Roadside attractions are the physical manifestations of the cliché, “It’s about the journey, not the destination.” The small, often odd stops were always meant to draw tourists on road trips to bigger destinations, and while the heyday for roadside attractions in the United States was the 1940s to the 1960s, there are still plenty to be found. The kitschy spots offer interesting places to take a break from the road and stretch your legs, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll delight in these oddities and maybe next time you hit the highway on a road trip, you’ll stop at a few of these places and bask in their quirky charm.
Many of these weird landmarks claim to be the world’s largest and others were made by people who enjoyed a bit of subterfuge, so the stories of their beginnings may be murky. That means I can’t verify with absolute certainty that any of these strange sites are actually the world’s largest anything, but that’s not the point. I urge you to suspend disbelief and enjoy the weird and wonderful stops on our journey through these roadside attractions.
1. The Big Duck
City: Flanders, New York
How to get there: The Big Duck is located on Long Island in the town of Flanders near Flanders Bay. It's about 90 minutes from Queens, New York, via I-495.
On Long Island by Flanders Bay, a giant white duck has taken up residence, never flying south for winter. The cement, duck-shaped building was constructed in the 1930s, the fruition of the idea of a farmer who used the building as a marketing tactic to increase the sales of ducks and duck eggs.
Today, the Big Duck operates as a gift shop selling Big Duck souvenirs and houses a display about the structure’s history.
2. Lucy the Elephant
City: Margate City, New Jersey
How to get there: Lucy the Elephant is located at 1 Lucy Plaza about 25 minutes southwest of Atlantic City on Atlantic Avenue.
Lucy the Elephant is a building in the shape of an elephant reportedly built by James Lafferty in 1881 to attract people to South Atlantic City (now Margate) in New Jersey to sell land. Lucy has attracted attention and curiosity for its entire existence. For much of its time, Lucy has been a tourist attraction where visitors could pay a small fee and tour the 38-foot-long elephant that stands on 22-foot-tall legs.
Even today, visitors can purchase admission to enter Lucy the Elephant on a tour. The entrance is at the hind legs where tourgoers climb up a spiral staircase into the body of the elephant and learn a bit about Lucy's history, like how the elephant used to be on the beach, was briefly a tavern and used as a vacation home for one summer.
3. World's Largest Chest of Drawers, High Boy and Chair
City: High Point, North Carolina
How to get there: All three of these roadside attractions are west of Greensboro, North Carolina. Heading down US 29, the World's Largest Highboy is the first stop. Continuing east via Dr. M. L. King jr. Drive to Highpoint, the World's Largest Chest of Drawers is the second stop. And departing High Point via English Road to Thomasville is the third and last stop, the Big Chair.
Outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, in Jamestown is Furnitureland South, advertised as the "world's largest furniture store." At the front of the store is the World's Largest Highboy chest of drawers. The highboy stands on four spindly claw-feet and capped with an ornate bonnet top. The highboy is taller than the warehouse sized store it sits in front of.
Further west is High Point, North Carolina, home of the World's Largest Chest of Drawers. The chest of drawers is actually a building façade, and the story goes that it was originally a bureau complete with a "mirror" on top that served as the building's billboard. The oversized piece of furniture was the town's welcome center that went by the name The Bureau of Information. In the ’90s, the building was in a state of disrepair, so it underwent heavy renovations, changing the style of the furniture, giving it a cherrywood-like finish and converting it from a bureau to a chest of drawers.
Heading further down the road will take visitors to Thomasville, home of The Big Chair. The enormous Duncan Phyfe-style armchair was built in the ’50s as a replacement for the original. The Big Chair was made to commemorate the furniture industry in the town.
4. Expedition Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum
City: Cherry Log, Georgia
How to get there: Expedition Bigfoot is located at 1934 State Hwy. 515, about 6 miles south of Blue Ridge, and it’s about 90 minutes north of Atlanta.
While I’m skeptical of the existence of Bigfoot, I still enjoy the lore. And Bigfoot Expedition has it in spades. This museum contains statues, castings of Bigfoot footprints, audio recordings of Bigfoot and info from firsthand accounts. I can’t say whether or not any of this is real, but believer or skeptic, this is a roadside attraction worth visiting. For a small fee, tour the museum, and stop in the gift shop before leaving.
