For sale: A $16,000 giant cow sculpture with echoes of Johnson County history
Holy cow! An oversized steer named Sir Loin is for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $16,000.
Rebecca Shipley, owner of The Fabulous Fern in Olathe, is selling the sculpture to recoup the cost of restoring him, and to avoid paying to mount him on a post, as city officials want.
She purchased the bovine in 2021 after hearing stories from long-time Olathe residents about an identical cow at the Dennis Avenue Shops off of Highway 7, where her store is located.
On Facebook, people remembered the 1970s when “the senior prank at the high school was to steal the cow and park it somewhere else.”
Luckily, the elder Loin was returned safely. “I mean, you can see a giant cow going down the street,” Shipley said.
Sir Loin’s past is mostly oral history — The Star looked at newspaper archives, old yearbooks and consulted with the Johnson County Museum and found no mention of the steer. But the memories loom large in the community, just like Sir Loin’s stature.
Shipley anticipates selling Sir Loin to a cattle rancher, a meat market, a roadside oddities collector or any business that wants a local landmark.
“It is an attention grabber, like you can just say. ‘Hey, turn right at the cow,’” Shipley said.
“The funnest day I had with it was when we bought it and we trailered it back up to Kansas City. Everyone, you know, had their phones out taking pictures, and it just brings smiles to everyone’s face,” Shipley said.
Earlier this fall, Shipley walked from The Fabulous Fern through the parking lot to show off Sir Loin like a proud 4-H member. Shipley and her husband restored the 12-foot-tall creature, repainting his Hereford coloring, rewiring his sign and regularly changing the puns on the sign — “Happy Moo-ther’s Day” or “Mooey Christmas.”
Walking around to the rear, Shipley pointed out Sir Loin’s genitals, which confirm that he is a steer, a castrated male.
“You can’t misgender him,” she joked.
Shipley bought Sir Loin from a collector in Wichita, and the trailer holding Sir Loin contains the only other evidence of his provenance: a chipping bumper sticker from a New Mexico music store.
A North Kansas City native, Shipley says oversized fiberglass sculptures loom large in her memory. She grew up seeing the whimsical animals at Penguin Park in the Northland or the cartoonish gun-slinging cowboys, located south of Kansas City off of I-49. The member of Gen X said these statues were “the kind of eye-catching thing that I think really appealed to me as a kid.”
The fiberglass cows were originally placed outside of the Oklahoma City-based buffet chain Sirloin Stockade, according to RoadsideArchitecture.com. More than 35 cows are scattered across the country from Minnesota to Louisiana. With hides of brown, black and white, the steers advertised businesses like grocery stores, restaurants or, in macabre situations, meat markets.
Despite being as large as a semi, Sir Loin is hollow. Many similar cows met their end when a strong gust of wind tipped them, but luckily, Sir Loin is weighted and tied down to his trailer.
While Sir Loin’s time in Olathe is numbered, you can spot a similar cow on the roof of Jess & Jim’s Steakhouse in Martin City.
