If you’re one of those bi-coastal types who thinks that the Midwest is full of conventional-minded folks leading ordinary lives as contented consumers, you owe it to yourself to visit the Garden of Eden (daily; $5; 785/525-6395), one of the country’s oldest and oddest folk-art environments. Located in the tiny town of Lucas, Kansas (pop. 436), the Garden of Eden is the sort of place that puts the gothic back in American Gothic, a front-yard forest of Biblical scenes and Populist political allegories—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the Crucifixion of Labor at the Hands of Preachers, Bankers, and Lawyers—created out of concrete from around 1910 to 1930 by one Samuel Dinsmoor. An Ohio native and Civil War veteran, Dinsmoor actively promoted his Garden as a tourist attraction, managing to draw many hundreds of visitors to this distant and fairly inaccessible corner of Kansas. Dinsmoor died at age 89 in 1932 and is buried in a glass-covered tomb on the property, yet carried on his hucksterism even after death, insisting in his will that no one be allowed “to go in and see me for less than $1.”
The Garden of Eden is at the corner of 2nd and Kansas in Lucas, which is on Hwy-18, north of Great Bend and 15 miles north of I-70. Homespun Lucas is also home to the Grassroots Art Center (785/525-6118), at 213 S. Main Street, a gallery showing and selling artworks created by other self-taught “outsider” artists; outside the gallery is a courtyard full of carved limestone masonry sculptures, many salvaged from demolished buildings around the area.
