New Salem, North Dakota

Driving west on Interstate Ninety-Four through New Salem, you cannot miss Salem Sue. She stands thirty-eight feet high and fifty feet long on a hill above the highway, painted black and white, and visible for miles: the world's largest fiberglass Holstein cow. The New Salem Lions Club built her in nineteen seventy-four at a cost of forty thousand dollars as a tribute to the region's dairy industry.

Donations came from dairymen, farm families, and local businesses who considered dairy farming the backbone of Morton County's economy. New Salem itself dates to eighteen eighty-two, when settlers began arriving by rail. It has never been a large place, but Salem Sue draws travelers off the interstate every year.

Her designer was Dave Oswald, who also created the world's largest catfish in Wahpeton. Sculpture Manufacturing Company of La Crosse, Wisconsin, fabricated her. She is hollow, weighs about twelve thousand pounds, and was shipped in three parts and assembled on the hill, which is called School Hill.

She was only the second giant roadside animal in North Dakota, after the Jamestown buffalo of nineteen fifty-nine. Visiting is free, and a milk-can-shaped donation bin at the bottom helps pay for upkeep and repainting. Scientists even named a fossil plant genus, Susiea, after her.