Big Brutus

Big Brutus is the nickname of the Bucyrus-Erie 1850-B, an electric mining shovel that worked the coal seams of Cherokee County, Kansas, from 1963 to 1974 — at its debut, the second-largest power shovel ever built. Standing sixteen stories tall with a dipper capable of holding around 90 cubic meters of earth, it stripped overburden at a scale few machines in history have matched. When coal extraction became unprofitable in 1974, the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Company shut it down; the machine was simply too massive and too expensive to dismantle. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and preserved as an open-air technical monument since 1985, it sits half a mile south of West Mineral on the flat Kansas plain. Visitors can climb inside, walk through its mechanical guts, and ascend to the operator's cab for a wide view over the surrounding prairie.