Riding a Pig by Alfred Stanley Johnson, 1916. Two girls wearing white dresses ride a pig, sitting back-to-back. One girl holds the pig’s tail and the other holds its ears. A boy pokes the pig’s haunch with a pitchfork. In front, a barefoot boy lures the pig down the road with a husk of corn. Red text in the upper left bears the inscription, “Scene on the road near Enok, Minn.” Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

Finding Americana

Butter Sculptures, Tiny Towns and Other Irresistible Gems

01.04.19

What could be more American than . . . butter carving? Maybe miniature roadside towns or perhaps a dead whale on a train. On this episode of BackStory, Ed, Brian and Nathan explore the best of Americana, finding the unique and the kitschy in American culture. (This show features two segments from previous episodes.)

creativity; popular culture; spectacle

Open Episode Transcript as PDF

Segments

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Botticelli

Ed gets greasy with the history of butter sculpting. He talks with artist Ken Robison about making a steer, penguins, Super Mario and more out of butter for the State Fair of Texas.

Music:

Carolina Rag by Albert Marlowe
Transmogrify by Podington Bear

art; fat; food; foodways; sculpting

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph & Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we and Joanne Freeman are all historians and each week we explore a different aspect of American history. Today, in this special holiday show, we’ll be looking at Americana.

Ed Ayers: I’ll be getting my fingers greasy with some butter sculpture.

Brian Balogh: I’ll be finding out about the miniature version of the US of A in Pennsylvania that’s been entertaining visitors for more than a half a century.

Nathan Connolly: And, we’ll be revisiting the story of whales on a train. Man, I love this show.

Ed Ayers: Brian, Nathan, did your parents ever tell you, “Hey, don’t play with the food?”

Brian Balogh: All the time.

Nathan Connolly: I guess, yeah.

Ed Ayers: Do you think they’d feel differently if you didn’t just play with it but maybe made it into art?

Brian Balogh: My parents would’ve loved that, especially if I could have sculpted it into a musical instrument.

Ed Ayers: How about you, Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: I’d have still been in trouble. Yeah, no.

Ed Ayers: People have been crafting food into artistic delicacies for centuries. If you were in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries and went to a big, fancy banquet, you might see sculptures made out of cakes, pudding, and even butter.

Brian Balogh: Wait a second, I’m pretty sure they didn’t have refrigerators back in the 17th century. Didn’t it melt?

Ed Ayers: It did. You’d need to look at it quickly and what it was mainly used for was to impress your dinner guests before a feast. Somebody kept it together long enough to make a sculpture out of it. But by the late 19th century, butter sculptures moved from the banquet halls to the fairgrounds.
This is when it started to make a real splash in the United States. I’m assuming that’s not because it was melting. Butter sculpting really took off once electric refrigeration became possible.
In 1901, a sculptor named John K. Daniels was hired by the Pan-American Exposition to sculpt an intricate model of the Minnesota State House. He used 1,000 pounds of butter to create his masterpiece and it was the earliest example of a dairy display using electrical refrigeration.
It was also the first time somebody was employed to make a butter sculpture for an international exposition. It’s two for one. This ushered in the golden age, so to speak, of butter sculpting from about 1900 to the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Nathan Connolly: A state house made of butter. That’s a good home for a bunch of greasy politicians. The 1930s was butter sculpting’s high watermark. Can we still see some of that going on today?

Ed Ayers: You know, you can, Nathan. You can go to state fairs across the country and see lots of it in fact. For example, at the Iowa State Fair, you can see its annual butter cow.

Nathan Connolly: Annual. As in every year?

Ed Ayers: Yep. Fair’s had a cow made entirely of butter for 107 years.

Brian Balogh: It better not be the same one every year.

Ed Ayers: It’s not. But, according to the Iowa State Fair, much of the butter is recycled each year and can even be used for up to a decade. But, butter sculptures can be found outside of just Iowa and if you go to the state fair of Texas, you can see the works of artist Ken Robinson.
He’s created butter sculpture for the fair since 2016 and I talked with Ken about his craft and how he got into this unconventional art form.

Ken: Well, I kinda slid in accidentally.

Ed Ayers: That sounds dangerous. Are we gonna see how many butter puns we can work in? Is this maybe starting now?

Ken: Well, you butter watch out.

Ed Ayers: Oh, God.

