Giants in the sandbox

A colleague from the big city recalls the first time she drove down I-77 to Marietta and saw, out in the middle of nowhere, a big brown tourist information sign conveying the enigmatic message "Big Muskie Bucket." 

That was the point when she knew she had arrived in Appalachia. What sort of savage, uncivilized people would enshrine as a tourist attraction a Big Muskie Bucket?

If she had taken that turn, she would have found out. 

During the height of the strip-mining era in southeastern Ohio, Big Muskie was the world's largest dragline digging machine (read about it here). What do you do with a machine that size when it's no longer needed? Sell it for scrap metal--except for its bucket,  which now perches on a pile of rocks on a hilltop in Noble County, Ohio.

The bucket looks like like a broken toy dropped by a giant baby, but moving the bulky bucket to its hilltop perch required a great deal of organizational and engineering knowhow. It serves as the centerpiece of Miners' Memorial Park, dedicated to the memory of the workers who died in service to coal, and it overlooks miles and miles of reclaimed strip-mined land now devoted to camping and recreation.


Savage and uncivilized? Tool-making, cooperation in service of community goals, and the desire to memorialize the dead are prime markers of civilization, but even more telling is the reclamation of the ruined land. It's as if the voice of authority told the giant baby, "You made your mess--now go clean it up," and the baby dropped the bucket and got to work, leaving behind a 230-ton steel toy as an artifact of a lost civilization.