By Alex Johnson
The Community Stage
My idea of a good time is finding the wildest, most obscure roadside attraction that tells you the most about a place, its values, and how it identifies itself. If it has a rock with a plaque on it, I’m there.
In Kansas, we can really lean into the fact we are at the center of it all. In Lebanon, Kan., the geographic center of the contiguous United States, they took that seriously.
They built a limestone monument, a motel, a tiny wedding chapel and a playground and planted cedars gifted by the country of Lebanon to help them celebrate this chance of geography.
It is a place of unrealized optimism. The motel operated for only a few short years in the 1950s and has since sat empty. Instead of the floods of intrepid road trippers they hoped for, it’s more of a trickle.
The Center is an odd place. Do you stay the night in the motel, take pics with the monument, bring a picnic for the family, or … get married? It’s hard to make a roadside attraction out of a chance of geography, not rooted in community identity.
I would assign three categories to the best kind of roadside attractions: historical significance, feats of ingenuity and absolutely unhinged creativity running wild.
Allow me to provide a few examples from our great state.
Historical significance: Council Grove has an unusual appreciation for tree stumps. I’ve seen many an important tree around the country—the oldest sycamore in Buffalo, N.Y., an ancient Live Oak in Tallahassee, Fla.—but rarely do I come across venerated stumps.
Council Grove has not one but three important stumps, complete with protective canopies.
Stump 1: The Council Oak stump, the site of a treaty signing.
Stump 2: The Post Office Stump, a 270-year-old tree where Santa Fe Trail travelers would leave messages for fellow travelers.
Stump 3: The Custer Elm. Gen. George Armstrong Custer camped near this tree with his 7th Cavalry Regiment.
Today, Council Grove sits between two interstates, instead of being a major stopover for cross country travelers as in its Santa Fe Trail days. It leans into the town’s history and its bygone significance as a gathering place and source of refuge, recognizing the intrepid adventurers, businessmen, and settlers who were touched by these ancient trees.
Feats of ingenuity: Near Columbus, Big Brutus is a marvel of human engineering and a monument to the coal industry in the region. As the largest surviving electric coal shovel, it has had a glorious afterlife as a tourist attraction after its retirement in 1974 following 11 years in service. Its features include a shovel the size of a large shed, cables as thick as an average adult, and immense machinery that you’d have to see to believe. You can stand in the shovel and explore the inner belly of this massive machine.
Big Brutus is remarkable for its size, and unexpectedness. Who expects to find a massive coal shovel in a corner of Kansas? It stands as a testament to industry and has a fan club of the mechanically minded and 3-year-old tractor enthusiasts everywhere. It is also a gathering space for the nearby towns, a festival host and community event site, bringing people together as only an 11 million-lb. shovel can.
Creativity running wild: Ah man, this category has so much potential. But the obvious choice has to be the Garden of Eden in Lucas. Samuel Perry Dinsmoor was absolutely off his rocker, but he also had an agenda: make his little town a destination, singlehandedly, and make a neat buck from charging admission to his one-of-a-kind residence. Every element of the house was planned as an eccentricity. The doors and windows are all different shapes and sizes. The “logs” of the cabin are 20-foot-long blocks of quarried limestone.
The rest of the town embraced Dinsmoor’s spirit. The Grassroots Art Museum is a compendium of eccentricities, including a sculpture built from salvaged lake bed trash, and a life-sized Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost made entirely out of pop tabs. And then there’s the nearby “Re-Barb” house with recycled Barbie sculptures and concrete recreations of iconic postcards in the backyard, the legacies of two very different artists.
By embracing the spirit of its residents, Lucas created an enduring community identity that continues to tie people together and keep tourists flowing into the quirky town.
Roadside attractions give me hope for humanity. They teach us not to take life too seriously, appreciate the small things and humor in everyday life, and encourage the dreamers to keep dreaming.
If Hutch could be distilled into a roadside attraction, what do you imagine? Would you lean in to the history, the industries that shaped this town, or the quirkier sides of its residents?
Alex Johnson is the founder of Classical Revolution ICT. She can be reached at alex@classicalrevolutionict.com.