Cities draw tourists and cultivate civic pride with unique attractions.
By Kaya Williams
The City of Long Beach has gone all in on big.
The Pacific County city of 1,730 lays claim to both the “World’s Largest Frying Pan” and the “World’s Largest Spitting Razor Clam.” For a while, Long Beach also was home to the “World’s Largest Pair of Chopsticks.” And then, of course, there’s the archway over Bolstad Avenue welcoming visitors to the “World’s Longest Beach.”
“We are full of very unique humans out here,” says Mayor Sue Svendsen, noting the community’s fair share of creatives and entrepreneurs. That might explain the enthusiasm for distinction, which, in Long Beach, goes back generations.
The frying pan originated in the 1940s, when the city appealed to clam-digging tourists with the Long Beach Razor Clam Festival and borrowed a giant pan from Chehalis to cook the “World’s Largest Clam Fritter.” The following year, the local chamber of commerce decided to commission a pan that would tour the region when it wasn’t in use for the festival.
It was such a successful push that by 1948, the influx of visitors had depleted the razor clam population. Both the festival and the frying pan went on hiatus, and when civic boosters revived the festival in the 1990s, they discovered coastal moisture had taken its toll on the famous pan. The city replaced the genuine rusted metal artifact with another outsized utilitarian pan for making fritters; to advertise the festivities, a 14-foot-long by 9-and-a-half-foot-wide fiberglass reproduction (incorporating the cast iron handle from the original) was commissioned and put on permanent display outside Marsh’s Free Museum.
Since then, Long Beach’s World’s Largest Frying Pan has been upstaged by even bigger pans in Wallace, North Carolina, and Brandon, Iowa, both of which now claim the title. Some of the city’s other biggest claims to fame deserve footnotes, too. The 30-foot-long chopsticks, carved by chainsaw in 2010, were fed into a wood chipper in 2024; its beach technically is the “World’s Longest Continuous Peninsula Beach,” which hardly fits on a bumper sticker.
But in Long Beach, the pan is still “a treasure,” Svendsen says, who adds that it might even help the city attract new residents.
“They don’t just come here for vacation,” Svendsen says. “They get addicted to what a great little town it is.”
A couple of hours east in Lewis County, Winlock’s “World’s Largest Egg” also serves as a tourism magnet. When Mayor Victoria Marincin was campaigning for her seat, she met visitors from New England, Florida, and Japan who all told her the same thing: “We came to see the egg.”
The current 1,200-pound behemoth was installed in 1991 atop a 10-foot-high pedestal in Vern Zander Memorial Park, named for a local chicken farmer who funded the egg’s construction before he died in 1993. It is the latest of several iterations. The first egg was commissioned in 1921 for Winlock Poultry and Egg Day, a festival recognizing the town’s dominance as an agricultural hub for chicken farming that commemorated the opening of a new road between Winlock and Cowlitz Corner. After touring the region by flatbed truck from Olympia to Portland, Oregon, Winlock’s egg was mounted on a platform near the train depot (the city was also a railway and lumber town; trains proved a boon for transporting all those eggs).
The celebration evolved into the annual Winlock Egg Days, held on the third weekend in June. The event includes a parade (the grand marshal is dubbed its CEO, or chief egg officer), a royal court, bingo, a custom car show, and plenty of egg salad sandwiches. The egg itself—created first of canvas and wood, then plastic, and now fiberglass—is maintained by volunteers as a symbol of civic pride.
Winlock is more a bedroom community than a poultry capital these days, but its giant egg is still the city’s centerpiece, drawing a steady stream of visitors off the state highway to pose for selfies.
“It’s there to support the businesses and residents,” Marincin says, “and give them something they can be proud of.”
For more information: longbeachwa.gov; cityofwinlock.com.