Sam Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden | RPPCs | Lucas, Kansas

Sam Dinsmoor was quite a kook: Having been a Civil War nurse, a school teacher, and a farmer, he retired in 1905 to become a sculptor. Until his death in 1932, he built the Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas, a twelve-room cabin and sculpture garden. He built it specifically as a tourist attraction, choosing a lot near the railway and siphoning the town water main in order to have the first indoor plumbing in the county. Many of the sculptures are religious and political in nature, and some of them are lodged in trees standing 40 feet tall! Apparently he didn’t take kindly to folks gawking without paying: If he caught you looking, he would yell at you through a giant tube from the house. For a quarter, he would pose inside his own coffin for you. He built it himself out of cement and glass, evidently because he thought these materials would cause the least resistance when God comes to collect him during the rapture. As per his written wishes, he is interred in this very coffin today, along with his first wife, in the mausoleum where the tour ends.

Here are two souvenir real photo postcards depicting the site. Refer to photos for condition: Some foxing from age and handwriting. Standard postcard size.