Gaffney Peachoid

The small rural town of Gaffney, South Carolina is well known for its peaches. Nicknamed the “Peach Capital of South Carolina,” Gaffney contains thousands of the little fruits, but it also features one that is abnormally large: a peach that’s 135 feet tall.

With a tall pedestal at the bottom supporting a spherical ball at the top, the Gaffney Peachoid, located on “Peachoid Road,” is shaped like any conventional water tower, but its design is slightly modified. As thousands of drivers motor down Interstate 85 each day, their attention is caught by the water tower’s sphere, which is sculpted and painted to look like a gigantic peach.

The multi-story Gaffney Peachoid, the world’s largest peach, has grown to become one of the region’s most famous roadside stops. Built in 1981 when “the staff of the Gaffney Board of Public Works was working way too late,” the Gaffney Peachoid holds one million gallons of water and is garnished with a stem and leaf. The fruit of five months of hard labor, the construction of this peach required fifty gallons of paint and ten million pounds of concrete. The Peachoid is so big that its leaf alone is 60 feet long.

The Peachoid is best known for its integral role in the Netflix series House of Cards. In “Chapter Three,” the giant peach is so distracting that a woman crashes her car while staring at it, raising questions about Frank’s persistence in keeping it upright.

The peach’s crease, however, may be just as famous as the peach itself. Called the “butt of jokes” by the Wall Street Journal and “the butt in the sky” by Gaffney’s locals, the fold of the Peachoid mildly resembles a rear end.