Qualla: World's Largest Ball of Twine

World's Largest Ball of Twine: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

World's Largest Ball of Twine: Frank Stoeber's Twenty-Nine Years

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...

World's Largest Ball of Twine: What a Town Does With a Dead Man's Hobby

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 198...

World's Largest Ball of Twine: The Rivalry

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

World's Largest Ball of Twine: Why People Stop

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

World's Largest Ball of Twine: Visiting Cawker City

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...