America’s rugged landscape and endless horizons seem to call to the inner pioneer of people who want to walk the world’s strangest places.
Somehow, the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine in Darwin, Minnesota, also appeals to that exploring spirit.
At roughly 13 feet tall, 40 feet around, and weighing 8.7 tons, the ball of twine resembles an enormous African cornrow. It smells like old, clean straw.
“This is real twine that farmers were using, and they gave it to them,” said its Thursday volunteer guardian Denise Iverson.
“y said when they moved, they thought there would be critters,” she said. “But it’s so dense. re wasn’t nothing when they moved.”
Iverson started working at the Twine Ball in 2019. She’s a devout Catholic with an enthusiastic and grandmotherly vibe.
“Even my friends, they just laugh,” Iverson said. “I think, ‘I don’t care if you laugh, I love this!’”
Made by local carpenter Francis Johnson, the “World’s Biggest Twine Ball Made By One Man” is arguably America’s most famous roadside attraction. It’s featured in Weird Al Yankovich songs, news articles, and record books.
At least three other Americans have also created giant twine balls, which respectively claim to be largest by weight, largest by width, and largest made from a certain type of twine. Darwin’s is still the largest made by one man.
No other nation can boast even one contender for the title.
Darwin mayor Josh Johnson said it wouldn’t matter to his town of 320 people if someone beat Francis Johnson’s record.
“To me, there’s probably only two twine balls that have a real claim to it,” he said. “That would be ours with Francis Johnson being the sole creator and then Cawker City.”
America rules the world of roadside attractions.
While the strange attractions of other countries tend to emphasize history, art, or religion, American attractions are different.
Many were created in the past 60 years by individuals working alone. Although some of these attractions serve an advertising or artistic purpose, many don’t. Many attractions were made just for the sake of breaking records.
Somewhere, some American wanted a giant ball of twine, or a Stonehenge made of cars, the world’s largest fork, a painted mountain, the world’s largest ball of paint, a giant blue whale statue, or something else even stranger.
So they built it.
In the words of parody artist Weird Al’s song about the world’s biggest ball of twine: “Kids, this here’s what America’s all about.”
All Roads Lead Through Minnesota
Like all great American stories, the World’s Biggest Twine Ball’s began with one determined individual.
Francis Johnson was a bachelor and carpenter, Iverson said. Starting in 1950, he began winding the ball, gathering twine from local farmers.
For 29 years, he worked four hours each day on his masterpiece, Iverson said.
He meticulously knotted and tightened the twine until the ball gained its current shape and solidity.
Francis Johnson, a non-smoker, died in 1989 from lung emphysema. People wonder if it was caused by inhaling dust from the twine ball, Iverson said.
No one ever discovered why Francis Johnson did it.
“My mother taught me not to waste anything,” he once told a Minneapolis Tribune reporter. But this answer only raises more questions. Why is spending five continuous years of life on a twine ball not itself a waste?
Twine Town
Like almost all persistent hard work, Johnson’s twine ball got results. He is now Darwin’s most famous son.
twine ball has forever changed the community, Josh Johnson said.
“We always say in Darwin, it’s the twine that binds,” the mayor said.
Every street sign in Darwin bears a stylized twine ball next to the street name. locals celebrate Twine Ball Day with a festival every August. Even the veterans’ memorial has a twine ball carved into its stone.
When an employee of Ripley’s Believe it or Not visited Darwin in an attempt to buy the ball, he got a very hostile response, Iverson said.
“He got so booed out of town that he said he feared for his life,” she said.
Despite all the local enthusiasm, the twine ball doesn’t bring in big-league tourism for local businesses. At peak season, the Darwin gas station gets about 200 more customers weekly than usual—a 10 percent increase, but still far fewer than the gas station down the road in Litchfield gets on a normal week.
Darwin has only two restaurants. Trouble’s Restaurant and Bar kitchen manager Adam Monson agrees that the twine ball brings in a few customers. But both restaurants are only open four hours a day—not long enough to fully benefit from twine-ball tourists.
Most tourists visiting Darwin hear about the Twine Ball online and are on the way to somewhere else.
