Roadside Attractions in Illinois

4 places

Quirky·Massac County
Big John of Metropolis
Big John is a fiberglass grocer about 28 feet tall in a checked shirt and white apron, holding paper grocery bags, outside the Big John supermarket on US Highway 45 at the east edge of Metropolis, Illinois. He is one of the last of his kind. Bob Martin and Frank Bayley of Carmi, Illinois named their supermarket chain after Jimmy Dean's 1961 hit Big Bad John, and around 1967 they commissioned a mascot from the General Sign Company of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Entertainment·Ogle County
Chicagoland Skydiving Center
Rochelle Municipal Airport is a city owned general aviation field of a hundred and thirteen acres on the south edge of town, and its best known tenant drops people out of aeroplanes over it. Chicagoland Skydiving Center runs from a purpose built campus there.
History·Ogle County
Flagg Township Museum
The building that houses Rochelle's local history museum was put up in 1884 as a joint city and town hall, and getting to that point took eighteen years of argument about who should pay. Flagg Township levied a tax for the purpose in 1866 and the city declined to contribute its share, and there matters sat until the two sides finally agreed in 1884 to build the thing together.
Quirky·Clark County
The Giant Rocking Chair
The rocking chair on East Main Street in Casey, Illinois is 56 feet 1 inch tall, 32 feet 10 inches wide and weighs about 46,000 pounds, and on 20 October 2015 Guinness World Records certified it as the largest in the world. The record required the chair to rock, and by the builders' own account it took ten grown men to do it.