One Man Built All of It

Casey sits on Interstate 70 in east-central Illinois, roughly halfway between St Louis and Indianapolis. Two thousand three hundred people. For most drivers it is an exit sign.

In 2011 a man who lived there decided to change that, and the method he chose was to build the world's largest wind chime.

The reason was a tea shop

Jim Bolin's family ran Bolin Enterprises, a pipeline and tank maintenance company. He and his wife had come back from a holiday wanting to open a tea shop in town, and he was not confident Casey could support another business.

So he built something to bring people to it.

The wind chime went up on East Main Street in November 2011, assembled from recycled pipeline between jobs, by his own employees. Forty-nine feet tall. The longest chime is forty-two feet. It weighs nearly seventeen thousand pounds.

To qualify for a Guinness record an object has to perform its function, so it had to actually chime. It does, in wind over about six miles an hour. Guinness certified it in June 2012.

Then he put signs up on I-70.

And then he did not stop

The traffic came. Out-of-state plates started appearing in a town that had not seen many. Bolin had expected the chime to be a one-off, and instead built a golf tee to draw attention to the golf course, then a rocking chair that took two years and needs ten adults to rock it, then wooden shoes, then a mailbox you can climb inside and post a letter from.

Over fifteen years: twelve Guinness World Records, and more than thirty oversized objects around a town of 2.6 square miles. A pitchfork at a restaurant. Softball bats at the hall of fame. A rocking horse outside a shop that sells horse feed.

Almost every one of them is outdoors, free, and built to be touched. You are meant to sit in the chair and swing on the teeter totter. That is not incidental — an object that cannot do its job cannot hold the record.

The town adopted a motto: Big Things, Small Town.

January 2026

Jim Bolin died in an accident this January.

There is not much more to say about it that is ours to say. Guinness published a notice; the local reporting was brief and careful; a town of two thousand buried the man who put it on the map.

What he leaves is unusual among the things in this index. Most roadside attractions are one object built by somebody for a reason that has been forgotten. This is thirty of them, built deliberately, over fifteen years, by a man who kept going because it worked — and whose stated reason from the beginning was that he wanted people to stop in his town and spend money in its shops.

They do. Estimates put it between one and two thousand visitors a week.

Going there

It is a four-minute detour off I-70 and the main cluster is walkable — the wind chime and the rocking chair face each other across East Main Street, with the teeter totter a few feet away.

Free, outdoors, open all year. Take an afternoon rather than twenty minutes; the point is not to photograph twelve records but to notice that a small town did this on purpose, and that it worked.