“You guys wanna go see the egg?” I asked as we pointed our car south on Indiana 19 from Etna Green, all part of our backroad sojourn from South Bend to Muncie.
“The egg?”
Of course, I needed to explain that I meant the world-famous Mentone Egg, the largest in the world, and an irresistible roadside attraction and photo spot for generations of eager tourists moving back and forth between places like Rochester and Warsaw or Bremen and Wabash or Plymouth and South Whitley.
“Is it cool?” someone asked.
I pretended like I didn’t hear the question. When I was growing up, we didn’t stop at things because they were cool. We stopped at things because they were there.
“Is it cool?” came the question a second time.
“It’s on the way,” I answered.
There was some hemming and hawing while I explained the rich heritage of the Mentone egg farming community and the importance symbolic nature of their ten-foot concrete egg.
“Oh!” someone else chimed in. “Is it like The Bean in Chicago?”
“Yes,” I lied.
The town of Mentone was platted in 1882 and derives its name from the French settlers who named it in honor of Menton, a stunning city in the southeast of France that watches over the Mediterranean Sea from its cozy spot at the base of a handful of mountainous rises. The French landscape painter Émile Appay recalled a Menton that looked like this:
As for Mentone, Indiana; it looks like this:
It’s difficult to say what the original settlers saw in the landlocked, flat-as-a-pancake Mentone that reminded them of the picturesque city across the ocean, just as it’s unknown how or why Indiana’s version of the place got the ‘E’ added to the end of it. Either way, by the early part of the 1900s, Mentone with an ‘E’ and Menton without were about to make a splash on the world stage.
Menton would become the final resting place for the theologian Charles Spurgeon and the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Lance Armstrong would be among the top-level cyclists who would come to train on the city’s world-famous climbs. In 2020, the Menton dining destination Mirazur was declared the finest restaurant in the world.
Mentone didn’t have anything like that, but they were about to get their Egg, and they’d done everything in the world to deserve it. By the 1920s, Mentone was recognized as the Egg Basket of the Midwest, an accomplishment that is quintessentially American, built from a formula that was equal parts agriculture and capitalism.
Rich soil and hardworking farmers made for above average egg production at dozens of family farms throughout Mentone, but this alone did not make Mentone unique. Chicken farmers had thrived in hundreds of towns scattered in hundreds of places across the Midwest. What made the Mentone egg scene so unique and so profitable was the way the local farmers came together to grease the wheels of capitalistic freight systems to make each of them a little more money. Without ever having any formal agreement or collectively bargained signed contract, the Mentone egg farmers worked together to ship their eggs – and to negotiate the shipping contracts.
News clipping from the Tampa Bay Times; May 1, 1929.
It doesn’t seem like much, but for as long as there had been commercial farming, other agriculturalists in other communities worked out distribution of their goods on a farm-by-farm basis. It was an arrangement that put the power in the hands of the transportation magnates. When Mentone’s egg farmers rallied daily in a single location to load their collective eggs onto a single freight train, they took that power back. It meant that each of Mentone’s local egg farmers made more money from their eggs and that the end consumers could get Mentone eggs cheaper than anyone else could offer them.
The whole arrangement was novel and eggstraordinary. Newspapers in Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, Kansas, and Minnesota ran stories about the system the farmers had worked out. Grocers all over the Midwest ran ads letting customers know that their store exclusively carried Mentone eggs. The Mentone industry was an agricultural, logistical, and marketing success; virtually unmatched throughout all of North America.
At about the same time that Mentone’s egg industry was burgeoning into something special, a Mentone man by the name of Lawrence Bell became to come to prominence all his own. Originally an airplane mechanic, Bell would go on to open his own aviation company where he would build P-39s and P-63s during World War II. He built America’s first jet-powered aircraft, the P-59, in 1942; and his Bell X-1 was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier. Bell is also responsible for the design of the UH-1 Iroquois (“the Huey”), and advanced versions of his design are still in production today. His company lives on as Bell Textron, a $14 billion organization that is primarily a manufacturer of military and civilian helicopters.
From left to right: John Stack, President Harry Truman, Chuck Yeager, Lawrence Bell.
Bell has a museum and a library named after him in Mentone, and by all rights, his long legacy in aviation advancements should be the most talked-about part of his hometown, but it isn’t.
Not even close.
All anyone really wants to talk about is The Egg.
By the 1940s Mentone’s place as the Egg Basket of the Midwest was unquestioned and absolute. They launched the annual Egg Festival as a grand ovular spectacle to celebrate the goldmine they’d stumbled into. Soon enough, The Egg Festival turned into a carnival, a feast, a beauty pageant, a party, and a 3-on-3 basketball tournament that I participated in way back in 2003. Even fifty years ago, The Egg Festival was still a big deal throughout the entire state. It became tradition for the governor to attend and newspapers all throughout the state reported when a new Egg Queen was crowned each year. News outlets stumbled all over themselves to report on the result of the 1955 egg-eating contest:
News clipping from the Indianapolis News; September 23, 1955.
It was at some point during one of these Egg Festivals that the idea came together to build their enormous egg. In 1945, an original plan was conceived to make an egg out of sheet metal, but those plans were scrapped when concerns arose that the structure wouldn’t last the test of time. That’s when they settled on 3,000 pounds of concrete poured around a frame of welded steel rods, then covered in several coats of paint. It took twelve men to roll the thing onto a trailer, where it was originally meant to sit outside the courthouse in nearby Warsaw as an advertisement for an upcoming Egg Festival.
It was only after the advertising run ended and the egg was returned to Mentone that anyone began to wonder what they should do with it next; but eventually it landed in the only place it ever could, on Mentone’s Main Street along Indiana 25 beckoning blue road explorers to take a peek and take a picture. Mentone proudly claims the thing to be the largest egg in the world, but it’s a claim that is not without controversy.
The town of Winlock, Wash., has a 12-foot egg that bests the Mentone Egg by a full 24 inches in length. Ripley’s even verified the Winlock Egg as the world’s largest; but Mentone would beg to differ. It’s not all about length, they shout. The Winlock Egg is a fiberglass model, and at 1,200 pounds, it’s barely a third the weight of Mentone’s impressive ovum. That should count for something anyway.
Largest or not, I can’t tell you that the Mentone Egg is worth the trip all on its own. But it is there, and if you happen to be cruising the road between Peru and Nappanee, you ought to stop to have a look.
Aaron Helman is a historian, adventurer, and humorist from South Bend, Indiana. He is the author of An Incomplete History of St. Joseph County, Indiana and Ride the Jack Rabbit: More of the People, Places, and Events that Make Michiana Fascinating. Find more of his work at aaronhelman.com/books.