Thanks to the Interstate Highway, it's only a stone's throw to Springfield, Ohio, where we're headed today.

We're going to the Hartman Rock Garden, which I suspect is more than just rocks.

Really looking forward to seeing what we're going find there.

Hello, Kevin.

Good to see you.

Thanks for coming out today.

So here we are in Springfield, Western Ohio.

What part of town are we in?

We are in the extreme southwest quarter of the state.

So it's a neighborhood?

Yeah, it's called the Melrose neighborhood.

It was a failed development from 1902.

So this land was big, open expanses of empty land that the Hartmans came in and moved into in the 19-teens.

Tell me more.

About the Hartmans, who were they?

So the family came to town from Appalachia, South Central Pennsylvania, and there was this migration westward from a lot of these families in Pennsylvania and they were moving out to Ohio, looking for jobs in the factories.

And so a lot people, even in this neighborhood, came from the town of Chambersburg, which is the town he was born just outside of.

Tell me about Ben.

He's the one who built the rock garden, isn't that right?

Yes, at the age of 16, started working in a factory as a molder and eventually moved out here, working in those jobs here in Springfield.

And in 1932, he lost his job as part of the Great Depression and he was not content just sitting around idle.

So he started constructing object after object by materials he's collecting from within a short distance of here.

He's collecting almost all the materials that he's building.

So naturally.

So natural materials like stone and pieces of glass, maybe?

Glass and metal and whatever else he can find.

There's been a legal dump back in those days, not far from here.

You'd walk there and you'd pick through things people are throwing away and incorporate those in.

So it's mostly found material.

The only thing he's really purchasing in our bags of concrete.

Concrete holds the whole thing together then.

It does.

Well, I see a lot of rocks and concrete here, but I have a feeling there's probably more.

Oh, there's plenty more.

Well, let's have a look.

All right.

Oh my, this is way more than I was expecting.

Yeah, so on our tours, we usually bring people down this way, in part because this entire stretch next to the house was built in 1932.

So he starts it around March of 32 and with a fishing pond down here and really just moves his way down.

This here is the schoolhouse.

It's the second object he ever built and it establishes a key theme in the garden, which is the importance of education.

And Ben quit school in the first grade or was forced out of school.

I mean, I always felt that his lack of education held him back.

So this is a replica of the one-room schoolhouse that he attended outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

This is wonderful.

Now, is this a wishing well?

Yeah, written around a famous poem, the old oak and bucket.

Poetry was popular then and Ben loved poems.

He'd read them in the newspaper and would have little books on them.

And then he incorporated probably five or six different poems into the garden.

And this is one of the earliest ones, the old Oak and Bucket.

So this is the Oak and bucket that he would drop down into as well.

And then the Liberty Bell with its famous crack in it and then Flanders Field underneath the World War I burial field.

So.

He moves to Springfield and he's living here when World War I happens.

Ben is a bit of a pacifist.

He had a message out front that said, war is hell.

So different pacifists messages around the garden.

The next object is one of the first objects that he creates around the importance of religion, specifically Christianity.

Ben was a Christian.

He didn't go to church.

This is kind of his church that he's building out here.

And this is the story of Jesus from the birth down here, the tiered temple representing his teachings.

Calvary Hill, and then the tomb.

So not a lot of religious art throughout the garden.

He becomes more religious in later years as he's dying and returns to religious art and creates quite a bit.

But in these days, this is one of his earliest objects and is really quite spectacular.

This next one seems to have a religious connotation.

Yeah, that is Daniel and the lion's den.

And then a little further down is two of my favorite objects in the garden, symbolizing American history and patriotism, kind of the third main theme of the garden.

One is the Betsy Ross House, who was purported to have sewn the first flag.

And then Lincoln's Cabin, one of the early tourism sites in America that you could visit.

We have a feeling Ben probably visited it himself.

It's not too far from here, down in Kentucky.

And then came back and built his log cabin out of boulders.

And again, these bouldars are things he's just gathering in the nearby fields.

So a lot of the objects here at Hartman are kind of aspirational travel.

Ben wanted to visit these places, wanted to take his wife.

Mary would receive postcards and they couldn't go.

It's the Depression.

So he'd build those things here at the Hartman Rock Garden.

One of the few things that we know that they actually visited as a family and then he came back and created was Strowenbrunn Village.

Where they visited in the late 1930s and then he came back and created these at the Hartman Rock.

That's in northeastern Ohio and that was an early settlement.

Right?

Yeah.

I don't know if you noticed a concrete picket fence.

You're right, it's not wood.

Yeah.

