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My friend Ian recommended a few stops along the way to his house. After a peek at the Geographic Center of the Lower 48 States (GCUS) I checked out the sleepy metropolis of Lebanon, Kansas (population 178), the town nearest the GSUS.

  • Perhaps the tiniest chapel I’ve ever encountered.
  • Every village needs its jail
  • The Visitor Center in a beautifully restored classic Standard Oil gas station was closed.

Next up the tiny town of Lucas, once dubbed the Grassroots Art Capital of Kansas for its community of folk art. Remnants of a once vibrant art enclave remain, but they all look rather sad. The 2020 census accounted for 332 souls in Lucas, down from 393 ten years earlier. Its remaining claim to fame is S.P. Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden.

I soon understood why Ian had been rather vague when recommending the Garden of Eden. It’s hard to put into words what this place is all about. Confusion began at the entrance when I paid my fee and was offered a guided or self-guided tour. I chose the self-guided tour, but no brochures or instructions followed. I backtracked to the entrance to ask someone to turn on an introductory video; the three people at the counter looked at each other in confusion.

Here’s my nutshell: Born in 1843, Dinsmoor returned from soldiering in the Civil War a damaged man. He joined the Masonic Lodge, which at that time was a hotbed of Free Thought ideology. In 1888 he moved with his new wife and her two children to Lucas, KS, They added five more children to the brood.

After his first wife died, Dinsmoor, then age 81, married his 22-year-old Czech housekeeper and along came two more children. Dinsmoor built his 12-room “log cabin” from concrete. That was just the beginning. He also built a mausoleum on the property and had his first wife exhumed and enshrined there. He spent the rest of his life creating concrete sculptures reflecting his Populist beliefs and religious convictions. Dinsmoor expected his sculpture garden to become a sustaining tourist attraction to support his family. The 40-foot-tall concrete trees and the Eye of God with a blinking light in the iris are surely eye catching. But the whole place creeped me out, as it did Dinsmoor’s would-be patrons. I couldn’t even figure out how to photograph its weirdness. There are no less than three massive sculptures depicting the story of Cain and Abel, a soldier, an Indian, chain of dog-eat-dog life, and civilization topped by the Goddess of Liberty. It all made my head spin.

  • From the street it really looks like wood
  • Adam & Eve & The Tree of Life
  • The Mausoleum
  • Above the coal & ash house is the Crucifixion: The Lawyer, The Doctor, The Preacher, & The Banker representing the thousands of grafters “who eat cake by the sweat of the other fellow’s face.”

Collecting my frayed nerves, I headed for possible camping at Wilson Lake. It was hot, treeless, and crowded. Option two: a motel in Salinas. The next morning I stopped in a cool little artsy-fartsy town called Lindsborg where I visited the Sandzen Gallery; it made up for the Garden of Eden.

I’d never heard of the artist Birger Sandzen, who was born and educated in Sweden in 1871. After a few years spent immersed in the Paris art world, Sandzen came to Bethany College in Linsborg, Kansas to teach language, art, and vocal music. He retired in 1946 and died in 1954. Despite his full teaching schedule, Sandzen was a prolific artist who created works in a variety of media. Some of his oil landscapes are huge. Sandzen was passionate about bringing beauty, much of it based on simple landscapes, to humanity. The gallery bearing his name was built three years after his death and is dedicated to displaying his work as well as highlighting active contemporary artists, many of whom are Kansas natives. I fell in love with Sandzen’s body of work, and also enjoyed works by Kelly Yarbrough and Clive Fullagar, both of Manhattan, Kansas; and Doug Osa, of Olathe Kansas.

  • Wilson Lake – pretty and not totally treeless, but it was HOT.

A few more shots of Kansas before I arrive at Ian’s house in Wichita.