradition, says Bill Elliott, pres­ident of the Sulphur Springs Chamber of Commerce, started in the late 1800s at the end of the school year, when folks would throw everything they had into the pot. Today, contestants use cast-iron pots up to 40 gallons in size but must cook over a wood fire.

“Recipes with secret ingredients abound,” Elliott says.

Over time, those kettles may well have included Avery tomatoes. The city got into the tomato industry in the 1920s when two local farmers realized Avery could duplicate the success that Jacksonville, Texas, had had in growing and shipping tomatoes to points north, says Lynn Stephenson, city secretary.

Signs proclaiming “AVERY, Tomato Center of Northeast Texas,” greeted visitors at the town line; the town water tower got a bigger version of the same sign in 1949.

For many farming families, tomatoes meant green. At its peak, Avery was filled with so-called “tomato tramps,” those who arrived each summer for the back-breaking work of picking them, and tomato sheds with teen­agers for sorting and packing.

Each year, there was a tomato festival.

The tradition faded as the industry did, but in 2003, city leaders brought back the annual festival. The event draws more than 10,000 people to the city of 462 each summer.