If you are a regular complainer about traffic west of Chattanooga – think Interstate 24 headed to Marion County – well, add a few more Goody’s powders to your console.
Because if you saw the ginormous iron skillet that was being hauled in the back of an 18-wheeler this month, well, it’s safe to say big things are coming to South Pittsburg.
That’s right, the state’s home to small public school football excellence is also the world’s home to cast iron skillet greatness thanks to the Lodge Manufacturing folks. Now the best is matched with the biggest.
When the Lodge Cast Iron Museum opens later this summer in South Pittsburg, this more than 7-ton cast iron behemoth – which can cook roughly 54 dozen eggs – will be a featured attraction.
So right up there with the World’s Largest Ball of Paint (it’s in Indiana) or the World’s Largest Fork – both Creede, Colorado, and Springfield, Missouri, make that claim – will be South Pitt’s World’s Largest Iron Skillet.
And rightly so, if you ask me, since the company has a special place in my family’s food line and the grandeur of the Lodge company as a whole.
First, I have a Lodge cast iron skillet, passed down from my Nanny to my momma to me. I use it often, and believe I use it pretty well, even if it’s a better utensil than I am a cook.
My Nanny was a Southern cooking great, known for miles around and using her cast iron pan like Zamfir used the pan flute.
Staff photo by Robin Rudd / Cast iron skillets await shipping in Lodge Cast Iron’s South Pittsburg facility on Oct.22, 2021.My mother, well, her skills were far ahead of her time. She was a leader of people and a great communicator, something that was not always welcomed with open arms for females in the 1970s. She became the national president of the Jaycee Women back when the Jaycees’ national numbers were well into eight figures.
Still, she loved her skillet and eventually got decent at cornbread against all odds. In fact, about her cooking and yard skills, my father was known to say that mom could “kill a rock garden” and “burn cereal.” But she never blamed her tools, especially our skillet.
Bigger picture, I think this museum is a great idea and could roll into the Cast Iron Hall of Fame.
But we can start with the museum, and South Pitt is the perfect locale, if for no other reason that companies like Lodge – folks committed to towns and towns committed to making something – deserve Hall of Fame chatter. And Hall of Fame credit.
Lodge is in its 125th year, a vast majority of those spent right over the county line in South Pittsburg. They make a top-tier product – I am happy to call the cookware the Cadillac of Cast Iron, the Saban of stovetop stuff.
As we fall all over ourselves for this logistics company or that Gig City gig, the folks who are making things – manufacturing things – and have been for generations are the backbone of this country.
Like the folks at Lodge, from the corner office on the top floor to the corner of the factory where the top of the boxes are sealed.
And that’s Hall of Fame worthy, whether you have the biggest cast iron skillet in the world or the one my mother used to burn cereal.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com.
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Staff file photo / Jay Greeson