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thursday ◀
8.19.99
fourteen.a
Right: S.P.
Dinnsmoor's Garden of Eden showcases the beauty of cement.
Below left: The Hosacks of Virgil, Joshua, 13, Jolene, 9, and their mother Orella, gaze in wonder at the concrete marvel.
Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
story steph brewer • photos by christina neff
Kansas has more to offer than wheat and Wizard of Oz jokes. When I started my freshman year at the University of Kansas in 1995, I decided that I was going to spend at least one weekend exploring the oddities of the state. I had heard about the big ball of twine on a quiz show and, of course, was determined to view this wonder. After all, there's nothing more fascinating than twine. Fast forward to the fall of 1999. It's its fifth year, and December graduation is staring me in the face. I still haven't seen the twine. I decide to take a road trip and document my findings in the Kansan. Here is my story.
July 28, Killingworth, CT: I decide to get a head start on my first feature page, of which I am the editor, before I go back to school. I sit down at my computer for a long night of research about odd sites in Kansas. Ten minutes later I am printing out my list courtesy of the www.roadsideamerica.com Feed the Tree archive. Apparently, I'm not the only one interested in twine and large prairie dog statues.
August 11, Lawrence: I'm back at school preparing for the trip. My designer bursts my bubble by telling me that many of my proposed desti nations, such as the Barbed Wire Museum and the giant
hands on the barbed wire Museum in prairie dog statue, are located near the Colorado border I'm not used to living in such a big state and thus, thought that a one-day road trip throughout the state was feasible Oons
August 12,
Lawrence, 9:45 a.m. I arrive at the newsroom to
learn that we are running
an Associated Press story
on the Cawker City ball
of twine in the back-to-
school issue of the
Kansan. This means I have to cross the site off my list. I am crushed but determined to still have my adventure. We're starting off by going to Abilene, then to Lucas and, finally, back home to Lawrence.
August 12, I-70, somewhere between Lawrence and Abilene,
11:30 a.m.: Having stayed out way too late last night, I am already tired of driving. At least the scenery is prettier than I thought it would be.
August 12, Abilene. 12:30 p.m.: We arrive at our first destination, The Museum of Independent Telephony. Telephony is the science of telephone transmission or the making or operation of telephones. Warning to potential visitors: This place is tricky to find. There are signs for the Dickinson County Heritage Center and Museum — where the telephone museum is housed — but the building is hidden by the Dwight D. Eisenhower museums. Turn at the Eisenhower complex and drive all the way back. Or you could see the Eisenhower stuff first. Personally, I am too psyched to see a museum dedicated to the miraculous creation called the telephone to spend time researching a dead president.
Upon entering the museum, I use a touch-screen television to view members of the Telephone Hall of Fame. If the criteria for being a hall of famer included talking on the phone and racking up huge phone bills, I might be considered. Unfortunately, members are men and women who have been honored for outstanding accomplishments and service to the independent telephone industry.
Next, I play the role of telephone operator on an old-fashioned switchboard. This is just one of many interactive features at the museum. Visitors also can talk to a friend on the old-fashioned "Talk to a Friend" telephone, pretend to talk in a turn-of-the-century phone booth or listen to music on old phones. There also is a short film about the telephone. History buffs will enjoy number of displays describing the history of the telephone and a recreation of an old telephone office.
After I have my fill of phones, I venture to the museum's backyard where I find chickens and a carousel. The fun never ends in Abilene. However, it is time for us to move on to our next destination. Lucas beckons.
August 12, I-70, somewhere between Abilene and Lucas, 2:15 p.m.: I keep myself occupied by looking at the Flint Hills and the plethora of cows that dot the Kansas landscape. However, I soon realize that my driving suffers when I look out the side windows too much, so I leave the cows to their grazing.
August 12, Lucas, 4 p.m.: We enter Lucas and follow the signs to the Garden of Eden. The sight of the house shocks me out of my travel-weary stupor. Tan sculptures snake up into the sky, appearing both ridiculous and scary. We learn at the door that there is a guided tour that costs $4.25. I have to pay in quarters. Having been told by my associate editor that the tour would include the viewing of a rotting corpse, I am eager. I want to get to that part right away.
The rest of the tour soon proves to be as interesting as an old, dead guy. We start by walking around the outside of the house. We learn that the wacky, limestone house was built by S.P. Dinsmoor in 1907. The back porch features home touches such as cement-filled beer bottles. These
Trip log
Distance: 412
miles
miles
Time: 9 hours, 5 minutes.
Cost: $6.75, plus gas.
were added so people could look at alcohol since they couldn't drink it during Prohibition.
Next we tour the garden. Huge cement poles support 150 sculptures. The religious part of the yard features an arbor with statues of Adam and Eve. Our tour guide tells us Dinsmoor had to clothe the naked innocents because of pressure from town officials. The religious theme continues around the front, but then the mood turns political.
