The annual World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Festival Birthday Party & Car Show in Collinsville, Illinois, is ending after the longtime co-organizers said they “were just done” and wanted to “move on to do other things.”
In a Facebook message Sunday night, co-organizer Mike Gassman posted:
The Catsup Bottle Executive Committee is announcing that the annual World’s Largest Catsup Bottle Festival Birthday Party & Car Show has come to an end. A world’s largest thank you goes out to all of our sponsors, our volunteers, and especially to everyone who came out to the fest each year and helped make it such a success. We’ve met a lot of wonderful people – literally from around the world – and have made many great new friends over the past 20 years.
We will continue to promote the Brooks catsup bottle water tower as Collinsville’s biggest roadside tourist attraction. For starters, on Saturday, June 9, and Sunday, June 10, we will partner with the Illinois Route 66 Blue Carpet Corridor for their “Miners, Mobsters, & the Mother Road” Motor Tour. Our volunteers will be set up at the Catsup Bottle for two full days welcoming Route 66 travelers and local visitors with souvenirs, games, and fun activities.
Also mark your calendars for September 12, 2018, when we are scheduled for a visit from the World’s Largest Idaho Potato truck with Larry and the Tater Twins!
All of the official souvenir merchandise will still be available and we will still sell and ship Brooks rich & tangy ketchup all over the country.
Thank you again to everyone who has supported us and had fun with us going all the way back to the original restoration project in 1993.
As always, keep pourin’ it on and we’ll catsup with ya later.
Gassman elaborated on his decision to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“Last year was so big and so fun we felt like we couldn’t top it again,” he said. “There’s three of us on the executive committee and we finally said that we were just done and ready to move on to do other things.
“We thought we’d go out on a high note, but it’s going to be a different summer that’s for sure.”
Gassman added he and his festival co-organizer wife, Judy DeMoisey, were “actually going to take a vacation this summer.” The 2017 event they oversaw drew up to 5,000 people.
The 170-foot-tall World’s Largest Catsup Bottle sits near the site of a former Brooks Catsup factory. The 100,000-gallon water tower was built in 1949.
Brooks eventually moved its operations to Indiana, but the big bottle remained. A local preservation group restored it in 1995, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. Franklin “Al” Bieri, owner of Mississippi River Construction Co. of nearby O’Fallon, Illinois, bought the landmark in 2015.
The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle sits about two miles south of the nearest alignment of Route 66 at Beltline Road in Collinsville. But it remains a favorite side trip for Route 66 travelers.
(Image of the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle in Collinsville, Illinois, by Mike Gassman via Flickr)
Bummer.