LUVERNE, Minn. — A giant 65-foot nutcracker named Verne the Patriot now stands high over the southwestern Minnesota prairie.
Hundreds of people gathered outside a local rock shop over the weekend for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Town leaders revealed the giant figure, dressed like Uncle Sam, stands 65 feet and 7.5 inches tall. A 9-foot pedestal pushes the giant structure even higher.
It is almost double the size of a 33-foot nutcracker in Neuhausen, Germany, which holds the current Guinness World Record. The giant statue features a working jaw and took $600,000 to build using grants and private donations.
“Please welcome our newest Luverne resident, Verne the Patriot,” Katie Walgrave announced to cheers.
Walgrave runs Those Blasted Things, a local rock shop. She said shop traffic has quadrupled since workers finished assembling the structure in mid-June. Other town shops are seeing more customers too.
“Our goal is to have something that’s different and that you won’t see anywhere else. And so that’s what we have here,” she said.
The project started after a city tourism expert urged leaders to embrace the town’s huge nutcracker obsession. Today, Luverne owns 7,554 nutcrackers, which easily outnumbers its 5,000 human residents.
“We’re crazy if we don’t utilize the nutcracker collection,” Mayor Patrick Baustian said.
The town’s massive collection started with 96-year-old resident Betty Mann. She bought her first figurine at a gift shop in 2001 after losing her husband and daughter.
“I said to my daughter-in-law, ‘I had a hard Christmas and I’ve always wanted a wooden nutcracker. I’m buying myself a belated Christmas present,’” she recalled.
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Her personal stash grew to 2,500 pieces before she donated them to the local historical society in 2016. That spirit of healing continues to draw people to the town today.
“Betty started her collection as a way of dealing with grief,” visitor John Hawkinson said Saturday after bringing his wife, whose own collection burned in a recent house fire. “We came down here out of loss as well. … I thought that was kind of a full circle moment.”
