World's Largest Ball of Store String

Detroit Lakes, Minnesota

Several of the oddities exhibited in Minnesota's Becker County Museum can be traced to Mary E. Lewis, who displayed them in the lobby and dining room of the hotel that she ran in Detroit Lakes. Her pride and joy was what the museum calls the World's Largest Ball of Store String.

The ball's appearance in a Ripley's Believe it or Not! column prompted a front page story in the July 31, 1930, Detroit Lakes Tribune, which the museum displays along with the string ball. In the news story, Mrs. Lewis recounts how she began diligently winding the ball on November 7, 1918, after some of the hotel guests joked that she needed one for the hotel's collection of novelties. In 1930, when the story was published, the ball weighed 42 pounds and had 140 miles of string. It didn't get much larger; Mrs. Lewis died in 1931. But her work was never forgotten, and it may have inspired an even more massive creation, years later: The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota.