The desert pit stop that’s basically a time capsule of roadside California |
Roadside fruit stands have long been a beloved fixture of California roadways. In the 1920s, a new kind of stand began popping up all along Highway 111 in the Coachella Valley, offering a relatively recent import to America that most people had never seen before. The date, a sweet, sticky orb that tasted almost like candy, happened to grow incredibly well in the area’s hot, dry climate, and farmers rushed to take part in the boom.
Competition was fierce, as new farms cropped up and growers had to figure out how to differentiate themselves. For one man who began his Indio farm on Christmas Day in 1924, that meant making this shriveled, brown fruit as sexy as he possibly could.
Shields Date Garden began when owner Floyd Shields traded his Long Beach apartment lease for a palm farm in Indio, giving up a bustling life in LA and replacing it with an agricultural one in the sparsely populated desert region, or so the story goes. With his wife Bess, Shields moved to the town of just 500 residents to see if they could make it in the rapidly growing industry. They had almost no farming experience.
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A view of the date palms inside the Shields Date Garden grounds in Indio, Calif.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture had recently imported date palms from the Middle East and northern Africa, and Shields took what he could get, grafted offshoots together and slowly produced a working date farm. The work was hard and complicated — dates must be picked by hand, the tall trees produce sharp thorns, and climbing the trees could be dangerous, not to mention the 100-degree temperatures — but the fruit was new and exotic, and the couple was poised to capitalize on farming in the desert just as it exploded in popularity.
The traffic through the valley got another uptick in the 1950s as travelers made their way from LA to the Salton Sea, a popular getaway at the time. Shields was perfectly positioned as a roadside stop, especially once it debuted a new building (the current one) in 1950. Soon after that, a sign out front proclaimed visitors could watch a film inside, titled “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”
“Oh, that shocked people then!” Bess told the Desert Sun in a 1981 interview.
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The iconic Shields roadside knight was introduced by Floyd Shields in 1953.
The Romance Theatre, where visitors can watch the Floyd Shields presentation, “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”
This (in reality very unsexy film) was born out of lectures Shields had offered at the farm to passing tourists. Eventually, he got tired of explaining how date cultivation worked and decided to use his frustration as an opportunity for some new marketing. The film premiered in 1951 and played in a theater constructed on-site, adjacent to the shop. The 17-minute film, updated since the original reel, continues to play on a loop in the very same place to this day. It’s also been viewed more than 31,000 times on YouTube.
If that title wasn’t enough to lure people in, frequent travelers to the area may know Shields for the giant blue knight that sits out front, pointing........