But a few visit the twine ball as a highlight on their trip.
“re’s a Weird Al song about the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota and I have known of it for many, many years,” said Chicagoan Jim Mulhearn, who visited with his wife Kelly for their anniversary.
For the Mulhearns, the Darwin twine ball was one stop on a cross-country oddity odyssey, which also included a giant ball of twine in Wisconsin and the Mall of America.
Fishing For Customers
Some roadside attractions are simply strange. But others are wacky advertising schemes, designed to bring customers off the road using wackiness alone.
For Hayward Wisconsin’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, the line is the highway, the fish is the bait, and travelers are the fish.
In 1978, four years after the museum’s creation, the museum’s owners built a 747-sized statue of a freshwater muskie outside museum, executive director Emmett Brown said. Big Muskie cost $40,000 to build then—roughly $167,000 in 2021 dollars.
World’s Largest Fish looms over the entire museum. Although trees now obscure a view from the road, its lifelike paint job still catches attention.
After visitors pay the museum’s $8.95 admission fee, they can see the Big Muskie up close and climb inside it.
Fishing Hall of Fame displays expertly caught fish, classic boat motors, fishing rods, and far more memorial plaques for anglers than one would expect.
Fishing enthusiasts love it, but without the Big Muskie, non-fishermen might find it too much hook and not enough bait.
From the memorial-studded garden, a river of visitors gawks at the giant muskie statue.
“Big Muskie!” one visitor exclaimed when asked why he visited.
Big Muskie, Big Money
Since 1978, the Big Muskie brought tens of thousands of people into the museum, Brown said.
Since its creation, it’s made the museum back its money a hundredfold if not more.
“ return on investment has probably been, I don’t know, a hundredfold,” said Brown. “It could be even more than that. I think the fish gets people into the museum initially.”
“We have about 50,000 visitors a year,” Brown said. “We are definitely the go-to attraction. bulk of our visitors are from the upper Midwest, but we get people from all over the place, even from Europe.”
giant muskie effectively extends the Hall of Fame’s visitor base from big fishing enthusiasts to Big Fish enthusiasts.
Most visitors to Hayward, Wisconsin, come for fishing tourism, local business owners said. n they visit the town’s bars, restaurants, and storefronts.
Local business owners say the Big Muskie sometimes gets people to stop in town for food. But, overall, its loss wouldn’t do much to their local economy.
“Hayward has been a destination for many, many years up here,” said Angler’s Bar and Grill owner Billie Jo Sabin. “re’s lots of different things that attract them, whether it’s the fish, the resorts, the restaurants, or the festivals.”
Just like the Twine Ball in Darwin, the Big Muskie has stamped an identity on the town.
“It’s kind of our icon here,” said local Marybeth Bates. “We’re one of the only people that have a fishing hall of fame.”
Bates said that the fish is a useful landmark. She often uses it as a reference point when giving driving directions.
Carhenge
In the middle of the Nebraska stands one of America’s most successful roadside attractions. Carhenge.
Carhenge is a copy of Stonehenge with a twist. It’s made out of vintage American cars painted gray.
No one knows how long it took to build Stonehenge, but it took Jim Reinders only a week to build Carhenge with his family. He was a sculptor who liked Stonehenge and classic cars.
Like Darwin’s Ball of Twine, the Big Muskie, and many other roadside monuments, it’s made with surprising attention to detail.
Like the original Stonehenge, Carhenge frames the summer solstice between its structures. It’s an exact copy of the United Kingdom’s most famous stone circle, down to the half-buried cars a few dozen yards away.
Entry is free, and visitors stop by on an almost hourly basis.
“We’ve been here twice already,” said Karol Erdmann, an Iowan visiting while travelling to Denver with her husband Alan. “In the true sense of the word, it’s unique.”
“We’re both car and henge people,” said Alan Erdmann.
“We’re definitely car people,” said Carol Erdmann.
couple spent the night in Alliance because they planned to visit Carhenge, said Karol Erdmann.
Many visitors said they slightly modified their original road trip plans to pass through Alliance and see Carhenge.
