The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden was not what I expected. I had heard about the Garden in Lucas, Kansas on television and read about it in newspaper clippings, but neither did justice to the one-man monument to cement, freedom, and Populism.

According to some people in Lucas, S. P. Dinsmoor, who was born in 1843, became enamored with cement because the invention of Portland cement in the 1820s made cement more workable and longer lasting. After he retired from farming, and possibly because he was drawing two Civil War pensions by accident (some say he tried to have the error fixed, but was unsuccessful), Dinsmoor moved into Lucas in 1907 and began construction on his post-rock “log” cabin home.

For those unfamiliar with this area of Kansas, because of a lack of wood for fencing, early EuroAmerican farmers began using the natural limestone rock, easily quarried throughout the area, as posts to support barbed wire fencing. These “log” rocks, some as long as 20 feet, were mostly used just for the fencing, but Dinsmoor used them as the logs for his cabin home.



There are many charming aspects of Dinsmoor’s concrete depiction of the Garden. One of the first that I noticed is that Eve looks very much like a Paleolithic goddess figure—lushly, fruitfully full and round. That aspect of her is best seen from inside the Garden’s arbor, as though seeing her and Adam from a place of hiding, almost devilishly.

Dinsmoor had many opinions about religion. He didn’t hold with Moses’ depictions of what the Garden of Eden must have been like. He even says, in his self-published booklet, Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden, that “Moses did not give God credit for any kindness toward the human family.” Instead of leaving the humans in the Garden to suffer alone, Dinsmoor has added a hand to catch those who are falling.

Dinsmoor, a registered Populist (I suspect he was also once a Mason, given some of his comments and the Masonic symbol on his coffin), was very open in this long-term artistic effort about his opinions on everything from labor rights to religious and racial intolerance. In his Pictorial History, he defends “heathens,” pointing out that “one man on this earth is just as good as another, and sometimes a darned sight better. They are as good as they act.”

Our tour guide showed us the most controversial part of the Garden just before a visit to Dinsmoor’s pyramid style crypt. The depiction of Labor Crucified is controversial because Dinsmoor chose to depict four groups of people he felt were the leaders responsible for crucifying those who labor for a living: Lawyers, Doctors, Preachers, and Bankers.

Having been raised in conservative, bible-thumping Kansas, I asked the tour guide how many people object to Dinsmoor’s claim that Preachers “eat Labor’s cake” by only preaching to think only of the afterlife (which he said they knew nothing about), not to think about the dilemmas of the present. She admitted that some people get offended, but the group that worried her most had been a group of bankers, especially when they heard that Dinsmoor felt the banker “has the money, takes the interest and breaks up more people than any other class” (Pictorial History). She was thankful that particular group hadn’t hurt her.

In many ways, Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, like Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, depicts a world of tolerance based not just on Populist labor ideals, but also on more pagan-like beliefs of Theosophy, wherein humanity is part of a sort of universal mind, which was popular about the time Dinsmoor was growing up, and which seems to stem from ideas which rose out of Naturalism and the Enlightenment, at least as it was practiced in America. Theosophists were the New Agers of their time, and I imagine that many super conservative Kansans and Nebraskans (where there were growing numbers of Theosophists, like the Baums) would have predictably been frightened by many of their suggestions.

Dinsmoor felt that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of race, gender, or religion. Sadly, even by today’s standards, he would have been considered a radical. Luckily, he built his monument to free thinking in cement, and it promises to stand the test of time.