5. School Bus Graveyard
City: Alto, Georgia
How to get there: The School Bus Graveyard is located at the corner of Crane Mill Road and State Route 365. Search for Alonzo Wade Auto Parts for GPS directions.
Graffiti and old vehicles seem to go hand in hand like chocolate and peanut butter, and it's how the School Bus Graveyard reportedly began. The story goes that a junkyard owner, Walter Wade, set up the old school buses on the perimeter of the property as a fence to deter theft of metal scrap and car parts. One day, some graffiti appeared on a bus and that grew into a yearslong art project when, once a year, artists come and paint the buses.
The perimeter of the School Bus Graveyard can be seen from State Route 365 near the corner of Crane Mill Road. To view more of the unusual attraction, you'll have to enter the junkyard for a small fee.
6. Coral Castle
City: Homestead, Florida
How to get there: Coral Castle is about 45 to 60 minutes south of Miami via Florida's Turnpike at 28655 S. Dixie Hwy.
Coral Castle is an oddity, surrounded in mystery. Local lore says that a man by the name of Edward Leedskalnin built this castle by himself out of stone too heavy for a single man to cut and move on his own. Leedskalnin built sculptures resembling planets and the moon, a fountain and fortress-like walls from a sedimentary rock named oolite. He claimed to have figured out how the pyramids were built and to understand how to use magnetism to move these large and heavy stones.
Today, Coral Castle is open to visitors, and guides will tell you about Edward Leedskalnin and the little that is known about him as well as the conjecture about how he constructed the landmark over more than 20 years.
7. Casey, Illinois - Home of a Collection of the World's Biggest Things
City: Casey, Illinois
How to get there: Casey, Illinois, is located about 130 miles northeast of St. Louis, Missouri, via I-70, and about 110 miles southwest of Indianapolis, Indiana.
Head downtown to see most of the items like the World's Largest Wind Chime and the World's Largest Rocking Chair. Another delightful stop is the World's Largest Mailbox. Visitors may climb the stairs into the mailbox where — when a letter is mailed — the giant red flag on the outside of the box raises and lowers. Visitors to town on a Saturday during the warm weather months might get lucky enough to see the World's Largest Teeter Totter in use and hop on for a ride.
The World's Largest Golf Tee is located at the public golf course in Casey, while the biggest golf club is downtown. Among the things that are big but not labeled as the world's largest are an ear of corn, a pencil and a spinning top.
8. The House on the Rock
City: Spinning Green, Wisconsin
How to get there: From Madison, take either US 14 or US 18 to SR 23. Use address 54 SR 23 for GPS directions.
The original owner, according to the stories, first imagined the building on the location in 1945, and he opened the house as an attraction to visitors in 1959 or 1960 (the date, as with many things about the house and collection, are unclear). There are a few admission options for self-guided tours. The house is divided into three sections, and if you opt to visit all three, expect to spend around three hours here, the strangest roadside attraction on this list.
There's no discernable order to how the collections are arranged. There are areas that have re-created elements of the outdoors with water features, trees, taxidermy and even an old-timey street. There is a large collection of porcelain dolls, and one of the two carousels is the Doll Carousel, which has two decks and is ridden by dolls. The other carousel is huge with 269 animals — odder than animals on the average carousel — and is lit by over 100 chandeliers. Old coin-operated automatons play out short vignettes, and a 200-foot-tall display of a whale with jaggedly sharp teeth being attacked by an enormous octopus shares space with a display on the Titanic. Each room feels more out of place than the last, and the whole attraction gives some visitors the sense that they’ve been on a detour outside of reality.
9. Carhenge
City: Alliance, Nebraska
How to get there: Carhenge is a less than a 10-minute detour from US 385 via 25th Street in Alliance. Head north on SR 87 to 2151 CR 59.
Modeled after Stonehenge in Salisbury, England, Carhenge has stood since 1987 as a replica of the prehistoric monument, albeit one made of 39 automobiles, and memorial to the artist’s father. Jim Reinder built and maintained Carhenge and Car Art Reserve before it was gifted to the city of Alliance that continues to maintain the unusual roadside attraction. The cars are painted stone gray, and visitors can take photos and walk around the giant display.
