World's Largest Ball of Twine by One Man

Francis A. Johnson wound his first piece of baler twine around two fingers in March 1950 and kept winding for 29 years, producing the ball that gave the small Minnesota town of Darwin its fame. The West Central Tribune described him in 2025 as a bachelor farmer and carpenter who spent one to four hours a day winding the twine as symmetrically as possible. When the ball grew too big to move by hand, he used the railroad jacks employed to lift boxcars. He finished it in 1979. The Tribune says it is made entirely of brown sisal twine, weighs 8.7 tons, stands 11 feet tall and measures about 40 feet around; the museum's website gives a diameter of 13 feet and a weight of 17,400 pounds.

The wording "largest made by one man" matters. The Tribune reports that Guinness listed Johnson's ball as the world's largest until 1994, when a ball made by J.C. and Elsie Payne of Texas, with the help of 70 people, overtook it, and that residents of Cawker City, Kansas, later surpassed it too. After Johnson died in 1989 the ball left his front yard east of Darwin; the town acquired it in 1991 and housed it in a wooden gazebo with clear Plexiglas panels in the centre of town. According to the Tribune, Ripley's Believe It or Not had tried for 20 years to buy it. Weird Al Yankovic's 1989 song "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota" helped spread its fame, and the alley beside the museum is named Weird Alley in his honour.