When you’re spending the weekend in Ohio’s Amish country and you’re only a 20-minute drive from Sugarcreek and the world’s largest cuckoo clock, you pack up the wife and kids and hightail it over there.
The giant cuckoo clock that currently sits in the middle of town was commissioned by the Alpine Alpa restaurant in Wilmot, Ohio in 1963, built by clockmaker Karl Schleutermann. The pinnacle of the clock’s existence was appearing on the cover of the Guinness Book of World Records in 1978, and since then, it has moved around a bit and had to be restored back to its original working condition.
However, the largest cuckoo clock on Earth finally found a great permanent home right in the middle of the main street of the village of Sugarcreek in 2012.
The clock runs at the top and bottom of every hour, even in the pouring rain, as we happened to experience it. Naturally, we arrived in downtown Sugarcreek about ten minutes past the hour, but the kids were troopers as we sat in the car for twenty minutes amid a downpour.
The rain let up just enough for us to run outside a few minutes before the next show. For a beautiful five minutes, the kids, my wife, and I watched the little characters pop out of the cuckoo clock door and play their song. It was an early Sunday afternoon, and the entire downtown area was essentially closed. And with the rain steadily coming down, there was just one other couple there with us.
Just as soon as it started, the little cuckoo characters moseyed on back into the clock, taking a breather before their next performance at the top of the hour. We jumped back into the car, perhaps changed forever by the performance we just saw at the world’s largest cuckoo clock.
