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Jul 12, 2009 11:04 pm US/Central
Finding Minnesota: World's Biggest Ball Of Twine
DARWIN, Minn. (WCCO) ―
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Explore Minnesota Tourism
There's an attraction in Minnesota so offbeat, none other than "
Weird" Al Yankovic penned a song in its praise.
It's the world's largest ball of twine, and it can be found in Meeker County in the town of Darwin.
Yankovic isn't the only person who has fallen in love with the sizable orb. In August, the town of Darwin is gearing up of its annual Twine Ball Days festival. It's always held on the second Saturday in August. There's a parade, live music, a pork chop feed and then a dance in the evening.
Even before you see the ball, you can sense something big up ahead as you drive west along Highway 12 towards the town of Darwin. Then you make that left turn at the water tower and behold!
The ball is 12 feet high and weighs more than 1,700 pounds. Furthermore, the world's largest twine ball was constructed by just one man: Francis A. Johnson.
"What a legacy that he gave to the city of Darwin and to the surroundings, because of the tourism and the interest of people coming," said Roger Werner, a volunteer at the
Twine Ball Museum.
Werner oversees the collection of photographs, newspaper articles, and souvenirs that honor Johnson.
According to Werner, Johnson started his labor of love back in 1950 and didn't stop until 1979. Almost every day for 29 years, he tied strings together and added them to the ball until it got too big to handle. His nephew Harlan Johnson recalled what a struggle it was.
"I remember my brother saying, 'As heavy as it is getting, we are going to have to start using a jack.' I think you saw a photograph maybe of a jack sitting at about a 45-degree angle -- that's just to move it over a bit. And then we'd put a timber underneath it to shim it, to stop it from rolling back and then get a new bite on it and give it another shout," he reminisced.
Francis Johnson's work can be seen in other places around town. He was a gifted carpenter and builder who worked on local houses and also a bank.
He also carved a pair of pliers from wood -- a pair of 7-foot-long pliers with more than 20 smaller pairs of pliers hidden within.
Pictures, statistics and descriptions are fine for giving you a sense of just how big this ball is, but there is one thing those images cannot convey, and that's the aroma. Thirty years after being completed, it still smells overwhelmingly like twine.
"It isn't something that is rotting away or anything," said Warner. "It's just like if you pick a flower and it smells, well twine has its own smell. As you say 'odor,' we say 'smell,'" he said to WCCO-TV reporter Angela Davis.
Regardless of how you describe the scent, the ball is still attracting people from around the country and around the world. Somehow, some way, the big ball of twine has established itself on the list of Minnesota's "must see" tourist attractions.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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