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A Highway Pickle Mystery Is Preserved in Missouri

Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura

The mysterious, infamous Missouri highway pickle jar.
The mysterious, infamous Missouri highway pickle jar.

We all have objects that we notice every day, that ground us in our communities. Maybe it’s a particular mailbox, or a nice street tree. Maybe it’s a sign on the way to work that makes you laugh. Or maybe it’s a pickle jar, perched on a concrete wall next to a highway ramp.

Such is the case for many who drive through Des Peres, Missouri. On the ramp that leads from I-270 North to Manchester Road, near a grocery store and a busy shopping mall, there often sits a quiet and mysterious jar of pickles. When it falls, breaks, or disappears, it is always replaced. It is the highway’s warty lodestar.

Barb Steen, who lives nearby, first noticed the jar in 2012. She’s been watching it ever since. “Every day for six years, I brushed my teeth, I got in my car, and I looked for pickles,” she says. Seasons changed: the sun beat down, then snow piled up. Construction and protest actions shut down the highway. “And the pickles remained,” she says. “Like there was some aura around it or something, protecting it.”

The Missouri highway pickles, circa 2014.

About two years into this routine, Steen decided to spread the love. She started a Facebook group, “Team Pickle.” “These Pickles need a Fan Page!” she explained in the group’s description. “There has got to be a story behind these pickles and inquiring minds want to know.” She closed out with a prophetic goal: “Let’s make them famous!!”

At first, about 25 people joined this condiment community. Members described sightings, and shared blurry drive-by photos. They posted pickle jokes and memes, as well as theories about the jar’s provenance. Perhaps it was a kind of shrine, meant to honor someone who had loved pickles. Perhaps it was aliens.

Steen has her own favorite conjecture: “Maybe it’s somebody with a forbidden love, and they put the pickles up there at their work exit: ‘Hey, know I’m thinking of you.’”

A satellite view of the pickle jar’s home, an off-ramp that leads from I-270 North to Manchester Road.

Attention has its downsides. Quite soon after the Facebook group began, the first pickle jar disappeared. It had been pretty gnarly: half-evaporated, with its label rubbed off, and “just this nude color, no real green to it,” says Steen. Still,…

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