S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden

Samuel Perry Dinsmoor was born near Coolville, Ohio, on March 8, 1843. He enlisted in the 116th Ohio Infantry in August 1862. In Kansas History in 2001, the historian Suzanne Hasselle-Newcombe found that he spent at least half of his 3 years as a regimental hospital nurse in Martinsburg, Virginia. He later claimed 18 battles "plus skirmishes." He taught school in Illinois, married the widow Frances A. Barlow Journey on August 24, 1870, and moved to a farm near Lucas in 1888.

In the 1890s, Dinsmoor was the loudest Populist in a Republican county. He ran for township clerk in 1892 and lost. The same year he founded a secret society, the United Order of Anti-Monopolies, which the Lucas Advance renamed the "United Order of Anarchist's Meeting." He won one election, for justice of the peace in 1896, and lost a race for the Kansas House in 1898.

The Cabin Home

Dinsmoor retired from farming in 1905, at 62, and bought a quarter block on the east edge of Lucas. The National Register nomination, written by the Kansas State Historical Society in 1976 from the Lucas papers, says: "In 1906 he began building a stone log cabin." The stone was postrock limestone, quarried in lengths of up to 20 feet and laid with dovetailed corners like timber. "By September, 1907, the finishing touches were being applied." Published start dates run from 1904 to 1907, and the operator's own site gives both 1904 and 1907. The house has 11 rooms, and no two of its windows or doors are the same size. In September 1909, he advertised it for sale. Nobody met his price, and he went back to cement.

Present day civilization

He began with a grape arbor, then Adam and Eve, two 8-foot figures with marbles for eyes. The nomination counts 29 concrete trees, some 40 feet tall, joined by concrete limbs that carry the figures. Dinsmoor's own 1927 guidebook, the Pictorial History of the Cabin Home in Garden of Eden, counted 15. The west side is Genesis: the devil with a pitchfork, Cain offering a pumpkin, Abel's wife and dog finding the body. "If the Garden of Eden is not right Moses is to blame," Dinsmoor wrote. "He wrote it up and I built it."

The north side is what he called "present day civilization." A soldier shoots at an Indian, who shoots at a dog chasing a fox chasing a bird about to eat a worm on a leaf. An octopus labeled Trust reaches around the Panama Canal, the North Pole, a woman, and a baby, and it stands on a limb labeled "chartered rights." Farther east, the Goddess of Liberty spears a second trust while a man and a woman cut its limb with a crosscut saw marked "ballot." Hasselle-Newcombe ties the octopus to the Ludlow Massacre of April 20, 1914, and quotes Dinsmoor from an undated newspaper clipping: "I thought of that when the Colorado mine trouble came up."

The last group stands over the coal house and ash pit: Labor crucified by a lawyer, a doctor, a preacher, and a banker, who are, in the guidebook's words, "the leaders of all who eat cake by the sweat of the other fellow's face." It was left unfinished around 1924, as cataracts took his sight. In a 1926 letter to the Pension Office, he wrote that he had not been able to read a newspaper headline for 2 years. Thomas Banks, an African American man who lived and worked on the property with his wife in the 1920s, helped him, as did local schoolboys who mixed cement. By July 1, 1927, the guidebook counted 2,273 sacks of cement, more than 113 tons.

Dinsmoor put it in sight of the railroad. He wired 48 electric lights into the trees, and the nomination says he "would often light it at night because of the specially eerie effect." According to Hasselle-Newcombe, he ran the pipe inside one tree down to his basement and threw his voice out of a sculpture's mouth at passersby. From 1914 to 1920, he charged a quarter for the house and another for the grounds, and by March 1917 he claimed more than 3,200 paying visitors. In 1920, a tax collector came for a share of the admissions. Dinsmoor dropped the fee and sold each visitor four postcards for $1 instead.

The coffin

Frances Dinsmoor died in 1917, at 78. The nomination records what happened next: "according to the newspaper accounts [she] was buried in the local cemetery. However, within a few years the literature on the Garden stated that she had been buried in a concrete coffin in the mausoleum just below a second coffin which Dinsmoor had reserved for himself." Later accounts say he dug her up and moved her. None of the sources cites a record of the exhumation itself.

