Travel and background

The strangest things on the National Register

John HarrisonUpdated October 2026

The National Register is not only mansions and courthouses. Its national list, as of October 2026, includes 469 objects and 5,297 structures alongside buildings, districts and sites, and among them are a water tower shaped like a catsup bottle, a municipal dump, a gallows, a pet cemetery, a boulder nobody can read and a golf fairway where the space age began. Here are 30, with each description taken from the property’s nomination summary.

How we found them

We scanned the National Park Service’s list of all listings (the NPS keeps the Register) for objects and structures and for names with words like diner, jail, gallows, landfill, privy, rocket, duck and coffee pot. For the ones in the ten states this site covers, we read the nomination summary and link the property page. For the rest we give only the name, state and category from the NPS list, because we have not read their nominations. The address lookup tool will find any odd listing near you.

Things that are not buildings

1. Brooks Catsup Bottle Water Tower, Collinsville, IL (structure). A 100,000-gallon tank painted as a catsup bottle on a 100-foot lattice tower, built in 1949 for the Suppiger Company after its president asked for a tank that looked like the product. Residents raised $80,000 to restore it in 1993.

2. Fresno Sanitary Landfill, CA (site). A 140-acre mound of compacted refuse, 45 to 60 feet above grade, that took the city’s waste from 1937 to 1987. The nomination calls it the oldest true sanitary landfill in the United States; it was also placed on the Superfund list in 1989.

3. Sierra County Sheriff’s Gallows, Downieville, CA (structure). Built in 1885 for a single hanging, held together with wooden pegs so it could be taken apart, and never used again. The nomination describes it as the only authentic standing gallows in California.

4. Plymouth Rock, MA (object). Identified in 1741 by 91-year-old Elder Thomas Faunce, split in 1774 during an attempt to move it, rejoined in 1880 and now under a 1921 canopy by McKim, Mead and White. The official Pilgrim records name no landing place.

5. Dighton Rock, MA (object). A 50-ton boulder covered in pecked inscriptions that more than 600 books and articles have explained about 35 different ways, from Vikings to a Portuguese explorer in 1511. The nomination says its interest rests on the fact that no explanation can be proven.

6. Angle Tree Stone, North Attleborough, MA (object). A 14-foot slate shaft set up in 1790 to replace a tree marked in 1664 where the boundary between the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies turned. It is the only angle on the whole line.

7. Goddard Rocket Launching Site, Auburn, MA (site). On March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket from a farm field here; it reached 41 feet and flew 2.5 seconds. The spot is now midway between the tee and green on the ninth fairway of a golf course.

8. Shell Oil Company “Spectacular” Sign, Cambridge, MA (object). A 68-foot scallop shell of incandescent bulbs and red neon, built in 1933 for a Boston rooftop and moved across the Charles in 1944. An animator runs a fourteen-second lighting sequence.

9. South San Francisco Hillside Sign, CA (object). The words “SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THE INDUSTRIAL CITY” in concrete letters 48 to 65 feet tall across a hillside, finished in 1929 after voters approved a special tax to pay for it.

10. Cyclone Roller Coaster, Coney Island, NY (structure). About 3,000 feet of wood track with nine drops, opened in 1927 and still running. Of nearly two dozen coasters once at Coney Island, it is the only one left intact.

11. Mission Beach Roller Coaster, San Diego, CA (structure). Built in 1925 by Prior and Church, it opened on July 4 that year as part of an amusement center meant to sell real estate and fill a streetcar line. Its companion, the Looff Carousel and Big Dipper at Santa Cruz, pairs a 1911 carousel with 70 hand-carved horses and a 1924 wooden coaster.

12. Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, Greenburgh, NY (site). Opened in 1898 as the first commercial burial ground for animals in America, with about 7,000 monuments, roughly 70,000 interments, a fifty-ton granite vault built in 1917 for two dogs, and a 1923 War Dog Memorial.

13. Old Tombstone, Roanoke, VA (object). A four-foot coffin-shaped marker for nine-year-old Robert Denton, who died in 1805, showing the child inside an open coffin with a poem in German, English and Latin. The depiction is unique in Virginia and the stone is now kept in a protective cage.

14. Town Pump of East Sparta, OH (structure). A ten-foot brick shelter built in 1921 around a hand pump over a well dug about 1846, at the village’s busiest intersection. Bricklayers working on a nearby pipeline offered to build it if the town supplied the bricks.

15. Boy with the Boot Fountain, Sandusky, OH (object). A small metal boy pouring water from a hole in his boot, imported from Baden, Germany, in 1895 by a hotel owner and left to the city in his will. The nomination lists it because it became the symbol of Sandusky, reproduced on plates and needlework.

16. Baxter Clock, New Bern, NC (object). A twenty-foot Seth Thomas post clock shipped in 1920 to stand outside a jewelry store, the only one of its type known to survive in North Carolina. All parts are original and it still keeps time.

17. Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta, GA (object). A 400-foot, 18,000-pound painting of July 22, 1864, made in Milwaukee by ten German artists, sold at a sheriff’s auction in 1893 and given a plaster-figure foreground by the WPA. Boston’s Cyclorama Building was built in 1884 to show a Gettysburg painting of the same size.

18. Rendezvous Docking Simulator, Hampton, VA (object). A 1963 overhead carriage and cable-hung gimbal on the roof of a NASA Langley building, from which full-scale Gemini and Apollo modules were suspended so pilots could practice docking with six degrees of freedom.

19. USS Cod, Cleveland, OH (structure). A 312-foot Gato-class submarine with seven war patrols and eight ships sunk, moored on Lake Erie. Unlike other submarine memorials she has not been cut open for visitors, who climb down a hatch as the crews did.

20. Priscilla, West Sayville, NY (structure). An 1888 oyster sloop, the oldest surviving sailing work boat of the Great South Bay fleet, restored after decades under a fiberglass shell.

Buildings with odd jobs or odd shapes

21. Miss Worcester Diner, MA. Worcester Lunch Car Company diner #812, delivered in June 1948 and parked across the street from the factory that made it, where it served as a working model for buyers. The company built 651 lunch cars between 1907 and 1957; the NPS list has 19 Massachusetts diners and 58 nationally.

22. Walter’s Hot Dog Stand, Mamaroneck, NY. A 1928 stand with a copper-tiled pagoda roof, curving dragons at the corners and stylized carp on the ridge, run by the same family since it opened.

23. Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket, Hinsdale, IL. A 1946 Route 66 restaurant that began as a lunch counter in a gas station and survived the 1962 opening of Interstate 55. Down the same road, the Soulsby Service Station in Mount Olive was built in 1926 by a former coal miner and pumped gas until 1991.

24. The Coffee Pot, Bedford Township, PA. A two-story round building shaped like a coffee pot, spout and handle included, built in 1927 beside a Lincoln Highway filling station and moved in 2003. Roanoke has its own Coffee Pot, a 1936 log roadhouse with a 15-foot stucco pot on the roof that once released steam.

25. The Big Duck, Flanders, NY. A 1930–31 poultry store shaped like a Peking duck, 30 feet long, with Model T tail lights for eyes, now a gift shop in a county park. In Cherry Valley, The Tepee is a fifty-foot steel-clad gift shop from 1954, built after a new highway bypassed the owners’ first store.

26. Elephant Hotel, Somers, NY. Built 1820–25 by Hachaliah Bailey as the headquarters of his menagerie business, with a statue of his elephant Old Bet out front. It now holds municipal offices.

27. Carthage Jail, IL. The 1839–40 limestone jail where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed by a mob on June 27, 1844, bought by the church in 1903 as its first historic site. Georgia’s Bronwood Calaboose is the opposite end of the scale: a 16-by-9-foot wooden lockup from about 1900 with two plank cells.

28. Old School Privy, Genoa, OH. A Romanesque Revival outhouse with round arches, rusticated stone trim, four separate toilet rooms (two for students, two for faculty) and a false chimney for symmetry, described as the largest and most elegant privy in the county.

29. Marstons Mills Hearse House, Barnstable, MA. A shingled shed from about 1885 built to house a village’s horse-drawn hearse, one of two left in a town that once had seven.

30. The Orange Show, Houston, TX. A two-story maze of walls, balconies and displays that Jefferson Davis McKissack built from salvage between 1955 and 1979 as a monument to the orange, which he considered the perfect food.

Odd listings outside our coverage (names only)

These appear in the NPS list in the states shown; we have not read their nominations, so we give nothing beyond the name and category. Lucy, the Margate Elephant (NJ, building). Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox (MN, object). Dinosaur Park (SD, object). Dine-A-Ville Dinosaur (UT, object). Big Brutus (KS, object). Boll Weevil Monument (AL, object). Hoo Hoo Monument (AR, object). Teapot Dome Service Station (WA, building). Benewah Milk Bottle (WA, building). Milk Bottle Grocery (OK, building). Wigwam Village #6 (AZ, building) and Wigwam Village No. 2 (KY, district). Nansen Ski Jump (NH, district). Ecker Hill Ski Jump (UT, structure). Vinalhaven Galamander (ME, object). Louden Whirl-Around (IA, object). Convicts’ Bread Oven (CO, object). Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter (NM, building). Sedan Crater (NV, site). Seminole Whipping Tree (OK, site). “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” Sign (NV, object). Mickey’s Diner (MN, building).

Why they qualify

Every one of these passed the same test as a courthouse or a mansion: significance under one of the four criteria and enough integrity to show it. The nominations above lean on association with events or patterns (roadside commerce, Route 66), on design (including “programmatic” architecture that takes the shape of what it sells) and, for the landfill and the rocket field, on engineering and science. The four criteria and seven aspects of integrity explains the test, and how the National Register works covers what listing means for an owner.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Researched from the sources above and drafted with AI assistance; published under the editor's name, corrections welcome. See the editorial policy.