Hartman Rock Garden

The Hartman Rock Garden is one of the nation's most intriguing and revered works of in situ folk art, an outsider art phenomena where self-taught artists construct fascinating worlds out of concrete, metal, stone, and whatever else they can find.

The Hartman Rock Garden was created by Harry "Ben" Hartman from 1932 through 1944. This remarkable garden includes over 250,000 individual stones that combine a mixture of history, religion, and depression-era pop culture.

Harry George "Ben" Hartman was born in 1883 in Edenville, Pennsylvania. At the age of 16 he left home to learn mold-making, a craft in which he quickly became highly-skilled. He moved to Springfield, Ohio in 1913, where he worked as a molder at the Springfield Machine Tool Company foundry.

In 1932, at the age of 48, and in the midst of the Great Depression, Ben was laid off from his job as a molder. He was not content with his newly-sedentary lifestyle and began constructing a cement fishing pond in his backyard. By the time he had finished the project, Ben was hooked. He began constructing a variety of structures and figures, following the themes of history, religion, and patriotism. For the remaining twelve years of his life, Ben filled his yard with over fifty structures, numerous varieties of plants, and countless handmade figurines. Using hundreds of thousands of tones, Ben had created a very unusual garden. In 1939, he returned to work at the foundry, which dramatically slowed his work on the garden.

Over the past eighty-plus years, the Hartman Rock Garden has welcomed tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world. With its recent restoration and ongoing preservation, it is poised to welcome countless more over the coming decades. We hope you enjoy your visit and that you will consider making a donation to help ensure that this national treasure is preserved, maintained, and interpreted for future generations.

Today, the Hartman Rock Garden is owned, interpreted, and maintained by the Friends of the Hartman Rock Garden, a local 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization.

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