Wisconsin Concrete Park

Between 1948 and 1964 a retired lumberjack filled his Wisconsin property with life-size concrete figures, and visitors can still walk among them. Fred Smith was born in 1886 to German immigrants, farmed Christmas trees and ginseng and worked in regional lumber camps until retiring in 1948, according to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. That year he began building sculptures around his home and the Rock Garden Tavern he operated on his property at Phillips, and he kept working until a stroke in 1964.

Price County says Smith built his figures on wooden frames wrapped with mink wire, covered them in hand-mixed cement and decorated them with broken glass and found objects, with glass objects donated by tourists. The Arts Center adds beer-bottle fragments, mirror shards and reflectors. His subjects include local legend and people he knew, along with Paul Bunyan, Ben Hur, Sacajawea and the Lincolns; the Arts Center calls a Budweiser wagon with a team of Clydesdales his final and most ambitious piece.