Garden of Eden… in Kansas!

Downtown Lucas Kansas

The Garden of Eden is situated a bit above Interstate 70, 235 miles east of Kansas City, about 150 miles northwest of Wichita. If this surprises you, possibly you’re thinking of a different Garden of Eden, maybe the one that was temporary home to Adam and Eve.

After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor moved to Ohio, then Illinois where he taught school and married Frances Barlow Journey, a widow with two children. The marriage produced five more offspring. They later moved to Kansas and took up farming outside the town of Lucas. After retiring from working with the soil, the Dinsmoors moved in to town and, at age 62, S.P. began work on his twelve-room log cabin, the twenty-seven foot “logs” being carved limestone. Finished two years later, in 1907, Dinsmoor began offering tours and for the next twenty-two years added 150 sculptures representing his views on religion and politics. The artist created mammoth insects, angels with massive wingspans, forty-foot -tall trees and frolicking children. Numerous political messages included a waving concrete U.S. flag and a crucifixion of Labor by Doctor, Lawyer, Preacher and Banker. Life-sized statues of Adam and Eve greeted visitors at the main gate, Eve offering visitors an apple. Town leaders forced Dinsmoor to cover them with concrete loincloths. An “all-seeing-eye-of-God” was hung from a branch on the “tree of life.” The “eye” included a hose that ran from the basement of the house so that Dinsmoor could shout at passersby, pretending to be God speaking to them.

S. P. Dinsmoor with second wife and their first child

Dinsmoor also built a forty-foot tall mausoleum for himself and Frances. When his wife died, eighty-year-old S.P. married the family’s twenty-year-old housekeeper whom he had impregnated. They had two more children. He died at age eighty-nine and is interred in an open casket on top of his first wife. His widow sold the property to pay taxes.

The property was abandoned until 1969 when a new owner reopened it. In 2012, recognizing its artistic value, the Kohler Foundation financed its restoration, including removal of clothing from statues, returning them to their natural state as Dinsmoor had intended.

TripAdvisor rates Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden at four-and-a-half out of five.