Lynn Scheider, our tour guide, tells me one of the political statues, a labor crucifix, is among the more popular at the house. The statue criticizes lawyers, doctors, preachers and bankers for taking money from the common man. This makes me laugh since Dinsmoor specifically designed his house to be a tourist attraction and admits in writing that he wanted to charge people to see his body decompose. Hmmm ... sounds like a big business attitude to me. Despite this conflict between principle and practice, I'm impressed by this crazy house.
Finally, it is time to enter the mausoleum to see my first-ever dead body. It feels sick and wrong to want to see this, but I do it anyway. It's less ghoulish than I thought it would be, but it teaches me a valuable lesson. I never knew hair lasted that long. Dinsmor has been dead 67 years and he still has a beard!
Inside the house a new tour guide shows us some pictures of Dinsmoor and his wives. His second wife married him when she was 20 and he was 81 and they were still able to have kids! I'm not so sure I understand why she'd want to be that intimate with a man old enough to be her grandfather. I guess he must have had hidden charms.
Downstairs I realize that I didn't have to go to the Barb Wire Museum because there's a barb wire collection here! I learn that apparently barb wire collecting is a popular and fast growing hobby. I better get started so I don't get left behind.
We decide to head back to Lawrence, so I sign the guest book and bid farewell to Dinsmoor and all of his cement.
August 12, Lawrence, 7:30 p.m.: I arrive home. My adventure is finished. I would've liked to visited more sites, but I'm satisfied. I have driven 400 miles, seen a lot of phones, observed a man decomposing and made it back in time for Thursday night TV.
Paradise found in sculptor's concrete fantasy land
By Dan Curry
Associate feature editor
There are two Gardens of Eden. Adam flubbed the first one out of existence.
At the entrance to his yard, a concrete angel hovers above a brown scene of Old Testament characters. Adam and Eve hold hands beneath a child who falls from a concrete stork's bill, and Abel's shepherd dog noses his master's grave. Real coyote teeth line the dog's concrete gums.
The other Eden lives on in Lucas and consists of several large outdoor concrete sculptures. They depict allegorical tableaus that resemble old-fashioned political cartoons rendered in three dimensions.
The creator, S. P. Dinsmoor, a bony, hazel-eyed farmer with a long, white beard, a fetish for concrete and a disconcerting chumminess with death, built the sculptures during the 1920's.
The head of the devil glows at night with a light bulb for a brain, and the All-seeing Eye of God, constructed with wire mesh and hand-mixed cement, oles passsyby.
Once it sometimes spoke to them.
"Coke, you son of a gun, where is your brother?"
Once it sometimes spoke to them.
Abel?" the Eve said.
Dinsmoor had run a pipe from his basement up through a concrete pole into the All-Seeing Eye. Dinsmoor wrote that he would startle people outside his home with messiacal questions from God.
This is the legacy of a man who rescued his first wife from her first grave in 1917, sired two children in his eighties with a second wife in her twenties, went blind in 1930 and had himself buried in a glass-walled coffin in his back-yard tomb 67 years ago. Any visitor since may press his nose against the cold pane and observe, for a price, the portrait of an artist as a dead man.
He mixed more than 113 tons of cement to express his religious and political beliefs, which included a firm faith in the power of the vote, absolute equality for everyone and the turkey as the most proper and noble national bird.
It all may sound demented, or "bughouse," as Dinsmoor proclaimed himself in his book.
Retiring from farming in the 1920s no doubt left Dinsmoor in dismal finances. The Garden of Eden was his solution.
But the man was savvy.
He built his house and art with the aim of creating
The site has held up well the years and still attracts tourists, Hood said, whose group, the Kansas Grassroots Art Association, purchased the site 7 years ago to preserve it.
But in Dinsmoor's day, folks weren't so enthusiastic.
a profitable tourist attraction, said John Hood, owner of J. Hood Booksellers, 1401 Massachusetts St., and part-owner of the Garden of Eden.
People would sit on Dinsmoor's fence and bait him while he worked on his sculptures — until he drove steel nails pointy-side-up into the railings. Then officials shut off his perpetual fountain when they discovered that Dinsmoor had tapped into the city's water main, and, in a final insult, the city forbade the burial of his first wife in his backyard tomb
Dinsmoor, however, would not be compromised.
Shortly after she was interred in the city graveyard, Dinsmoor stole in the night with a shovel in the crook of his arm.
He brought her back home. Later that night, in the hush of his mausoleum, S. P. Dinsmoor tucked her in with a blanket of concrete so that no city official could disturb her. His coffin now rests upon the slab that holds her in its heart.
Amy Kibbee, 6. of Silver Lake, goes in back in time Bill and Ted style at the Museum of Independent Telephony in Abilene.