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McGinn
Marshall Gorby
The restoration of the Hartman Rock Garden on Russell Avenue is nearing completion.
McGinn: Hartman Rock Garden coming back to life
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By Andrew McGinn,
Staff Writer
Updated 10:26 PM Thursday, December 17, 2009
Not long before his death in 2007, I sat in Ben Hartman’s living room and talked one last time about the amazing, incredible concrete albatross he’d inherited along with his mom’s Russell Avenue house.
Now that I think back, I kind of feel sorry for the guy.
As much as I love wandering through the Hartman Rock Garden — the stone fantasyland that covers most of the home’s yard — it was always somebody else’s responsibility.
Somebody else’s weeds to pull.
I hate mowing my own yard, and I only have to move a couple of downspouts.
I didn’t have a dad that dumped rocks all over the place.
Old man Hartman — Harry George, who also went by Ben — had lost his job during the Depression, so he started making little buildings out of concrete, sticking rocks by the thousands into the cement.
I don’t know for sure how old Ben Jr. was when I visited him that last time, but he was a man who’d had enough.
“I get volunteers once in a while,” he explained, “but they find out there’s actually work.”
By the end, the weeds had won, choking everything like the tentacles of some sea monster in a Jules Verne story.
The life had been drained from the Hartman Rock Garden, the somewhat obscure local landmark once known as much for its many varieties of flowers as it was for kitschy little concrete replicas of the White House, Independence Hall and other famous sites.
The colorful lawn ornaments made by Hartman Sr. of everyone from Sitting Bull to Mae West — with some obligatory gnomes thrown around for good measure — had long been removed.
That last time, the whole place was just brown with accents of grey.
“The fact is,” Ben Hartman warned, “it is not gonna get any better. It’s not going to fall together. It’s going to continue to fall apart.”
Talk about a turn of events.
The Hartman Rock Garden is making the unlikeliest of comebacks.
It can’t be overstated how unbelievable this is — like the Bengals winning a Super Bowl; like Kajagoogoo recording another hit.
“Had it been allowed to crumble, I would’ve considered it a defeat. A defeat for the community,” said Mark Chepp, director emeritus of the Springfield Museum of Art and a longtime champion of the rock garden.
Chepp always felt helpless.
“There didn’t seem to be a sense of interest in the community,” he said.
There really wasn’t.
After Ben Hartman’s death, a Wisconsin nonprofit, the Kohler Foundation, bought the property and restored the garden.
Work, which began in May, is just about done. They’ll return in the spring to get some flowers going.
For Chepp, who came to Springfield in 1991 from Wisconsin (a coincidence), the garden already is improved by the return of lawn ornaments, which had been rescued by a Hartman cousin, George Henderson.
The place, at last, has some color again.
“That’s one thing we haven’t seen in a number of years,” Chepp said.
Last week, Kohler passed the deed onto a new local group calling itself Friends of the Hartman Rock Garden.
The group, which consists of the Springfield Foundation, the Turner Foundation and the museum, will be in charge of keeping the place up.
It’s no longer somebody else’s responsibility.
Those weeds come August?
They’re ours, as a community.
“I don’t have a real green thumb,” Chepp confessed, “but I might need to acquire one.”
The group, Chepp said, will be in need of a small army of volunteers.
The first time I’d seen the rock garden as a newcomer to Springfield a decade ago, I found it by accident.
I must’ve driven around town endlessly those first few months and, so far, the house at 1905 Russell Ave. remains the only one I’ve seen with a 12-foot stone castle in the yard.
Even then, the whole place had seen better days. The little figures already were gone.
But, like the Colosseum or some other ancient wonder, I could see through the decay and tell there was something spectacular.
“It’s not the kind of thing people would ordinarily consider art,” Chepp said. “It looks like someone’s giant hobby to most people.”
Anybody who’s ever visited me from out of town has been driven to the rock garden.
On the grand tour of Springfield, we drive by the Heritage Center. We cruise by the Westcott House.
When we get to the Hartman Rock Garden, we get out.
It still amazes me how many people who grew up here have never seen it when so many others know about it.
Chepp knew of it while still living in Wisconsin. A family of four from Kansas showed up this past spring when we both were there.
“Most of the time I’m there, someone else shows up,” Chepp said. “Virtually every time, someone goes by or stops.”
So — is it art?
“You have a man here with no real background in the arts,” Chepp said, “but he obviously has a need to create. He has a creative impulse.
“In the end, if an object, or a tableau in this case, speaks to you, you’re getting to the peripheral of the definition of what art is.”
Earlier this summer, I was sitting at my desk when my brother e-mailed me an MP3.
After his most recent visit to Springfield this past spring, he’d gone back to California and recorded a song about the rock garden in his apartment.
One man’s creative impulse 77 years ago fired another’s this year.
That’s just cool.
As Chepp put it, sounding almost relieved, “I don’t feel like the only person out there promoting it anymore.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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