That is one substantial fence.

They say it's the world's largest concrete picket fence.

Frankly, it's probably the only.

Well, I can see there's a lot more down here.

Yes.

So pretty much everything we've seen, Ben built in 1932.

And people would ask him even back then, like, how did you do all of this?

And he credited Maxwell House Coffee.

So in 1933, in his second summer, he built a tribute to Maxwell House Coffee with his cup and saucer.

Ha, ha, ha.

And then, right after that, he created his most significant object, and that's the Tree of Life.

And where everything in 32 was a work of realism, his own works of realism.

This is abstraction, right?

It's a tree that looks like a Saguaro cactus.

It has a schoolhouse on one, the importance of education, has a chapel on the other, the importance religion, and then it has patriotism, American history going down the middle, bald eagle with a globe with the letters US on it and then the US shield.

And then he came back.

Not long after and he added two dubs of peace.

So you have three main themes of the garden and then also pacifism, which is really just absolutely beautiful.

So I know you're a fan of puns and in 1955 he created the great heart man which still people don't fully understand is his play on the family's name with the heart and the man letters in it with the broken glass on each one it really especially this time of day with the how strong the sun is catches the sun and visitors see it now he created this in 1935 this entire section of the garden used to be just one elaborate flower bed uh ben was first and foremost a a culture list.

So the Hartman Rock Garden was first a Hartman Flower Garden, so to speak, and then the art was really there to accentuate his flowers.

Over time, the art kind of took over, and this was a section where the flowers were cleared out in favor for this theme of a variety of things, Death Valley coming through with his cactus garden, moving back around to the most beloved object of the Hartman rock garden, Ben's castle.

It's a massive castle with well over 100 windows.

And what's surprising to visitors is it only took him 14 days to build it from start to end.

This seems familiar.

Yes.

So this is one of those works of realism.

This is Ben's version of Mount Vernon, a popular tourist attraction in the United States.

That 1932 year, Ben loses his job in the Great Depression, but it's also the bicentennial of George Washington's birth.

Right, of course.

So it's no coincidence that a number of the objects in the Hartman Rock Garden relate back to George Washington and none more significant than Mount Vernon.

Well, Mount Vernon is among the larger structures here.

The castle, of course, is a bigger one, but there's a very big one behind us.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, so this is the cathedral.

So in the late 1930s, Ben's health is continuing to decline.

He has silicosis from breathing and all of the silica at the factory as part of the mold making process, and he becomes much more religious in his art.

And he's also adopted, so to speak, by the ladies at St.

Mary's Parish, the nuns, and they're bringing him Catholic statuary.

So a lot of people will visit and they think Ben's Catholic because we have this very Catholic-looking object in the garden.

But the nuns are bringing him objects and he's molding them and casting them.

So then in 1937, 1938, he starts work on the cathedral.

He had a postcard from the Holy Land, the family said, of this cathedral, and he set about building it.

And it was right off of his workshop, so it's an extension of his work shop.

It's one of the few objects that's not fully three-dimensional, like it connects into his workshop.

So today you can still go in and there's a dirt floor in there and that's where he created a lot of his objects.

Sabin created almost everything in the garden in only seven years, believe it or not.

And as his health declined, his productivity waned.

But at the very end, he starts to create this final object, which he called the cherub gateway, which is what he interpreted as the gateway to heaven.

Has two of those concrete figurines on each side of the gateway into heaven, his cherubs, and he eventually passes in 1944.

His wife, Mary, maintains the garden for the next 53 years.

She called it her garden of love.

And after Mary passed away in 1997 the family had it but it started falling into disrepair and they then sold it to the Kohler Foundation, the sink and toilet company out of Sheboygan, Wisconsin or Kohler, Wisconsin.

They're known for saving and preserving this type of visionary art across the United States so they bought this site really sight on scene.

They got the call by the family and invested those resources here in Springfield, Ohio.

But I understand you started the organization that supports the effort here.

Yeah, so some citizens came together to help Kohler.

They had no contacts.

They're coming out of Wisconsin.

So we were really involved in helping connect them in the community and ultimately then creating the nonprofit that would take ownership and continue this restoration.

I mean, it takes a lot to keep up rock and concrete in Ohio winters with the freeze thaw cycle.

Things are constantly popping off and being damaged, visitors touching things.

Just, it take a lot of work.

But the family's left us this amazing legacy, including family albums.

Five family albums with hundreds of photographs of Ben creating this garden between 1932 and in the early 1940s truly is a real gem.

You might call it a rock star.

Thank you for a great tour.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you!

Good luck in the future.