Crossing the open farmland of southwestern Minnesota, you'll encounter an otherworldly sight: a massive head with a beard, mustache, and red-striped top hat looming over the horizon. Pull into the small town of Luverne and the figure—a nearly 66-foot-tall nutcracker, decked out like Uncle Sam—comes into full view. Luverne, which thanks to a local collector claims to have more of the decorative figurines than people, now boasts the world's tallest nutcracker, too, complete with working jaw, per the AP. Outside a quirky rock shop in the town's center, hundreds of people gathered for a weekend ribbon-cutting where the nutcracker's name and exact height were revealed to a crowd that was later served red, white, and blue cookies and slushies.
"Please welcome our newest Luverne resident, Verne the Patriot," Katie Walgrave announced to cheers. The nutcracker stands 65 feet and 7 1/2 inches tall, with the pedestal pushing Verne an additional 9 feet over the surrounding prairie, according to Walgrave. That's almost twice the height of a 33-foot-tall nutcracker in Neuhausen, Germany, that Guinness World Records currently has ranked as the largest. It all traces back to Betty Mann, 96, and a trip that she made to a Cracker Barrel in January 2001 after her daughter and husband had recently died. "I said to my daughter-in-law, 'I had a hard Christmas and I've always wanted a wooden nutcracker. I'm buying myself a belated Christmas present,'" she recalled. Mann got her first in the Cracker Barrel's gift shop.
She kept buying them, and her collection eventually ballooned to more than 2,500 nutcrackers. In 2016, she donated them to the town's historical society, where she was president, hoping to draw more visitors to its museum. Others also started donating and today, Luverne's 7,554 nutcrackers outnumber its roughly 5,000 residents. No two are the same. A city committee came up with the idea of building the world's tallest nutcracker, and so Verne was conceived. It was timed perfectly to arrive as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary.
The nutcracker was several years in the making, with the pieces crafted in Utah and assembled in Luverne. The head and hat had to be lifted on with a crane three weeks ago, completing the structure. It cost around $600,000 and was funded by donations and grants, Walgrave said. "Betty started her collection as a way of dealing with grief," local John Hawkinson said Saturday, revealing that a fire had recently destroyed his wife's collection of nearly 300 nutcrackers. "We came down here out of loss as well. ... I thought that was kind of a full-circle moment."
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