In these tiny NC towns, spend the night in a lighthouse or gaze a giant skillet

At least two places in North Carolina have tourist attractions based on oversized skillets.

The town of Rose Hill, in Duplin County, claims to have the World’s Largest Frying Pan, which it puts to use each year during the North Carolina Poultry Jubilee.

And in the ocean off the Brunswick County community of Southport, guests can spend a weekend in a decommissioned light tower that once kept ships from running aground in Frying Pan Shoals.

Is it really the world’s largest frying pan?

Whether the World’s Largest Frying Pan lives up to its name is open to interpretation, given that a cast-iron skillet on display in Tennessee seems to have a few feet in diameter on the chicken-frying pride of Rose Hill. But it’s an impressive piece of cookware, measuring 15 feet across, weighing two tons and sitting atop gas burners that make it fully operational.

By comparison, Tennessee’s version is 18 feet across, but it’s propped against a wall inside the Lodge Museum of Cast Iron, claiming to be big enough to cook 650 eggs simultaneously. Prove it.

During the Jubilee, Rose Hill’s sectioned pan is filled with up to 200 gallons of oil and used to golden-fry hundreds of pieces of actual chicken at a time. Photographs appear to show pitch forks instead of tongs for turning the meat.

This year’s Jubilee is scheduled for Nov. 3-4.

The rest of the year, the skillet sits under a gazebo at the intersection of N.C. 117 and Main Street, marked with a red-lettered, state-fair-sideshow-quality sign proclaiming its truth. Visitors sometimes report being disappointed that only the handle of the skillet is visible, while the business end is covered with a custom-fitted tarp to keep it clean. Food safety first.

▪ Where to find it: 510 E. Main St., Wallace, North Carolina

Spend the night in a North Carolina light tower

Out in the ocean, it’s the figurative handle that gave the ocean-going hazard Frying Pan Shoals its name and made it necessary for the government to place a series of markers offshore to warn ships to navigate around it. On nautical maps, the shoals do look like a skillet handle extending from southeastern North Carolina.

According to a 2004 story in N.C. S— was established at Frying Pan Shoals about 17 miles offshore in 1860. It was one of more than 100 lightships the U.S. operated into the 1960s, outfitting them as technology became available to sent sound signals during times of reduced visibility and electronic signals around the clock.

The government built Frying Pan Tower in 1964, replacing the lightship with what’s called a “Texas tower” that looks like the oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

The tower was placed farther into the ocean than the light ship — about 30 miles out, at the end of the shoals — so ships could pick up its signal and avoid the shallow water. It sits in about 50 feet of water, its legs anchored to the ocean bottom. The floor of the living-working space is 80 feet above the water’s surface.

A crew of six manned the tower, four weeks on, two weeks off, traveling to and from via a boat from either the Oak Island or Wrightsville Beach Coast Guard stations, or the occasional helicopter ride. The top of the two-story, 5,000-square-foot building is a helicopter pad.

The tower was automated in 1979, and decommissioned in 2004 after GPS on ships made it unnecessary.

Richard Neal of Charlotte bought the tower at auction in 2010 and now works for a non-profit he set up to repair and preserve it. He spends every other week on the tower, doing maintenance and repairs and hosting volunteers or guests who pay to come stay in the structure.

Reached on the tower this week, Neal said he grew up in Oklahoma, a long way from the ocean, never owned a boat and hadn’t even been deep-sea fishing when he bought Frying Pan Tower.

“You know how you see something, and you think, I like this. What am I going to do with it?” Neal said. “Well I saw this and it just really appealed to me.”

When he was a kid, he said, Neal’s family home didn’t have trees big enough to support a tree house, so his parents installed some posts and built a box on top for him to play in.“I really just a got a big version of my childhood treehouse,” Neal said.

Except that this one is in a constant battle with salt, water and wind. A live “belly cam” mounted under the platform scans rusting legs of the structure, showing why Neal is in search of a trained welder interested in working in at sea.

Frying Pan Tower amenities

Less skilled workers are welcome too, and for the cost of transport to the tower — $850, usually a 60- to 90-minute boat ride from Southport — volunteers stay Sunday through Friday, performing chores and enjoying a 360-degree view of the water. Eco-tourists stay Friday through Sunday, and for $1,550 they have a chef who prepares their meals and no chores except to clean up after themselves.

The place has seven bedrooms, including a bunk room for six.

Tower power is solar, with a backup generator. There is no cable or satellite TV, but there is wifi, which allows those staying in the tower to watch the live “shark cam” mounted near the ocean floor below them. Rain collected on the slightly concave roof and purified provides fresh water.

Neal said he gets three types of tourists: fishermen, divers and family groups, friends or coworkers out for an adventure. Researchers from different universities have used the tower, along with NOAA and a team of Navy Seals.

Neal, who studied engineering and loves heavy equipment, so far isn’t taking in enough through tourism or donations to pay for the work needed on Frying Pan Tower. And while pieces of it occasionally rot off and fall to the ocean floor, he isn’t giving up.

“We will never build structures like these again,” Neal said. “But we have this, and we can preserve it, and we can teach people in the future that there was a time when people didn’t have cell phones or calculators. They had steam engines and ciphers and barges the size of football fields.

“To me, it’s worth it to try to save it.”

Where to find it: The boat ride leaves from Southport, North Carolina