By Jason Frye
On road trips in my car, we keep the talk light — how much money you’d really get after you hit the Powerball jackpot and exactly how you’d squander every penny; whether 1977 or 1989 was a better year for the Grateful Dead — unless we’re headed to Rose Hill, in which case I’ll tell you that this little burg is a triple play in weird roadside attractions. Gas up the car and make your way to Exit 380 on Interstate 40 and prepare to be whelmed.
I’m not sure if you’ll be over- or under-whelmed (that’s all about your attitude), but a whelming awaits thanks to a pair of yesteryear highway oddities with dubious distinctions and a real coastal rarity: a winery.
Rose Hill’s a proud chicken town, and back in 1963, Ramsey Feed Company decided to celebrate that by building a whopper of a frying pan to go along with the North Carolina Poultry Jubilee. This monster pan weighs 2 tons, is 15 feet across and holds 200 gallons of oil, enough to simultaneously fry a year’s worth of chickens, 365 of them swimming in the pond-sized pan until they turn golden brown.
But they only fire it up once a year when November’s Poultry Jubilee rolls around. Then you’ll find lines of locals hungry for a plate or platter or pile of fried chicken. Otherwise, it’s right there by the Fire Department (smart thinking) filling every square inch of a gazebo adorned with a sign that reads “Worlds (sic) Largest Frying Pan.” But this is misleading. Not because of the missing apostrophe, but because this is not the World’s Largest Frying Pan. There are contenders — in Iowa, Washington, Mexico — but for the longest time those big pans fell short of ours by one mark: Rose Hill’s pan was the World’s Largest Operational Frying Pan. The pretenders to the throne just sat there. Then, in September 2025, some hungry folks in Torreón, Mexico, built a 29 1/2-foot pan, cooked a discada (a meaty, and circular, dish), and stole the crown. Maybe we can start a petition to rename ours “World’s Largest Usable Frying Pan for Fried Chicken” and make a sign that wraps around the whole gazebo?
Seeing the dubiously named Worlds (sic) Largest Frying Pan in the off season is a little “wow, that’s a big pan,” but show up in November and the smell of fried chicken and the sound of all that grease popping makes the thing impressive. And there’s food.
Fortunately, you can find food in Rose Hill year-round, and you can spot your second showy roadside attraction in the process. Just a block and a half away stands a house-sized chair, the World’s Largest Adirondack Chair (bonus points for the apostrophe). It’s tremendous. Red. Towering. Filling the whole lot beside Fredrick Furniture with its physical and psychic presence. I thought the one I’d seen on the Duck Boardwalk on the Outer Banks was big, but that’s a baby chair by comparison. Standing two stories — maybe a touch more — high, it’s got gravity. But it’s got a controversy, too. In Ontario, there’s one three stories tall; and there’s an impressive pair in Florida; and another one in Wilmington, Ohio — step it up Wilmington, N.C.! You might think L.L. Bean would have a giant camp chair in Maine but they’ve got a boot instead. So, Rose Hill finds itself in good company, though we may need to hire the world’s largest Mayflower truck to gather all the chairs together and settle this once and for all.
Thinking about those logistics worked up a thirst in me, and after admiring the Frying Pan (and touching it even though signs said not to) and posing for a selfie on the chair, I made a beeline to Rose Hill’s third oddity: Duplin Winery.
The coastal plain’s not the first place you think of when you think North Carolina wine — the humidity, the salty air, the long-and-growing-longer summers (which are woefully absent of cool nights) — but out here on the temperate side of I-95, you find ideal growing conditions for our native grape: vitis rotundifolia, the Muscadine grape, specifically the bronze-skinned scuppernong. And Duplin Winery has crushed somewhere north of 15 million cases worth. I stopped in for a sample and for lunch at The Bistro.
Cars from out of state, from in state and a minibus from a retirement community fill Duplin Winery’s parking lot. Above the door a sign proclaims this as “The Winery of The South.” I’m almost convinced it’s true.
Tastings are all full. Every private tasting room, every nook and cranny where one might take a guided journey through Duplin’s portfolio, every seat at long tables set with empty glasses and bowls full of crackers is occupied. I go for lunch first, which, honestly, is the pro move when you’re wine or whiskey tasting.
When my menu arrives, the server pours a sip of a sample of sweet scuppernong juice as a tasting. I’ve got fried chicken on my mind, and I read the menu twice before realizing the salad topped with a chicken tendie is my only fowl option, so I go for a cheeseburger and nose my wine. It’s floral. Like gardenias or a humid breath of jasmine-scented air.
For much of the dining room — median age: advanced church lady — it’s a buzz-inducing sip and all these free samples are creating a buzz indeed. The room vibrates with conversation. Two-top tables, like mine, stand against barnwood-slatted walls. I’m seated beneath a photo of a white-haired, white-bearded guy who looks like Alec Guinness praying over a book-sized loaf of bread, a normal-sized bowl of soup, and a Bible bigger than The Worlds (sic) Largest Frying Pan. It reminds me of my grandmother’s house. And my aunt’s. And that I need to trim my beard.
In the center of the room, four-tops float like bits of iceberg. In some places they’ve been pushed together forming eight- and 12-tops whose edges rub against one another like tectonic plates as diners dive with abandon into their communion-sized wine samples. Those sips hit some lightweights hard and they get loud, driving the next table louder, eliciting a gale of laughter from yet another table. The biggest group — an 18-top of the mini-bus retirement community folks (they wear matching shirts) — is the most, well, festive.
Finally, I go in for my sip. It seems communion-cup sized, but it’s a little bigger: two easy sips for a food writer like me, three for the little old lady having soup with another little old lady a table away, one gulp for a college student. The wine tastes like childhood summers. The green summers of West Virginia when the humidity was trapped in the hollers and my granddad’s grapevines grew leaves big as a dinner plate and the bronze fruit was the size of a golf ball: scuppernongs, a through line across time tying me to my future in North Carolina, warm on the vine and waiting to be eaten. Pluck the grape, make a quick slit across the top with a pocketknife and apply just the right pressure with your teeth and the slippery, meaty globe of flesh pops free from the bitter skins. It’s sweet bliss. The wine tastes like that.
A few minutes of reverie spent in summers long past and suddenly lunch is gone and it’s time for my tasting. I head through the gift shop, take a seat, and wonder what the next seven bottles have in store.