Audobon County, Iowa is Home to Many Quirky Attractions
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Holy cow! Paul Fredericks (ph) of affiliate station KETV shows us where the beef is in Iowa.</s>PAUL FREDERICKS, KETV-TV REPORTER (voice-over): Audubon County may appear ordinary at first, with a cornfield here and a little town there. But these quiet, quaint communities have an abundance of quirky attractions. Meet the biggest stud in Audubon.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's 30 feet high and weighs 45 tons.</s>FREDERICKS: Albert the bull is the biggest bull in the world. Albert was built back in 1960 to honor Audubon County's cattlemen. People from across the country stop for photo ops with Albert.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's big. He's a big cow.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How many people can go meet new people and say, We have the world's largest bull in our back yard?</s>FREDERICKS: Down this lonely country road sits another Audubon County landmark. It's the tree in the middle of the road. A hundred and fifty years ago, a surveyor simply stuck a walking stick in the ground to mark the county line.</s>DAN FORD, AUDUBON COUNTRY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: Right. They walked away from it, there was nothing out here at the time, and so leaving it in the ground was just purely their marker.</s>FREDERICKS: Now this cottonwood is 100 feet tall. It was easiest to build the roads around it.</s>FORD: This is the first famous tree that we had.</s>FREDERICKS: This is Audubon County's other famous tree, the one with the plow in the oak.</s>FORD: The legend of the plow in the oak tree is that a young farmer went off to the Civil War and left his plow leaning against the tree. And the plow stayed, and the tree grew up around the plow.</s>FREDERICKS: Not to be overshadowed is Nathaniel Hamlin (ph) Park and its self-proclaimed largest site of working windmills.</s>FRED SIEVERS, WINDMILL EXPERT: Man, I'm proud of 'em.</s>FREDERICKS: Eighteen windmills in all, and all were donated by Audubon County farmers.</s>SIEVERS: They work good. Windmills work good. But their day is over.</s>FREDERICKS: The Little Mermaid is the biggest conversation piece in the town of Kimbleton (ph).</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's just a part of our Danish heritage.</s>FREDERICKS: She comes from a Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She dreamed of finding her prince and be -- having a mortal soul.</s>FREDERICKS (on camera): Never did.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Never did. I just think it's great to live here and have all these neat things to go and tell people about.