18 Small Towns with Strange Claims to Fame

Ski bums delight! The Mt. Baker Ski Area in northwestern Washington State reported a whopping 1,140 inches of snow in a single season, the figure was validated by the National Climate Extremes Committee. Of course, that was back in the 1998-1999 snowfall season, but the area continues to claim the unofficially highest average annual snowfall of any resort in the world, with 641 inches.

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Talk about a snow day! On February 26, 2008, town residents erected a towering snow woman, standing 122 feet, 1 inch tall—just a tad shorter than the Statue of Liberty. Named Olympia, she was made from 13 million pounds of snow and had eyelashes fashioned from skis, lips made from red car tires, and arms formed by two 30-foot spruce trees. Of course it’s erroneous to call the construction feat the work of a snow day; Olympia actually took a hundred or so volunteers about a month to complete. So why a snow woman? Because in 1999, the people of Bethel built Angus, King of the Mountain, who stood a then-record-breaking 113 feet, 7 inches.

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Be careful when you ask someone in Hershey to give you a big kiss—you might get more than you bargained for. The town is home to the chocolate manufacturer of the same name, and on July 7, 2007, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the company’s signature candy, it unveiled a Hershey’s Kiss weighing 30,540 pounds! It officially made the Guinness Book cut as the largest individual chocolate ever.

And you thought gnomes were tiny! Not the one at Iowa State University's Reiman Gardens—he’s 15 feet fall and 3,500 pounds of metal-reinforced concrete! The handiwork of Wausau craft-folk Andy and Connie Kautza, the gnome was constructed out of a cubic yard of concrete—enough to pave about 20 feet of sidewalk—and traveled 400 miles to its current home, where he stands as a good luck charm. Yeah, it’s good luck he hasn’t fallen and squished anybody!

What’s cooking? How about 365 chickens in the same skillet! Totally doable in this 2-ton frying pan, built by the Queensboro Steel Corp in 1963 as a tribute to the area’s poultry industry. The cast-iron pan, which is 15 feet in diameter and can hold up to 200 gallons of oil, has been frying up chickens for local festivals for decades. Finger lickin’ loco!

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When you think of Louisiana cuisine, you think gumbo, po’ boys, and jambalaya—but there’s got to be dessert on the menu, so may we recommend the peach cobbler? Ruston, hosting the 65th Annual Louisiana Peach Festival on June 27, 2015, was proud to serve the most ginormous fruit cobbler ever. Baked by the local Hampton Inn, it required 819 pounds of peaches, 312 pounds of butter, 343 pounds of flour, 73 gallons of milk, 1 pound of baking powder, and 454 pounds of sugar. The result, which took six hours to cook, weighed in at 2,251 pounds.

Like it or lump it—lump crabmeat, that is! This spot north of Baltimore, home to the Maryland State Fair, got a taste of the state’s signature dish, big time, on September 1, 2012. Thanks to seafood firm Handy International, the world’s largest crab cake, all 300 pounds of it, was dished up. You couldn’t exactly call it light and fluffy, but made of world-famous Maryland blue crab it had to be delicious!

Imagine telling friends you swam the length of an entire river! Try it on the Roe River—at only 201 feet it won the title as the Guinness Book’s shortest. But it’s a claim to fame in dispute! The previous record holder, Oregon’s D River at 440 feet, submitted a new length of only 120 feet at “extreme high tide.” Any wonder why Guinness dropped the category as of the 2006 edition?

Where else but the birthplace of the famous Louisville Slugger (first manufactured in 1884) would you find the world’s biggest bat? Though meant to replicate the wooden bat used by Babe Ruth in the 1920s, it’s actually made of 34 tons of carbon steel. It was erected in July 1996 and today stands proudly in front of the town’s Slugger Museum. But it’s not the only big bat that Louisville can claim: A few blocks away, a huge fake flying bat clings to the wall of a costume store.

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Folks may argue over who makes the best barbecue, but there’s no disputing who put the most time into the tasty treat! That would be Jan Greeff, who—in association with grill and smoker company Char-Broil—cooked for 80 hours straight, culminating on April 27, 2014. Under a tent in the center of town, Greeff got busy with 1,000 hot dogs, 200 pieces of corn, 104 pieces of chicken, 558 hamburgers and 526 sausages. Though the food was given away free, the event was a benefit that raised more than $10,000 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Chow down, y’all!

Getting lost was never this much fun! In October 2011, Garden Cents nursery employee Bryan Jentszch unveiled his monstrous, mammoth Mega Maze—all 96,847 square feet built out of bales of straw. The maze boasted 3,202 bales of straw (each one weighing about 1,100 pounds) and wound its way through 1.6 miles, on the ground and in an elevated 3D section, including two secret hidden rooms. After the Halloween season the maze was dismantled and the straw distributed to local dairy farms as bedding for cows. And that ain’t hay!

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