How Casey earned the score

Let’s meet Casey, Illinois

Casey sits in Clark County in east central Illinois, about 35 miles west of Terre Haute, Indiana, on a stretch of old U.S. 40 that the National Road put on the map two centuries ago. The 2020 Census counted 2,404 people here. The town has topped 3,000 residents only once since 1880, so the scale of what happened next is worth stating plainly. This is a place of a few thousand people that now holds a dozen official world records and pulls travelers off a federal interstate on purpose.

Drive into downtown and the first thing you notice is a wind chime the height of a five story building. It is 54 feet tall, its longest tube runs 42 feet, and when a six mile per hour breeze comes through, it actually rings. That last detail matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it. Around the corner sits a rocking chair 56 feet and 1 inch tall that weighs 46,200 pounds. A few blocks away a mailbox big enough to walk inside has its own postal cancellation stamp and a red flag that lifts when you drop a letter through the slot. None of this is a theme park. It is a working small town that decided to build big.

How Casey found its thing

For most of the twentieth century Casey did not need a gimmick. It had oil. It had the National Road, later U.S. 40, carrying traffic straight through the center of town, past the diners and the hardware stores and the filling stations that lived off that traffic. Then, in the early 1970s, Interstate 70 was built to the south and the through traffic moved with it. The bypass did to Casey what it did to a thousand other Main Street towns along old federal highways. The cars stopped coming through, some of the larger employers left, and the storefronts downtown began to go dark one at a time.

Tom Daughhetee, the city’s economic development director, put the before picture in one sentence. “Before the big things, our downtown was completely empty,” he told Arts Midwest. That is the situation almost every reader from a small town will recognize. A good grid of brick storefronts, a courthouse square worth walking, and not enough reason for anyone driving past to slow down and stop.

The turn came from an ordinary domestic idea. Jim Bolin, a Casey native who ran the family pipeline and tank maintenance company, Bolin Enterprises, had a wife, a mother, and a daughter who wanted to open a tea shop downtown. Bolin liked the idea and wanted to go one step further. He wanted something that would give a driver on I-70 a concrete reason to take the exit. Sitting on his porch one evening, listening to the wind chimes, he started doing the math on how big a wind chime would have to be to become the largest on earth. His company welded pipe for a living. A giant chime made of pipe was, as he saw it, simply a job he already knew how to do.

How Casey built it

The World’s Largest Wind Chime went up in 2011, assembled from recycled sections of pipeline. Guinness World Records recognized it, and the tea shop opened the next year as the Whitling Whimsy Cafe. Then Bolin did the thing that turned a single novelty into a strategy. He put signs out on Interstate 70 advertising the record, and he watched the traffic downtown change, with more and more out of state plates parked on Main Street. So he built another.

To qualify for a Guinness title, an object cannot just be large. It has to actually work as the thing it claims to be. The chime has to chime. The mailbox has to accept and hold mail, which is why it carries a real cancellation stamp and drops every letter into a locked compartment at ground level so the carrier does not have to climb the stairs. The rocking chair, topped off on a summer day in 2015, is engineered so it can be rocked. That rule is the quiet engine of the whole project. It forced Bolin and his crew to build real, permanent, functional structures rather than props, and it gave each one a legitimacy that a simple oversized statue would never earn.

Over roughly fifteen years, Bolin’s crew kept going. By the count Guinness used in early 2026, he had earned 12 Guinness World Records titles across 21 different objects, and the town today advertises a dozen current world records with more than twenty additional Big Things that are genuinely enormous but not quite record setting. The official list of world’s largest items includes the wind chime, the golf tee, the rocking chair, the wooden shoes, the pitchfork, the mailbox, the truck key, the gavel, the swizzle spoon, the golf driver, the barber pole, and the teeter totter, which at 82 feet is also the longest in the world. There are giant knitting needles and a crochet hook, a pencil, a birdcage, and more, scattered across the grid on a self guided route the town lays out for visitors.

