World's Largest Catsup Bottle
Collinsville, Illinois
Built in 1949 in this former catsup company town, the World's Largest Catsup Bottle celebrated its 65th anniversary in 2014. It's the water tower at the old Brooks Catsup Plant and headquarters. In the late 1970s Brooks Foods slipped out of town and relocated to Mount Summit, Indiana -- but their Condiment Monolith remained.
Nearly 70 feet tall, atop a 100-foot-tall steel tower, it could hold up to 640,000 bottles of regular catsup (or 100,000 gallons of water).
Legend has it that the bottle can cause red hair in the unborn, as pregnant women passing too close to it have discovered.
By the early 1990s the bottle had deteriorated, faded and peeling. In 1995 volunteers raised money to repaint and restore it in time for its 50th birthday, modeling it after an original 1949 Brooks catsup bottle provided by a sympathetic bottle collector.
The bottle's long-time owner put it up for sale in 2013; the city of Collinsville was interested, but didn't have the cash. It was eventually purchased by a local building contractor in late 2015, and he has pledged to preserve it.