“I’ve been wanting to come here for years. It’s just never been on the route wherever I was going, and I decided to veer off the route this time,” said visitor Renee Helmsteadt. “It’s better than my expectations.”
Standing Cars, Moving Economy
Carhenge is the crown of Alliance, Nebraska. circle draws between 67,000 and 84,000 visitors to the town every year, said Becci Thomas, the director of the Alliance Knight Museum in Alliance. Thomas previously was a member of Friends of Carhenge, a local group dedicated to preserving the car circle.
For Alliance, a town of nearly 8,000 people, this level of tourism brings huge economic benefits.
“That’s a huge impact if those people only brought bought one soda while they were here,” Thomas said. “That’s a ton of money. Our last tourism director referred to Carhenge as our ‘hook,’ which I totally agree with.”
Some of this business impact comes from the fact that Alliance is incredibly remote. nearest town with over 2,000 people is nearly an hour away. When people visit Carhenge, they often buy food and fuel too.
“Instead of saying ‘ middle of nowhere,’ our mayor used to say ‘We’re in the middle of everywhere,’ which is much more nice-sounding,” said Thomas.
For local business owners, Carhenge is a cash cow.
Local gas station owner Nick Singh said he estimates Carhenge’s presence drives up his sales by 25 percent to 50 percent.
“It makes pretty big difference,” he said.
Restaurants also receive a steady trickle of Carhenge customers. Melanie Mann, the owner of Newberry’s Common Ground café in Alliance, said she estimates that during peak season, two customers visit her restaurant after seeing Carhenge every day.
“It’s a great attraction, it brings people to town,” Mann said.
At first, locals hated Carhenge, said Thomas. One woman deliberately built her house so that her windows faced away from it.
“She’s now dead,” said Thomas. “Carhenge is still there. So that didn’t work well for her.”
prosperity Carhenge brought Alliance made it valuable to the city and to relatively nearby towns. In 2011, Friends of Carhenge, the volunteer association that owned the circle, put it up for sale for a staggering $300,000, Thomas said.
Friends of Carhenge eventually sold the attraction to the Alliance City Government.
“We didn’t want to move it. We didn’t want to lose it,” said Thomas. “Because it brings many people in today.”
Roadside
Perhaps America has so many roadside attractions because it has so many roads. Driving them almost allows travelers to understand timelessness.
After a few hours driving the Great Plains, you begin feeling you haven’t gotten anywhere. small towns, the road, the endless sky are the same.
Only sound still indicates time. So you listen to music or the radio until it starts to sound the same. Time seems to disappear.
People mistake the feeling that follows for boredom, but it’s really restlessness before an unchanging eternity.
When drivers on the Plains see a sign for “ World’s Biggest Ball of Twine,” they pull over because they want to be reminded of size and distinction. Timeless Plains swallow those qualities like the ocean swallows a life raft.
Compared to other countries, America has more roads that pass through far fewer populated areas. Among First World countries, only Australia and Canada compare with America’s low population density and large areas.
Interestingly, these countries both have several strange roadside attractions. Australia has the World’s Largest Sheep and the World’s Largest Pineapple, while Canada has the World’s Largest Lobster, the World’s Biggest Axe, and the World’s Biggest Dinosaur.
But these attractions differ from America’s in a crucial way. y celebrate local industries, while Americans often build their attractions without any clear economic reason.
Travelers and Destinations
America’s roadside attractions may be located in many different places, but in one way they’re all at the same intersection.
y stand at the point where one person’s creative desire meets with another person’s urge to discover.
In even the strangest roadside attractions, it’s possible to see the devoted attention of an artist. It seems odd that someone would put so much care into creating a ball of twine or calculate the exact angle at which to bury cars so they could mimic Stonehenge, but Francis Johnson and Jim Reinders did.
It seems equally strange that thousands of people drive countless miles to see these places and others like them.
A cynic might dismiss this peculiar meeting of minds as mere kitsch. And like most tourist activities, roadside attractions do thrive on kitsch. But America’s obsession with roadside attractions also has a deeper meaning.
It reveals a nation always eager to both find and create the world’s most unusual places.
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