About

The Hartman Rock Garden is a nationally-recognized visionary art environment by self-taught artist Ben Hartman. Ben drew inspiration from family and friends, as well as from magazines, books, radio, and film. This was a deeply personal space, meant to promote his ideals and values to the larger world. He constructed every object by hand between 1932 and 1944 using concrete, metal, glass, stone, wood, and whatever else he could find. 

Ben Hartman was born in 1882 in Edenville, Pennsylvania. He moved to Springfield, Ohio in 1912, where he worked as a molder at the nearby Springfield Machine Tool Company’s foundry. In 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Ben was laid off from his job. Not content with his newly-sedentary lifestyle, he began constructing a cement fishing pond in his backyard. By the time the project was finished, Ben was hooked. For the remaining twelve years of his life, he constructed hundreds of structures and figurines for the garden, following the themes of history, religion, patriotism, and popular culture. Ben died from silicosis, an occupational lung disease, in 1944. For the next fifty-three years, his wife Mary took on the monumental task of maintaining the garden, caring for the wide array of flowers, preserving Ben’s intriguing structures, giving tours, and even adding small details where she saw fit. Mary passed away in 1997 at the age of 91. 

In 2008, the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation, known for its involvement in the preservation of significant visionary art environments across the country, purchased and began restoring Ben and Mary’s unusual masterpiece. Local citizens formed the Friends of the Hartman Rock Garden in 2009 to continue the preservation and interpretation of this remarkable site. Since its creation in 1932, Ben Hartman’s Historical Rock Garden has welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world.