USA Today ranked this Kansas wheat-belt town as one of America’s best small-town art scenes

It’s the state’s grassroots art capital

Lucas, Kansas, sits out in the Smoky Hills of Russell County, a farming community of about 400 people where you’d expect grain elevators and not much else.

But more than 20 self-taught artists have left their mark here, covering yards, buildings and telephone poles with handmade work.

The governor gave Lucas the title of Grassroots Art Capital of Kansas in 1996, and USA Today’s 10Best has ranked it as high as the second-best small-town art scene in the country.

The reason starts with a Civil War veteran and 113 tons of cement.

A 64-year-old veteran poured 113 tons of cement into art

In 1907, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor started building the Garden of Eden. He was 64 years old.

He cut post-rock limestone into slabs shaped like logs and stacked them into a house that looks like a cabin made of stone.

Then he spent the next 22 years surrounding it with over 150 concrete sculptures mounted on concrete trees that reach 40 feet high.

The scenes pull from the Bible and from sharp political jabs at monopolies and labor rights. The whole property now sits on the National Register of Historic Places.

You can still see Dinsmoor in his glass-lidded coffin

Dinsmoor built his own mausoleum on the property, a limestone chamber where he rests in a concrete coffin with a glass lid. You can walk up and look in.

He died in 1932, and the site fell apart for decades before reopening as an attraction in 1969. By 2012, the Kohler Foundation stepped in and cleaned years of lichen and mold off the sculptures.

Now thousands of visitors come every year from around the world, and guided tours of the house and mausoleum run year-round with seasonal hours.

Pull-tab motorcycles and 51 years of limestone carving

Three renovated 1897 limestone buildings in downtown Lucas hold the Grassroots Art Center, where you’ll find work from over 22 self-taught and visionary artists across the Midwest. Many of them picked up art in retirement and never stopped.

The materials run wild: metal, barbed wire, computer motherboards, bones and even chewing gum. Herman Divers built a life-sized motorcycle and car entirely from aluminum can pull-tabs.

Inez Marshall, a former truck driver and auto mechanic, spent over 51 years carving Kansas limestone into sculptures.

A schoolteacher’s backyard became a miniature America

Florence Deeble watched S.P. Dinsmoor build the Garden of Eden when she was a girl.

After retiring from teaching, she started her own backyard project in 1955, using concrete and rocks she collected on her travels to build what she called “postal card scenes.”

You can spot a mini Mount Rushmore and other American landmarks she shaped by hand.

After Deeble died in 1999, artist Mri-Pilar took over the house interior and covered every wall and ceiling in silver foil, filling seven rooms with sculptures made from recycled dolls, computer parts and household items.

They call it the Garden of Isis.

Decades-old rock miniatures came home to Lucas

Starting in the 1930s, Lucas residents Roy and Clara Miller spent 30 years driving across the country collecting rocks.

Back home, they used those rocks to build miniature mountains and tiny replicas of local businesses and churches, along with landmarks like Pikes Peak.

After they died in the late 1960s, the sculptures were sold off and sat in a field in Hays, Kansas, for over 40 years.

The Kohler Foundation brought them home in late 2012, restored them and placed them just east of the Garden of Eden. You can see them year-round.

The town restroom won an international toilet award

When Lucas needed a public restroom for all its visitors, the community did what Lucas does and turned it into art. Bowl Plaza looks like a giant toilet.

The building forms the tank, curved benches shape the bowl, and the sidewalk unrolls like a strip of toilet paper.

Artists Mri-Pilar and Eric Abraham covered the walls inside and out with mosaics made from broken pottery, toys, bottles and tiles. In 2014, the Cintas Company voted it the second-best public restroom in the country.

By 2018, it had won the International Toilet Tourism Award for the quirkiest restroom in the world.

Tiny replicas of giant roadside things live on Main Street

Artist Erika Nelson drives the country visiting oversized roadside attractions, then handcrafts miniature replicas of each one.

Her collection, the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, includes tiny versions of the world’s largest ketchup bottle, the world’s largest ball of twine and dozens more.

You can find them at the Roadside Sideshow Expo on Main Street, open April through October.

Nelson also built the World’s Largest Souvenir Travel Plate, a 14-foot painted satellite dish installed along Highway K-18 in 2006 with a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Decorated telephone poles and a fork art park

Art spills out of the museums and onto the streets in Lucas.

Walk down Main Street and you’ll see telephone poles decorated with installations by different artists. The Fork Art Park has mosaic sculptures of oversized forks, a pun on the town’s folk art reputation.

The Switchgrass Art Cooperative, a volunteer-run nonprofit gallery, sells work by living artists alongside vintage goods.

On weekends, you can catch first-run movies at the Lucas Area Community Theater, restored by volunteers. The downtown buildings themselves date to the pioneer era, built from the region’s traditional post-rock limestone.

Drive 18 miles of limestone fence posts on the scenic byway

The Post Rock Scenic Byway runs 18 miles along Kansas Highway 232 from Lucas south to Wilson, winding through rolling prairie and open pasture in the Smoky Hills.

Miles of limestone fence posts line the road, carved by hand in the 1800s by pioneers who had no timber on the treeless plains.

The stone comes from the Greenhorn Limestone formation, soft enough to shape when freshly quarried but hardening once exposed to air.

Keep your eyes open for four “Faces in Stone” carved into fence posts by California artist Fred Whitman. The byway connects Lucas to Wilson, the Czech Capital of Kansas.

Kansas’ clearest lake sits six miles down the road

Wilson Lake is just six miles south of Lucas, and it holds the title of the clearest lake in Kansas.

The water covers 9,000 surface acres with over 100 miles of shoreline, and extensive grasses filter the water to a blue you don’t expect this far from the coast.

You can swim, kayak, fish, camp and boat at Wilson State Park.

The Switchgrass Mountain Bike Trail runs nearly 25 miles of single-track through the park, and the rocky cliffs and limestone formations along the shore draw comparisons to landscapes in Utah.

Over a century of art and still going

The Kansas Sampler Foundation named Lucas one of the 8 Wonders of Kansas Art, and the creative tradition here stretches back more than a century to Dinsmoor’s first pour in 1907.

Over 225 species of birds visit the Wilson Lake region each year, so the land around town holds its own alongside the art. Everything in Lucas is walkable and affordable, and you can bring the whole family.

This small town on the Kansas prairie shows what happens when a community decides that art belongs to everyone.

Explore the art scene in Lucas, Kansas

You can reach Lucas from Interstate 70 by taking Exit 206 and heading north on the Post Rock Scenic Byway.

The Garden of Eden runs guided tours daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., May through October, and Thursday through Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m., November through February.

The Grassroots Art Center, Bowl Plaza, Miller’s Park and the Roadside Sideshow Expo are all within walking distance on or near Main Street.

Check the official website before you go for current admission prices and seasonal updates.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

Read more from this brand:

• One Illinois exit off I-70 leads to a town where everything is 40 times too big
• Norman Rockwell’s hometown in the Berkshires looks exactly like his paintings
• Nothing inside this Wisconsin roadside wonder makes sense, and people can’t stop visiting it