World's Largest Cherry Pie Pan
Traverse City, Michigan
Two "World's Largest Cherry Pie" competing towns -- Charlevoix and Traverse City -- are only 50 miles apart in Michigan's cherry farm country. Both claims have long since been snatched away by more ambitious pie baked in Canada, but roadside memorials to the earlier records are still evident and maintained.
Traverse City, the self-proclaimed "Cherry Capital of the World," had wanted to bake the biggest Cherry Pie in 1976, but Charlevoix beat them to it. Nine years later Traverse City finally tasted sweet revenge by baking a 28,000-pound whopper, 18 feet across and over two feet deep. An estimated 35,000 pieces of the pie were served on July 25, 1987. None were left uneaten.
Although Guinness World Records accepted Traverse City's accomplishment as the World's Largest, Charlevoix did not, claiming that Traverse City's pie had no bottom crust and therefore was not a real pie. And Traverse City's time as a world-record-holder turned out to be even briefer than Charlevoix's. Three years later, in 1990, the Canadian town of Oliver, British Columbia, baked an immense 37,700-pound Cherry Pie. That record still stands -- but the Canadians foolishly failed to save any roadside-worthy relics. So Traverse City still has the World's Largest Cherry Pie Pan.
If you accept that it was a real pie.