Dinsmoor as Creative Catalyst: 100 Years of the Garden of Eden in Lucas
Raw Vision #58, March 2007
Lucas, Kansas is a small farming community of 430 people nestled in the Geographic Center of the United States. Across the Midwest, rural communities are losing their inhabitants to out-migration, family farms are closing under pressure from an increasingly corporate agricultural industry, and decreasing population translates into loss of business opportunities in small towns. But the town of Lucas is surviving. This is perhaps due in part to the fact that at its core is Samuel Perry Dinsmoor’s folk art environment, the Garden of Eden. Built between 1907 and 1932, the Garden captures the social climate of the era through its sprawling concrete illustration of politics at the turn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the Populist Party.