World's Largest Stucco Snowman

A 44-foot stucco snowman stands beside Highway 36 in North St. Paul, Minnesota, and the city bills it as the World's Largest Snowman. The city gives it as 20 tons, with a smile 16 feet across. It began as a winter-festival habit. Each year the North St. Paul Jaycees built a huge snowman from plough-heaped snow for the Snow Frolics Festival. After a family visit to Disneyland in 1969, local barber and civic leader Lloyd Koesling saw the park's stucco sculptures and proposed a lasting version, as Mpls.St.Paul Magazine and the city tell it. In 1972 the City Council donated a small plot of land, and volunteers poured the foundation and built the figure on welded rods: two large bodies and a smaller head. More than 1,000 pounds of stucco covered the frame, and the Chamber of Commerce paid the $2,000 cost. On 23 July 1974 a volunteer crane operator lifted the head into place. The snowman stood on Main Street for nearly 20 years before it was moved in May 1990 to Margaret Street and Highway 36, in Central Park, with part of the cost met by Celebrate Minnesota. The magazine reports that the head had to come off for the journey, which prompted at least one letter to the local paper. The title is a local claim. Asked whether it is really the largest, the Historical Society's museum curator told the magazine, "Well, who's going to contest it?" Fox 9 reported in 2025 that city leaders cannot prove it but no one has disputed it, and that the city gave the cracking hat a quick fix and the figure a new coat of paint for its 50th birthday. The snowman has no official name, a former Historical Society president told Fox 9, and people picnic beside it from the bike trail.