Every State’s Most Famous Roadside Attraction — Ranked From Genuinely Magnificent to Gloriously Absurd

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We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you … you’re just helping re-supply our family’s travel fund.

I have stood in front of a 55-foot concrete ear of corn in Mitchell, South Dakota at 7am on a Tuesday with no other human beings in sight, and I felt something. I’m not entirely sure what. Pride? Awe? A kind of deep American confusion? Whatever it was, I got back in the car more alive than I was before.

That’s what roadside attractions do. They are the unofficial religion of the American road trip.

This piece is not a listicle with fifty identical bullet points. This is a curated argument for which attractions in each region are actually worth your time, which are pilgrimage-worthy, and which have been photographed so aggressively by influencers that the magic has been sucked entirely out of them.

The South’s Roadside Royalty

• Alabama — Ave Maria Grotto, Cullman A Benedictine monk named Brother Joseph Zoettl spent decades building 125 miniature replicas of famous religious and historical structures from concrete, broken glass, cold cream jars, and whatever else he had. The Vatican. The Colosseum. The Statue of Liberty. All in a garden behind a monastery in north Alabama. It is absolutely worth the $10 admission and it is unlike anything else in America.
• Georgia — World’s Largest Peanut, Ashburn Georgia is the peanut state and they will not let you forget it. The 20-foot concrete peanut on a pedestal in downtown Ashburn is peak roadside America. Free, quick, and perfectly stupid.
• Texas — Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo Ten Cadillacs buried nose-first in a wheat field off I-40. You can spray-paint them. People have been spray-painting them continuously since 1974. The cars change colors like a living organism. This is legitimately great and everyone should see it.
• Louisiana — Atchafalaya Welcome Center Swamp Walk Less famous than it deserves. A genuine elevated walkway through actual bayou swamp vegetation off I-10. You can see cypress knees, egrets, possibly alligators. It’s free. It’s a rest stop with genuine natural wonder attached to it.
• Mississippi — Birthplace of Kermit the Frog, Leland Jim Henson grew up in the Delta. There is a museum dedicated to this fact. Kermit is in there. It is legitimately sweet and worth the detour through the flattest landscape in North America.

The Midwest Owns This Category and Everyone Knows It

The Midwest has the highest concentration of genuinely excellent roadside attractions per capita of any American region. This is because Midwestern towns had the ingenuity to invent reasons for people to stop, and the stubbornness to maintain those reasons for sixty years.

• Kansas — World’s Largest Ball of Twine, Cawker City This is the gold standard. Frank Stoeber started wrapping twine in 1953. The town still hosts an annual “twine-a-thon” where visitors can add to it. It now weighs over 20,000 pounds. This is the Sistine Chapel of roadside America.
• South Dakota — Corn Palace, Mitchell An entire arena building redecorated every year with murals made entirely from different colored corn and grain. It sounds fake. It is very real. It is magnificent.
• Iowa — Field of Dreams Movie Site, Dyersville The actual farm from the 1989 Kevin Costner film. The baseball diamond is still there. People play catch on it every day. Grown men cry here. I have cried here. It’s okay.
• Wisconsin — House on the Rock, Spring Green Warning: this is not a pleasant afternoon stop. This is a four-to-seven-hour descent into one man’s cathedral of obsession. Alex Jordan built increasingly bizarre structures on a rock formation starting in the 1940s. There is a room filled with mechanical orchestras. There is a whale and a giant octopus in a room together. Neil Gaiman set a chapter of American Gods here. Go prepared to be disturbed in the best way.
• Illinois — Gemini Giant, Wilmington A 30-foot fiberglass spaceman holding a rocket, standing in front of a Launching Pad drive-in restaurant on old Route 66. It is cold comfort for the decline of Route 66 and it is perfect.

The West Coast Entries That Actually Deliver

• California — Salvation Mountain, Niland Leonard Knight spent 28 years building a mountain of adobe, straw, and paint in the Sonoran Desert, covered in biblical scripture and folk art. It’s in the middle of nowhere near Slab City. The colors alone are worth the drive. This is one of the most photographed folk art installations in the United States and every photo undersells it.
• Oregon — Voodoo Doughnut, Portland Technically a business, not a roadside attraction. But the line at 2am, the maple-bacon bar, and the general vibe of the thing qualify it. You can get married there.
• Washington — Fremont Troll, Seattle A 20-foot concrete troll under a freeway bridge clutching an actual Volkswagen Bug. It has been there since 1990. It is still somehow fresh every time you see it.

Mountain States: Where the Landscape Does the Work

• Colorado — Bishop Castle, Rye One man — Jim Bishop — has been building a medieval castle entirely by himself since 1969. No permits. No contractors. Just one incredibly stubborn man and several tons of stone. It has turrets, a grand hall, and a fire-breathing dragon head made of scrap metal. He is usually there. He will talk to you about it at length.
• Montana — Kevin Richardson’s Bull, Billings A massive roadside bull that has become a landmark for I-90 drivers. Unglamorous, deeply Montana, and somehow affecting.
• Nevada — International Car Forest of the Last Church, Goldfield Cars buried vertically in the desert, covered in graffiti art. Like Cadillac Ranch but weirder and with fewer people. If you’re driving between Vegas and Reno and you don’t stop here you are making a mistake.

The Northeast’s Understated Weird

• Maine — Desert of Maine, Freeport An actual sand desert that appeared on a Maine farm in the early 1900s due to overfarming. It has been spreading slowly ever since. It is surreal and deeply disconcerting in the middle of all that pine forest.
• Vermont — World’s Largest Collection of Snow Globes Located inside a shop in Montpelier, thousands of snow globes covering every surface. The proprietor will not let you touch them. This tension is part of the experience.
• New York — Lucy the Elephant, Margate City, NJ Technically this is New Jersey, which nobody discusses enough. A six-story elephant building constructed in 1882. You can go inside. She has been a tavern, a summer cottage, and a real estate office. She is the oldest surviving example of novelty architecture in the United States.
• Pennsylvania — Roadside America, Shartlesville An indoor miniature village that has been operating since the 1940s. At night they do a patriotic light show to “God Bless America.” The original creator is long gone. His grandchildren maintain it. It is time-capsule America and it will make you feel things you can’t quite name.

The Ones That Are Honestly Not Worth the Stop

Fairness demands this section.

• Any “World’s Largest” That Is Just a Sign and a Plaque Many towns claim a world record but have nothing to show for it beyond a painted sign on a wall. Do the research before detouring six miles off the highway.
• The Grand Canyon Skywalk Technically spectacular in concept. In practice: $29 admission, no photography allowed on the walkway itself (your phone and camera must be locked away), and you’re herded through so quickly that the experience barely registers. The Rim Trail at the national park is free and more impressive.
• Most “Historical Marker” Roadside Stops Unless the marker is for something genuinely dramatic, a bronze plate in a parking lot is not a destination. It is a parking lot.

The American road trip was invented for exactly this kind of absurdity. We are a country that builds concrete ears of corn and 28-year castle projects and mechanical whale rooms because we have the space to be excessive and the will to be strange. That is not nothing. That is, arguably, the whole thing.