North Dakota: New Salem – World’s largest Holstein cow

🗺️ Getting There (Or, How to Drive Across Absolutely Nothing)

There are places in the world where you have to work hard to find them, and there are places where the only real challenge is staying awake on the way. North Dakota, bless it, falls firmly into the second category. We were heading west along Interstate 94, about 34 miles out of Bismarck, which is itself not exactly the centre of the known universe, when the sat nav announced exit 127 for New Salem. New Salem sits in Morton County in the south-western part of the state, and if you are not paying attention you will sail straight past it at 75 miles per hour without registering a single thing. The town was settled in the early 1880s, and according to a rather charming piece of local folklore, one of its first farmers was out breaking the prairie sod in 1883 when two Sioux men stopped to watch. The older one quietly flipped a piece of the freshly-turned earth back over, grass-side up. The younger translated: “Wrong side up.” The farmer apparently took this to heart, decided the ground was better suited to grazing than to crops, and New Salem’s dairy industry was effectively born from that single wordless observation. You have to admire a town whose entire agricultural identity traces back to a Sioux man flipping over a clod of earth. We came off the interstate, turned south on North 8th Street, followed a dirt road, and then, on top of a hill that appeared to be the only hill for about four counties in any direction, there she was. You could see her from miles away, which is rather the point.

🏆 Salem Sue Herself (The Full Enormity of It)

Salem Sue, to give her proper title, is the World’s Largest Holstein Cow, a designation she has held without serious challenge since 1974 when the New Salem Lions Club put her up there on School Hill. She is 38 feet high and 50 feet long, she weighs 12,000 pounds, and she is made entirely from fibreglass, which means she is hollow, which is either reassuring or slightly unsettling depending on your state of mind. The whole project cost $40,000, raised through donations from local dairymen, farmers, businessmen and residents, which when you think about it is a remarkable act of community devotion to a large fake cow. The artist was a fellow called Dave Oswald, who also created the World’s Largest Catfish down in Wahpeton, so clearly had a niche. The actual construction was done by Sculpture Manufacturing Company in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and she arrived in three pieces and was assembled on land owned by the New Salem Park District. The historical backdrop matters here: Holsteins had been coming to this part of North Dakota since local creamery owner D.M. Young first brought them in, selling two or three head at a time to local farmers. By 1896 the New Salem Creamery was in operation, and by 1898 the Youngtown Creamery followed, both turning local milk into what was apparently very good butter. The Holstein Circuit was organised in 1908, with 14 members completing the first year’s butterfat testing by 1910. So by the time Sue went up, there was more than half a century of serious dairy farming behind her. Standing at the base and looking up at something the size of a small house that is also recognisably a cow, you are struck by two things simultaneously: the sheer oddness of it, and the fact that it makes complete sense. The high school sports teams are called the Holsteins, which is either the best or worst team name in American sport, and the hill has “New Salem” spelled out in rockwork at the bottom. She is, by the way, visible for five miles on a clear day, which means she has probably been the first thing an awful lot of weary drivers have seen after a very long, very flat stretch of nothing. We stood there for quite a while, looking at her, and she stared back with that particular expression that large fiberglass animals tend to have: serene, blank, faintly superior. Entirely magnificent.