The genius was the placement

Here is the part that separates Casey from every roadside oddity that never revived a downtown. The Big Things were not dropped in a field or a dedicated attraction lot. Almost every one of them was placed directly beside, or inside, a working business on Main Street. The World’s Largest Barber Pole stands at Tina’s barber shop. The World’s Largest Wooden Shoes sit outside a bakery and candy company. The World’s Largest Swizzle Spoon marks a bar called Brownie’s Place. The World’s Largest Pitchfork is planted at Richards Farm Restaurant. Inside the Whitling Whimsy Cafe, the family tea shop that started it all, the walls were once lined with a hundred small objects that begin with the letter W. Inside Casey’s Candy Depot, twelve foot clogs stand over the bulk bins where visitors buy taffy and fudge.

That is the whole design. The scale is the hook that makes a driver on the interstate pull off and take a photograph. The business behind the object is the reason that visit turns into a purchase and the reason the visit matters to Casey at all. A record breaking chime is a wonderful thing to see for free. A record breaking chime fifty feet from a cafe, a candy shop, and a yarn store is an economy. Bolin understood that a photograph alone does not pay a town’s bills, but a photograph that puts a family on the sidewalk in front of an open shop just might.

What it created

The results show up first as foot traffic. After national and international television crews featured Casey in 2017, the town began drawing on the order of a thousand visitors across a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, a temporary swing that adds a large share to the customer base of a town this size on a weekend. Bolin himself estimated that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people stop in Casey in a given week, while allowing that an honest count is hard to pin down. Either figure is transformative when it lands on a downtown that Daughhetee describes as having been empty a few years earlier.

The second result is the downtown itself. The storefronts that had gone dark filled back in with the cafe, the candy depot, a yarn shop, restaurants, and gift stores that live off the visitor traffic the giants bring. Local operators have been blunt that a good number of those businesses would not exist without the Big Things, and that the tourism is what keeps the town alive. Daughhetee credits the shift directly to Bolin and his crew. “Jim was a visionary with this,” he said. “He and his team are extremely skilled builders and very clever.” The beautification that came with the project pulled residents back into their own downtown as well, shopping and gathering on a Main Street that had been quiet.

It is worth being clear about what Casey is and is not. It is not a resort. It has comparatively few hotel rooms, and much of its traffic is day trips and interstate travelers breaking up a long drive rather than multi night stays. That is the honest shape of the place. Its strength is that it converts a passing car into a downtown stop about as efficiently as any small town in the country, and it does it with objects that cost far less to build, for a company that already owned the welding equipment, than any conventional attraction of comparable draw.

What is next

In January 2026, Casey lost the man who imagined all of it. Jim Bolin, who was born in 1964 and had run Bolin Enterprises for decades, died from injuries sustained in a snowmobile accident. The community mourned a neighbor first and a record holder second, which is fitting for a man who once said the point was never the objects. “It’s not the Big Things,” Bolin told Arts Midwest. “It’s the human part of just enjoying life.” He is survived by his wife of forty years, Diane, and their children.

What he left behind is durable in a way a marketing campaign never is. The chime, the chair, the mailbox, and the rest are permanent steel structures, cared for by a town that has organized itself around them under the Big Things in a Small Town banner. The self guided route, the events, and the downtown businesses now form a working system that does not depend on any single new record to keep running. The question in front of Casey is the ordinary one that faces any town that succeeded at its first act: how to deepen the visit, add reasons to stay past an afternoon, and keep the maintenance and the storytelling strong now that the founder is gone.

For any small town watching from a distance, the lesson Casey offers is unglamorous and repeatable. Bolin did not have a beach, a mountain, a ski hill, or a Gilded Age downtown. He had a welding shop, an interstate a mile away, and a set of empty storefronts he wanted to fill. He picked one idea, made it real enough to earn an official record, pointed the highway at it, and placed the payoff next to an open door. That play is available to a great many towns that assume they have nothing worth stopping for. Casey is the proof, and it looks a lot like the case Creative City Developments has made elsewhere, from the Thomas Dambo trolls that reshaped Detroit Lakes, Minnesota to any place willing to build the one thing that makes a driver take the exit.