Every August on Wisconsin Street in Cawker City, Kansas, a few hundred people stand in line for the privilege of adding a few feet of sisal twine to a giant ball. The ball already weighs more than ten cars. It sits inside an open-walled gazebo on a concrete pad, exposed to the wind and the heat, and visitors approach it the way pilgrims approach a relic - one at a time, with a length of twine the town has provided, looking for an open spot on the surface to start their wrap. The event is called the Twine-a-Thon. It has been running, on and off, since the 1980s, and it is the reason a hobby that one farmer began in his barn in 1953 is now the heaviest object on the high plains of north-central Kansas.
Frank Stoeber was a dairy farmer outside Cawker City, a town of fewer than five hundred people roughly two hundred miles west of Kansas City. In 1953 he began coiling the loose ends of sisal twine that came off his hay bales, partly out of thrift and partly because he wanted to see how big the thing would get. He wrapped a few hours every day for the next twenty-one years. By 1961 the ball was five thousand pounds and had to be moved out of his barn. By his death in 1974 it weighed roughly seventeen thousand four hundred pounds and stood eleven feet tall. Stoeber had wrapped every inch of it himself, on a steel rod through the center, in a barn he gradually had to enlarge around it. The ball did not have a plan. It had a habit.
When Stoeber died, Cawker City had to decide what to do with the ball. The obvious answer was to put it in a museum and leave it alone. The town chose something stranger: they decided to keep adding to it. The first community wrappings happened informally in the 1970s. By the 1980s the town had built the open gazebo on Wisconsin Street and formalized the Twine-a-Thon as an annual August event. Visitors are invited, the local merchants pitch in, and someone weighs and measures the ball at the end of each session to record the new total. The current weight is over twenty thousand pounds, the circumference roughly forty feet. The ball outgrew the man who started it almost a quarter century ago. Cawker City keeps the addition going on his behalf.
Cawker City is not the only town in America that claims a world's-largest ball of twine. Darwin, Minnesota, has one too. Francis A. Johnson began his ball in 1950, three years before Stoeber, and worked on it alone until he stopped in 1979. Johnson's ball is preserved inside its own plexiglass-walled gazebo, fixed at the size and weight he left it. The Guinness record book has recognized both balls under different criteria at different times: Darwin holds the record for largest twine ball rolled by a single person; Cawker City holds the record for largest twine ball overall, on the strength of decades of communal additions. Branson, Missouri, briefly entered the contest with a polypropylene ball that purists rejected on material grounds. There is also a smaller plastic-twine ball in Wisconsin. The argument about which counts has never been settled and probably never will be.
Cawker City sits on US-24 about twelve miles north of Interstate 70, in the rolling wheat country between Salina and Hays. There is not a lot else on the highway. A traveler comes off the interstate at Beloit, drives west past elevators and fields and the occasional turbine, and arrives in a town of one block of brick storefronts and a wide quiet main street. The ball is right there on the right, in its gazebo, free, twenty-four hours, no fence. The sign records the latest weight in flaking paint. Some visitors take a photograph and drive on. Others stand for a while. Children touch it - it is permitted - and feel the surprising hardness of a hundred and forty thousand miles of twine compressed against itself. It is not a beautiful object. It is not a meaningful one. It is unreasonably large, and Cawker City has decided, year after year, to keep making it more so.
The ball is at 719 Wisconsin Street in downtown Cawker City, on the south side of the road. There is no admission, no closing time, and no formal staff - just the gazebo, the ball, the sign, and the rotating tally of weight and circumference. A small gift shop across the street sells postcards and lengths of souvenir twine. The Twine-a-Thon falls on a Saturday in mid to late August; the town schedule and a Facebook page list the year's date. The annual event also draws a pancake breakfast, a parade down Wisconsin Street, and live music. Beloit, seven miles east, has the nearest motels and restaurants. Salina, sixty miles southeast, has the nearest commercial airport. Plan fifteen minutes for the ball itself. Plan longer if you stay for the Twine-a-Thon, in which case bring sunscreen and a willingness to wait your turn at a piece of string.
Located at 39.5093 degrees N, 98.4344 degrees W in north-central Kansas, in the rolling agricultural country between the Solomon and Republican rivers. From altitude, Cawker City reads as a small grid of streets on the south shore of Waconda Lake, a long reservoir on the Solomon River - the lake is the prominent navigational feature, not the town. US-24 runs east-west through the grid; Interstate 70 is twelve miles south. The twine ball itself is invisible from the air. Nearest airports: KCKK (Cawker City Municipal, on the south edge of town, public-use turf), KBLU (Beloit, 6 nm E), KSLN (Salina, 55 nm SE, commercial). Recommended viewing altitude 2,500-4,000 ft AGL for the lake and town grid. Daytime VFR; conditions across this stretch of Kansas are usually excellent with strong crosswinds from the south or northwest.