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Rock garden restoration ongoing

Barbara J. Perenic Kohler Foundation conservator Shane Winter works this past spring to restore the Hartman Rock Garden on Russell Avenue.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer 5:26 PM Thursday, October 29, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — Take two marvels of artistic achievement.

One was designed for a privileged family on an exclusive street by the great and powerful Frank Lloyd Wright, whose reputation has only grown more legendary in the 50 years since he died.

The other was designed by an uneducated, out-of-work iron molder whose concrete castings of Jesus Christ and stone replicas of famous buildings in the most remote corner of the city were merely byproducts of boredom before his own death 65 years ago.

Take a guess which was harder to put back together?

If you said the Westcott House, you win a free trip to the Hartman Rock Garden, which soon will join Wright’s more prestigious creation as a restored local landmark.

“It took us five years to find one picture of Mrs. Westcott,” said Mark Chepp, director emeritus of the Springfield Museum of Art, who’s played a role in the restoration of both sites.

There were little to no photos of the house’s interior.

By comparison, the rock garden, which still is in the process of being pieced back together by the Wisconsin-based Kohler Foundation, has had photos and recollections come out of the wood, er, stonework.

“The most gratifying and surprising thing,” Chepp said, “has been how much documentation they found on it.”

Not only did the family keep scrapbooks, H.G. Hartman’s daughter periodically visits the site and, from memory, drew out a map of where every flower bed was located, and what was planted where, Chepp said.

In its day, the Hartman Rock Garden — today considered a prime example of folk art — was as popular for its many varieties of flora as it was for Hartman’s concrete fauna.

“The true meaning of this place I get from the community,” said Anne Carnes of Milwaukee, who recently was replacing missing stones on Hartman’s 10,000-stone castle. “This really belongs to Springfield. I see that in the people who come in. People are really proud of it. They’ve grown up with it.”

The restoration will return the site to what it looked like in 1944, the year Hartman died, said Ben Caguioa, a conservator with the Kohler Foundation.

“It looks kind of messy now,” he said, “but everything that’s upright is in really great shape.”

While the restoration, which began in May, has taken longer than expected — the new completion date is December — the art museum now has a sampling of artifacts from the site on display to drum up awareness for the project.

Once the restoration is complete, Kohler will give the site back to a local nonprofit for upkeep.