Giant City: How a crumbling provincial town became the world capital of everything big (11 photos + 1 video)

Even in the American hinterland, the town of Casey looks like a speck of dust: a mere 5.2 square kilometers (smaller than, say, Moscow's Vnukovo Airport) and fewer than 3,000 residents. But if you think there's nothing to do there, you're sorely mistaken.





Because Casey is home to a dozen of the most incredible objects in the world: giant wind bells, a rocking chair the size of a house, a knitting needle with a hook (you can fit a log in it instead of thread), a mailbox big enough for a pickup truck, a pitchfork, a golf club, a pair of wooden shoes, a bird cage (for a pterodactyl), a meter ruler, a pencil, a corn cob, and even a saguaro cactus.



Eight of these behemoths have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. And one man is behind it all – local businessman Jim Bolin.





Jim is the vice president of Bolin Enterprises. The company started as a small paint shop in a family garage, and now employs 240 people, servicing oil and gas pipelines across the country. But while Bolin's business was growing, the rest of Casey was dying.



One after another, the shoe factory, tool shop, hardware store, and feed store closed. And when the recession hit in the late 2000s, even Bolin was gnashing his teeth from lack of money. Then he decided: the town needed to be saved by tourism.



With access to tons of pipe (the company's profile makes a difference), Bolin welded them into giant windbells, each 16.5 meters tall. The project took two years, and by the time it was completed in 2011, ideas were flowing. The company already had its own paint shop, welding shop, and skilled craftsmen. Old telephone poles were used for a rocking chair, oil tanks for the roof of the mailbox and the bottom of the cage. Almost everything was recycled.



Guinness's requirement: a record holder must be functional. So Bolin pulled his cousin Jeanette (who runs a yarn shop in town) onto a giant chair with giant knitting needles. And from there, she knitted the beginnings of not just a scarf, but a giant scarf. Those knitting needles and crochet hook now hang in her shop.



The town's economy revived. The candy store where the "Largest Wooden Shoes" are located makes hundreds of sales a day, and tourists drop coins into the shoes for good luck. All proceeds go to the local food bank. And people drop postcards with the local postmark into the "Largest Mailbox"—hundreds of handmade cards a day.



Jim Bolin didn't stop there. He added to the already mentioned records: "Largest Hammock," "Largest Key" (almost 6 meters), "Largest Fishing Rod," and "Largest Typewriter." However, in 2018, the city and Bolin publicly filed a lawsuit over the "Big Things Small Town" trademark.



Bolin registered it in his own name, claiming to have created the brand himself, though the mayor and residents believed otherwise. The dispute was resolved, but a bad taste remained. Nevertheless, today Casey thrives solely on tourists: tens of thousands of people come here every year to take selfies with the giant pitchfork.



Sadly, Jim Bolin is no longer alive. But the management of Bolin Enterprises continues to build on Jim's legacy and create new masterpieces. So this small city of big things is still growing and continues to thrive on the tourism that one man once started.