10. The World’s Largest Jackalope and World’s Even Larger Jackalope Statue
City: Douglas, Wyoming
How to get there: Douglas, Wyoming, is about 230 miles north of Denver, Colorado, via I-25. It’s also about 315 miles west of Yellowstone National Park’s East Entrance via US 26 and US 20.
The word jackalope is a portmanteau of jackrabbit and antelope, and while the origins of the creation of this mythical creature are a bit murky, the people of Douglas, Wyoming, have taken on the moniker of Jackalope City with pride.
With that in mind, if you are on a road trip in Wyoming, stop off in this town to admire the former tallest jackalope statue, fittingly located in Jackalope Square. For a fun memento of your visit to Douglas, stop at the visitor center located at the Railroad Museum (which fittingly has another Jackalope statue) to purchase a jackalope-catching license, valid for a few hours on June 31 (a made-up day for a made-up creature).
You might have noticed that I said that the 8-foot statue was formerly the tallest. That's because a 13-foot statue was erected atop a hill outside of Douglas. It can be seen from I-25 on the west side of town. Look for the Jackalope a couple miles north of exit 140 on the northeast side of the road.
11. Cadillac Ranch
City: Amarillo, Texas
How to get there: Cadillac Ranch is located on an access road of I-40, east of Arnot Rd. Use the address 13651 I-40 Frontage Rd. for GPS directions. Parking is on the side of the road, and visitors must take a short walk through a gate for an up-close view of the Cadillacs.
Cadillac Ranch was built in 1974 by a small art collective called the Ant Farm. The public art installation is 10 Cadillacs ranging from 1949 to 1964 models buried nose down in the ground with tail fins up. People have painted and graffitied the cars so frequently that the paint is thick and bubbled, and this odd art endeavor continues to attract graffiti artists and onlookers alike some 50 years later and is a popular stop on road trips through Texas.
12. Cabazon Dinosaurs
City: Cabazon, California
How to get there: The Cabazon Dinosaurs are located at 50770 Seminole Dr., about 20 minutes west of Palm Springs via I-10 and around a 90-minute drive from Los Angeles.
The first Cabazon Dinosaur was built in the 1970s, Dinny the Brontosaurus (now Apatosaurus), a long-neck dinosaur like Little Foot in "The Land Before Time," and a massive Tyrannosaurus rex was constructed in the ‘80s. The dinos have been an attraction since capturing the attention of passersby, dinosaur lovers, and even some filmmakers, appearing in a few ‘80s movies. Today, the apatosaurus and T. rex are often painted to celebrate different holidays throughout the year.
Dinny the Apatosaurus has a gift shop in the tail, but visitors must pay a fee to enter the T. rex. Once inside, visitors can climb to the top, into the mouth and peer outside between the intimidatingly sharp teeth.
13. Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree Park
City: Leggett, California
How to get there: Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree Park is north of Sacramento and San Francisco. From US 101 exit to SR 271 and turn onto Drive-Thru Tree Road to 67402 Drive Thru Tree Road.
The Chandelier Tree is a giant redwood with a car size hole carved into base. The tree is on private property, and visitors must pay a fee to drive through. However, visitors are permitted to stop and take photos of their vehicle as well as pose with the tree. The area is also set up as a day-use park, so in addition to the gift shop, there are chainsaw carvings of animals throughout the park.
14. The Giant Little Red Wagon
City: Spokane, Washington
How to get there: The wagon is located in Riverfront Park in Spokane on Spokane Falls Boulevard between Stevens Street and Washington Street.
Head to Spokane for a giant dose of nostalgia with a look at a huge red Radio Flyer wagon. The oversize toy was commissioned for Spokane's 1989 centennial Celebration of Children and now stands as an interactive element in Riverfront Park. Parkgoers can climb into the wagon using a staircase at the back and go down the handle that doubles as a slide.
Note that there is another giant red wagon at the Radio Flyer corporate office in Chicago. This wagon, known as the World's Largest Wagon, was created for the company's 80th anniversary. It is currently behind a gate against the office building and cannot be viewed up close.
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