The mausoleum sits in the northeast corner of the lot, where Masons lay a cornerstone. It is built of the same stone logs in three tiers, 14, 9, and 4 feet square, rising 40 feet to a concrete American flag, with a 7 by 10 foot room inside. Dinsmoor described his coffin on the back of a postcard he sold: cement over "a screen of reinforces No. 6 wire and half-inch iron," with plate glass under a small lid carrying the Masonic square, compass, and trowel. "When I quit breathing, my body will be embalmed, placed in this coffin," he wrote, with his cement jug at his feet. "This cement lid will fly open and I will sail out like a locust. If I get to go up I have a cement angel outside above the door, to take me up. If I have to go below, I have a splendid well of water beside my mausoleum." He posed in the coffin for tourists, and he made a double-exposed photograph of himself lying in it and standing over it, which he also sold as a postcard.

Emilie Brozek, a Czech immigrant, moved in as his housekeeper in 1921, at 17. On April 22, 1924, Dinsmoor married her. She was 20, he was 81, and the nomination records "a considerable stir in the small community." Their daughter, Emily Jane, was born that September, and a son, John William, in January 1928. In a will dated December 30, 1929, Dinsmoor wrote that the place "is purely educational from the Stone Log Cabin to the Mausoleum and should be kept for that purpose." His guidebook set the price: "none except my widow, my descendants, their husbands and wives, shall go in to see me for less than $1.00. That will pay someone to look after the place."

He died in July 1932. The Kansas Historical Society gives July 21, and the nomination cites a Topeka Capital obituary of July 23. "As he had instructed," the nomination says, "his body was placed in the mausoleum in a concrete coffin that had a glass top so visitors could view him."

After 1932

Emilie stayed through the Depression and remarried in 1941. The property passed to Dinsmoor's daughter Laura Elizabeth Mansfield and her husband, Harry, who rented the rooms as apartments, and vines and elms grew over the sculpture. Mary Ann Steinle, a tour guide and Dinsmoor relative, told Roadside America that a later owner offered $100 to anyone who would bulldoze it. "No one would touch it," she said. "There was a kind of a fear about this place." No dated record of the offer appears in any source.

Wayne and Lou Ella Naegele bought the property in 1967 or 1968, depending on the source, cleaned it, and reopened it to tourists in 1969. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 28, 1977. A group of grassroots art enthusiasts led by the University of Kansas sculptor John Hachmeister formed Garden of Eden Inc. and bought it around 1989. In August 2011, the Kohler Foundation of Wisconsin took ownership, sent two conservators from International Artifacts of Pearland, Texas, to work on it daily for 5 months, and then gave it to a new nonprofit, the Friends of S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden. Kohler puts attendance at more than 10,000 people a year.

Dinsmoor is still in the niche, above Frances. Shining a flashlight through the glass for a Roadside America tour group, Steinle said that "for about 70 years he still looked pretty good." Roadside America reported that the glass then cracked, early in the 21st century, and let in air and moisture.

The Friends of S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden run guided tours of the Cabin Home and the mausoleum daily from 11am to 4pm in March and April, daily from 10am to 5pm from May through October, and Thursday through Sunday from 1pm to 4pm from November through February. Admission listed on the operator's site in October 2026 was $9 for adults and children 12 and over, $8 for seniors, military, and groups of 10 or more, $4 for children 5 to 11, and free under 5. Some travel listings still show older hours and a $7 price, so calling 785-525-6395 before a winter visit is worthwhile.

The sculptures on the 2nd Street and Kansas Avenue sides are always visible from the sidewalk without a ticket. The tour of the house comes first and ends inside the mausoleum. Visitors have reported that photography is not allowed inside it.

A free guide on the Bloomberg Connects app includes an audio tour of the outdoor sculpture read from Dinsmoor's own words by the Lindsborg artist Mike Hartung, which works on site or from home. Copies of Dinsmoor's 1927 Pictorial History are sold in the gift shop.