The world's largest goat tower was built by accident
The world's largest goat tower was built by accident Popkin 7:29 am Tue Aug 4, 2026 goat tower — Marcia Rittmueller Johnson / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) The Tower of Baa-Goat is a 31-foot brick tower in Windsor, Illinois, with a ramp spiraling up the outside of it, and goats live in it. Dave and Marcia Johnson built it in the late 1990s, Marcia told the Atlas Obscura podcast, after Dave saw a photograph of the goat tower at South Africa's Fairview winery in a British wine magazine. They had handmade brick left over from building their house, and the tower looked like a way to use it up.
- ▪The world's largest goat tower was built by accident Popkin 7:29 am Tue Aug 4, 2026 goat tower — Marcia Rittmueller Johnson / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) The Tower of Baa-Goat is a 31-foot brick tower in Windsor, Illinois, with a ramp
- ▪Dave and Marcia Johnson built it in the late 1990s, Marcia told the Atlas Obscura podcast, after Dave saw a photograph of the goat tower at South Africa's Fairview winery in a British wine magazine.
- ▪They had handmade brick left over from building their house, and the tower looked like a way to use it up.
Boing Boing files mainly under tech. We currently carry 434 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/04/goat-tower-illinois.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:29:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-04T14:45:41.401Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-04T14:45:41.401Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SbUMMjynCHBN · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The world's largest goat tower was built by accident Popkin 7:29 am Tue Aug 4, 2026 goat tower — Marcia Rittmueller Johnson / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons) The Tower of Baa-Goat is a 31-foot brick tower in Windsor, Illinois, with a ramp spiraling up the outside of it, and goats live in it. Dave and Marcia Johnson built it in the late 1990s, Marcia told the Atlas Obscura podcast, after Dave saw a photograph of the goat tower at South Africa's Fairview winery in a British wine magazine. They had handmade brick left over from building their house, and the tower looked like a way to use it up. There were no plans. Dave and a bricklayer who came out of retirement for the job worked backward from the magazine photo.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Boing Boing
