EDITOR'S NOTES: Sweet tea world record a good way to celebrate big move

By David Kennard
dkennard@journalscene.com

A new world record is expected to be broken today in Summerville when thousands will sample sweet tea from a 2,400 gallon “mason jar.”

The tea will be brewed using 210 pounds of local tea and 1,600 pounds of sugar. The newly constructed tea container - which is made from an industrial sized water tank – will be filled using a fire hydrant to dwarf last year’s batch of just 1,425 gallons.

The record will be set in the Guinness Book of World Records under the category of “World’s Largest Iced Tea” because there is no category for sweet tea. But because the event will take place in Summerville, birthplace of sweet tea – and the fact that it will be made with 1,600 pounds of sugar – there is little doubt that anyone will mistake it for anything other than sweet tea.

Tea will begin to be served at 5 p.m. Friday outside Summerville Town Hall.
This is the second year Summerville has brewed the world record-setting tea, but it will be my first time attending. Since I arrived in town in December, I’ve heard lots of build-up to the event and I am certain it won’t disappoint.

Last week, as I moved my family across the country to South Carolina, I got to see a few other “world’s record” things.

We began our tour at the southern Utah ghost town of Sego. The only thing that remains of the town now are a few roofless stone buildings and an old rusted car. In its day it was a coal-mining boom town, but the lack of a reliable water source doomed the settlement to be reclaimed by the arid southern Utah desert and red rock.

On the way to the ghost town, which is only about 10 minutes off of Interstate 70 just past the almost ghost town of Thompson, Utah – there is still a gas station there – we discovered some of the world’s oldest graffiti drawn on sandstone cliffs. Created by the Fremont culture sometime between AD 1 and 1300, these rock drawings included both petroglyphs and pictographs. Dozens of images of bighorn sheep and hunters with bows adorned the cliffs. The images also contained drawings of weird alien looking figures that no one has been able to figure out.

Further west as we traveled through Colorado, we drove through the world’s longest and highest elevation road tunnels. The Eisenhower tunnel was constructed in the early 1970s to allow traffic to travel under the Continental Divide rather than over the treacherous Loveland Pass, which also holds a record as the highest mountain pass in the world, (11,990 feet) that is maintained year-round for passenger travel.

For what it’s worth, Loveland Pass also is home to Loveland Ski Area where, at 16 years old, I taught my father how to ski when he was in his 50s. That’s not a world record of any kind, but still impressive in my mind.

As we moved into Kansas, however, well that’s where the world records began to really shine. We first stumbled upon the world’s largest artist’s easel in Goodland, Kansas. Because Kansas is the Sunflower state the painting on the easel is a version of “Three Sunflowers In A Vase” by Van Gogh.

This man-made wonder stands 80 feet tall and is the centerpiece of a local city park maintained by the local Rotary Club. Further east in Kansas is another obscure world record - the world’s largest ball of bailing twine sits majestically in a small roadside park under its own covered structure. I am not sure why, but like Goodland, the fine residents of Cawker City, Kansas, have latched onto this oddity, giving the house-sized ball of twine its own annual festival where visitors can add to the ball each year.

Our trip took us through St. Louis, world’s largest man-made monument, 630-foot Gateway Arch; Nashville, world’s longest-running radio broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry; Atlanta, world’s most aggressive drivers (my opinion), and finally Summerville.

Finally home in South Carolina, we were able to enjoy a rest from our weeklong road trip across the country. I’m now looking forward to settling in a bit and I can’t think of a better way to start than enjoying tonight’s festivities in Summerville. See you there.

David Kennard is the executive editor of Summerville Communications, which publishes the Berkeley Independent, Goose Creek Gazette and Summerville Journal Scene. Contact him at dkennard@journalscene.com or 843-873-9424. Follow him on Twitter @davidbkennard.