A - Wisconsin Concrete Park ~ B - Ave Marie Grotto

A - WISCONSIN CONCRETE PARK

It’s hard to believe that just one man, Fred Smith, built the Wisconsin Sculpture Garden. Illiterate and with no formal schooling, Smith worked in lumber camps for almost 50 years. In 1948, at the age of 62, he began to build monuments to the things that were important to him. As one area resident noted, “It was like…instead of writing his autobiography he sculpted it.” His sculptures included European immigrants who had come to Wisconsin: the lumberjacks who cleared the forests, the “stump farmers” who cleared the rugged land and the plowmen and farmers who enjoyed an occasional frosty bottle of Milwaukee’s finest after a long day in the fields.. Smith worked on the Concrete Park from 1948 to 1964. After Smith suffered a crippling stroke in 1964, the future of the Wisconsin Concrete Park was uncertain, until The Kohler Foundation (yes, the bathroom fixture company) committed to restoring and preserving the site. According to Ruth Kohler, director of the Kohler Foundation, “These are not simply oddities, … they are important works of art… These important works are the legacy of a man viewers will come to know as a backwoods renaissance man – a lumberjack, fiddler, farmer, pub owner and sculptor.

B - AVE MARIE GROTTO

At the Saint Bernard Abbey in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama, sits the Ave Maria Grotto – it is here that one tiny, frail Benedictine monk crafted 125 miniature reproductions of some of the most famous historic buildings and shrines of the world. The masterpieces created from stone and concrete are the lifetime work of Brother Joseph Zoettl, who came to the abbey in 1892 when he was just 14 years old. Once he was given a blessing to pursue his talents, there was no holding Brother Joseph back. “It’s a place where I think that one can see in the concrete, literally, someone’s response and reaction to God,” observes one of his fellow Brothers at the Abbey. As the years passed, age slowed down his ability, but not his resolve. Brother Joseph built his last miniature, the Lourdes Shrine, in 1958 when he was 80 years old. He lived at the monastery until his death in 1961 and was buried in the abbey cemetery, not far from the site where tens of thousands of people come annually to be awed and inspired by his work.