The frying pan under the gazebo on East Main Street in Rose Hill, North Carolina is 15 feet across, 45 feet around the rim, with a six foot handle, and it weighs two tons. It holds 200 gallons of cooking oil and cooks 365 chickens at a time over 40 gas burners. It was built in 1963 for the first North Carolina Poultry Jubilee, held in Rose Hill that October, on the initiative of the Ramsey Feed Company; Clarence Brown and other Ramsey employees fabricated it from steel supplied by the Queensboro Steel Corporation of Wilmington. The pan is divided into eight sections, and volunteers pour 25 gallons of oil into each of them. It still cooks. The Jubilee is now held on the first weekend of November, and the pan also comes out for fire department, Lions Club and chamber of commerce fundraisers, having once turned out about 3,000 dinners at a single event. It has left town exactly once, hauled to Morehead City, and the fire chief has said they decided not to do that again. Between events it lives under a red roofed shelter with a sign and a plaque, covered by a tarpaulin, so visitors passing on an ordinary day often find nothing showing but the handle. Duplin County is poultry country, and the claim on the town's welcome sign is worth reading precisely. There is an older pan at Long Beach, Washington, which fried clam fritters from 1941 until the late forties and was rebuilt in fiberglass in a way that makes cooking in it impossible, and a smaller one at Brandon, Iowa. Rose Hill's is bigger than either, and it is the one still in use.
Getting there
34.8264, -78.0219
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Hear it from the road
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