Bean Station Toot

They had themselves a party up on the hill up in East Tennessee this weekend.  Bean Station is one of my favorite non-towns.  It is perched on the edge of a high ridge, and there is not much going on there.  According to The Tennessean, this weekend, they decided to rectify matters.
Monday, 10/22/07

Attempt to break world record gives Bean Station a chance to toot its horn

Associated Press

All comers to Bean Station’s 11th annual Harvest Pride Festival on Saturday received a heaping helping from what the town thinks is the largest pot of beans ever cooked, thanks to the makers of a “flatulence deodorizer.”

The Upper East Tennessee town of 1,500 cooked nearly 600 gallons of pinto beans in an attempt to secure a Guinness World Record.
“The city was looking for a way to promote the festival,” said Steve Cason, editor of the Grainger (County) Today weekly newspaper, “so I did some research on the present bean record.”
He says that record is held by the town of Horace, N.D., which cooked up a 350-gallon mess of beans in 2002.
To break the record, Bean Station put 1,200 pounds of beans, 10 pounds of salt, 20 gallons of lard, seasonings and almost enough water to fill a hot tub in a massive custom-built stainless steel pot for 16 hours.
Doyal Bibbins and Mitchell Singleton spent their Friday night baby-sitting the bean
pot, occasionally stirring
with specially made stainless steel implements the size
of shovels.

Among the main sponsors of the bean record attempt is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, company called Flat-D Innovations Inc., which company Vice President Frank Morosky said makes a “flatulence deodorizer,” a charcoal pad that you put in your underwear.
Morosky said his company had been looking for a year or more for an event to introduce its product and the bean record seemed perfect.

According to the town Web site, Bean Station was not named after a legume but rather the family of William Bean, a contemporary of Daniel Boone who settled in the area around the same time as the signing of the Declaration of Independence.