Birds-eye view of the World's Largest Catsup Bottle in January 2025.

World's Largest Catsup Bottle

Collinsville, Illinois

When we visited the World's Largest Catsup Bottle in July 1992 (driving a vintage Oscar Meyer Wienermobile on tour for our New Roadside America book), Collinsville's colossal condiment container had been largely forgotten. Built in October 1949, the Bottle was a water tower for the Brooks Tangy Catsup factory. Despite popular belief, it never held catsup (or ketchup). If it had, it would have filled 640,000 normal-size catsup bottles, enough for about 25 million hamburgers.

Promo material for the Bottle when it was brand-new.

By the early '90s, however, the catsup factory had left town and the paint on the Bottle -- a design from the 1970s -- was faded and peeling. Town officials failed to grasp the tourism appeal of a World's Largest Catsup Bottle, even after our visit. But a relative newcomer to Collinsville, Judy De Moisy, did. She organized the Catsup Bottle Preservation Group, and with t-shirt sales and persistence it raised enough money to prevent the Bottle's possible demolition, and to repair and repaint the Bottle to its original 1949 appearance.

Ralph Finch of the St. Louis Antique Bottle Collectors Association donated an old Brooks Tangy Catsup bottle, still with its label, to serve as the restoration template. High-quality paint was also donated, free of charge. So was lighting to illuminate the bottle at night.

The Catsup Bottle had to be painted by hand.

The repainting took place in the Spring of 1995. The Bottle's tapered, nonstandard shape forced the workers, who specialized in water towers, to paint this one by hand while suspended from cables. A hole had rusted through the Catsup Bottle's eight-foot-wide cap, which meant, according to painter Larry Pettus, that an estimated 2.5 tons of pigeon poop had to be shoveled out of it. The temperature inside the 77-foot-tall metal Bottle reached nearly 140 degrees.

With its restoration, the World's Largest Catsup Bottle was swamped with a tomato-colored tidal wave of belated media interest. It became the symbol of the town, and an honorary must-see stop for travelers on the similarly revived Route 66 (even though the Bottle is eight miles off of the Mother Road). In August 2002 the World's Largest Catsup Bottle was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

A brief scare ran through Collinsville in 2014 when the property owner of the Bottle put it up for sale (It was eventually purchased by a local construction company). Town officials, their apathy forgotten, have embraced the Bottle's preservation. Judy De Moisy, now known as "Catsup Bottle Lady," noted with pride that what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, the World's Largest Catsup Bottle is to Collinsville.

Roadside America Team visits in the Wienermobile: 1992.