Fossil museum to restore historic Mammoth Orange food stand
What is old, and even older, will unite to return a roadside attraction in the shape of a giant orange to Highway 99.
The San Joaquin Valley Paleontology Foundation that runs the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County has won a bid to rescue the Mammoth Orange food stand from where it sat rotting in a Chowchilla city storage yard.
The Fossil Discovery Center is across the street from the largest deposit of fossils on the West Coast. It is also on the same avenue where the Mammoth Orange once stood in Fairmead.
The hope is that the avenue will be renamed Mammoth Parkway and the exit will lead both to the 14-foot tall replica of a Columbian mammoth at the Discovery Center and to the Mammoth Orange food stand next door.
The food stand became the subject of a bidding war after Madera fruit stand owner Kathy Parrish, 74, started wondering what became of the orange -- a noted example of car-culture architecture.
After a highway extension project put the stand out of business in 2007, the city of Chowchilla's redevelopment agency bought it to use as part of a museum. The museum never materialized and a family of foxes moved into the abandoned orange.
Parrish initially offered the city $1,000 for the structure. But once the sale went public other would-be buyers surfaced. The discovery center, one of the last of five bidders, bought the orange for $2,050.
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-- Diana Marcum in Fresno
Photo: Joe Roman, streets supervisor for Chowchilla, has a look around the shell of the Mammoth Orange food stand. Credit: John Walker / Fresno Bee
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