The Cabin Home (Part 2)

The Cabin Home (Part 2)
by Denyce Cribbs

In my last post, I wrote about a booklet I found in our library called, Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden, written by S.P. Dinsmoor.  Dinsmoor built a stone cabin in 1907, along with a sculpture garden, on his property of Lucas, Kansas.  I was curious to find out what happened to the property after he passed away. 

Samuel Perry Dinsmoor (1843 – 1932)

First, I was surprised to find that the booklet is still available on Amazon, in very limited quantities.  Surely, one of the first examples of “self-publishing” during its time, it survives as a self-published paperback in the modern age.

Also, I found that the property does indeed survive today.  In fact, the sculpture gardens are on the National Register of Historic Places. Tours are offered for $6 per person (well over the $1 fee that Dinsmoor called for in his will, and wrote about in his book).  According to the Kansas Sampler Foundation website,  (http://www.kansassampler.org/8wonders/artresults.php) Dinsmoor’s Cabin Home survives as one of the “Top 8 Wonders of Kansas Art.”  The website describes The Cabin Home currently:

The Garden of Eden is a world-renowned grassroots art site with one of the most fascinating (and bizarre) sculpture gardens in the world!

In 1907, at the age of 62, Civil War veteran Samuel Perry Dinsmoor began construction of this unusual site by building a structure of limestone logs, (some up to 21 feet long) for the family home. Then, using 113 tons of cement, Dinsmoor built 40-foot tall trees to hold his larger than life figures for his sculpture garden. He stopped working on the sculpture in 1929 because he went blind.

Tour guides help observers become fully aware that every part of every cryptic sculpture has meaning about Populist politics, modern civilization, and the Bible that connect like a dot-to-dot puzzle. The humor and message that he conveys through the sculptures amazes visitors.

Dinsmoor also built a mausoleum to house his mummified remains! Always a jokester, he claimed he would wink at anyone who paid to tour the garden. His vision was accurate and today the Garden of Eden supports itself through admissions. While Dinsmoor was building and creating locals tried to run him out of town. Decades later, the Garden of Eden became the town's main attraction and today Lucas is known as the Grassroots Art Capital of Kansas.

The Cabin Home Today

The Cabin Home (Lucas, Kansas)

The Cabin Home (Lucas, Kansas)
by Denyce Cribbs

In digging around the surname files in our library, I came across a little booklet in the Dinsmoor file entitled, Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden.  Written by S.P. Dinsmoor, it’s a journal of sorts about the home and surrounding gardens that the author constructed in Lucas, Kansas. 

Dinsmoor served three years in the Civil War, claiming to see the capture of Robert E. Lee.  Following the war, he taught school in Illinois for five years.  In 1870 he married his first wife and became a farmer.  He eventually moved to Lucas, Kansas in 1891, and built his Cabin Home in 1907, and later the surrounding grounds which he named Garden of Eden.  He married his second wife in 1924.  He was 81 at the time, and she was 20 years old.

The cabin he built was distinctive in that the logs were all made of cement.  Dinsmoor states:

There were eleven rooms besides the bathroom, three halls, two closets with cave and light plant under back porch.  The porches, side walks, fence, strawberry and flower beds, fish pool, grape-arbor, three U.S. flags, Adam and Eve, the devil, coffin, jug, visitors’ dining hall, labor crucified, two bird and animal cages, and was house are all made with cement.

Dinsmoor goes on to describe the Garden of Eden that he created on his grounds, consisting of Adam and Eve cement statues, the Devil, Cain and Abel, and other creatures to complete his rendition of famous Bible stories.  Eccentric to be sure, he also built his own mausoleum and coffin, complete with instructions for their use after he passes away.  He states in his will that no one besides his descendants shall enter his mausoleum for less than one dollar, so that profits from visitors can be used to maintain the place.  He builds his own coffin to have a plate glass lid so he can break out on the final Resurrection Day.  At the foot of the coffin he places a jug so he will be prepared with water on the final day of reckoning.

This little booklet in an interesting legacy of a man’s creativity, complete with photos on every page.  It gets my curiosity going, though, about what comes next.  Does the Cabin Home still exist?  Is Dinsmoor buried there? I’ll try to answer those questions in my next post.