Illinois Museum Breaks World Record For Extremely Unique Display

An extremely unique museum located in Long Grove recently broke a Guinness World Record for the amount of sock monkeys in their vast, growing collection. According to WTVO, museum owners Arlene and Michael Okun started collecting sock monkeys over 16 years ago and have since grown their glorious collection to over 2,098 monkeys.

Guinness World Record representatives Hannah Ortman and Chloe McCarthy stopped by the museum to make the record break official. Daily Herald mentioned that the record was so unique that an entire new category was created just for Arlene and Micheal's eclectic collection. Arlene detailed how the pair's love for sock monkeys came to be.

"We were traveling across the country in an RV, and we stopped at a Cracker Barrel, and I bought my first one." Have you ever heard the saying, "...and the rest was history?" Well, in Arlene and Michael's case, it really is!

"I started to look into the history, and I found that they are tied to not only Americana but also Illinois," Arlene shared.

As it turns out, sock monkeys can be traced directly back to Rockford, Illinois where a man by the name of John Nelson settled in 1857 and began to work on "improving an automatic sock knitting machine." Daily Herald noted that Nelson soon built a knitting company that sold trademark red-heeled socks. These socks were used to create sock monkeys for children to play with during the Great Depression, stuffed with inexpensive household items like foam and sawdust.

Okuns' sock monkey museum, located off of Robert Parker Coffin Road in Long Grove, opened last year and customers are constantly amazed to find sock monkeys of "every variety the imagination can conceive," as they look through the one-of-a-kind shop that now holds a Guinness World Record.