Ken: No, what happened was I did a lot of work for the state fair of Texas and they asked me to do it and since I had never done a butter sculpture, I had no idea what it was like and I accepted the job.
Had I ever done anything in advance, I would not have accepted the job because it’s a difficult medium to sculpt in.

Ed Ayers: Is butter the hardest thing you’ve sculpted?

Ken: It is a difficult medium because it’s not stable. If refrigerator unit gets a little warm, it begins to get soft and it makes it impossible to work. If it gets a little cool, it begins to get hard and it’s difficult to work. You just never know where you are and the unit that they have at our state fair is old like me and obviously they don’t intend to replace it anytime soon, hopefully like me.

Ed Ayers: So the others can benefit from your experience, take us through the steps of how you would make a butter sculpture. What do you do?

Ken: Well, the first time that I did this, that was 2016. They asked me to recreate the steer that had won grand champions for 2015 and I thought that was a little odd because usually when you’re talking about a butter sculpture, you have a cow with utters, that kinda thing.
They want a steer. I added to that sculpture two penguins. Now, the steer when I did it, I have an armature inside of it which holds it up in place because butter is unusual. If you’ve got 50 pounds of butter hanging off his head or an arm or an ear or whatever, it’ll just fall right off. You have to put an armature in.
But the two penguins I put in, I made them completely out of butter and all I did was take one of the large butter blocks and carve the penguin out of it, so there’s several ways to go about it. You just have to figure out, anytime you have a nose sticking out or an arm sticking out, you’re gonna have to have something there to support that.

Ed Ayers: What were those penguins doing there with that steer?

Ken: Well, it’s a steer for instance. I have one penguin standing at the front looking up at the steer’s head and my thought is the penguin has a query. What’s a steer doing in a refrigerator? Penguins should belong there, butter should belong there, what’s a steer doing there?

Ed Ayers: How long does it take you to do that?

Ken: Well, generally, it depends on the stuff that I’m doing. This last year was the toughest of all because I had to make the butter sculpture look like it was metal gears and circuitry which are all smooth things and butter, it goes much better with organic stuff like people’s faces or animals or something because it has a roughness to it.

Ed Ayers: Why were you making it look like gears?

Ken: Well, it was called Big Tex but it’s the face of a guy. We have here at the state fair of Texas a big statue. It’s not a statue, it’s more of an automaton and he says “Howdy, folks!” And “It’s the State Fair of Texas!” That kind of stuff and he waves to them.
He’s like 60 foot tall or something like that. What I did is I did just the head and I made it almost 40 inches, 48 inches wide and what I did is I took all of the electronic parts that appeared in the rest of his bust and I had the head floating by the way. We call that hover butter here in Texas.
He was floating and I put a box off to one side and I put Mario Brothers in the box and he’s throwing stuff out onto the floor that looks like all these electronics and gears and stars and everything. He’s throwing it out on the floor because obviously he’s going to assemble or he is currently assembling this thing.
Of course, the Mario is the quirk this year for the kids to find and I stood out in front of the butter sculpture and they would say, “Mommy, mommy, look, there’s Mario!” The adults didn’t even know who it was. They couldn’t recognize it but the kids all recognized it.

Ed Ayers: As Ken said, he had his hands full with this year’s mechanical Big Tex. That’s because even though butter might be smooth on toast, there’s a certain roughness to it when you’re using it for sculpting. Therefore, butter works better when making molds of things that look natural like people.
Over the years, artists have created sculptures of historical icons from Elvis Presley to Barack Obama. In fact, the first well known butter sculpture was a detailed mold of a fictional princess. It was called Dreaming Ayolanthe by a woman named Carolyn Shock-Brooks.
People flocked to see it displayed at the 1876 centennial exposition in Philadelphia. The sculpture made Brooks famous and helped propel the art form’s popularity.

Speaker 6: Since an Iowa woman modeled the head of Dreaming Ayolanthe in butter at the Philadelphia centennial exposition, butter art has developed wonderfully so that now at this World’s Fair, we have whole groups of life sized statuary in butter.
Dreaming Ayolanthe was reproduced at later fairs and her features preserved by photography and it must be said, no succeeding butter sculpture approaches it in beauty. The Iowa woman’s Ayolanthe was worthy of marble. Other and later butter figures are not always models of grace.
But, butter is butter. Graceful and ethereal as its forms may be, one would not hesitate long to slice off a nose or a finger to butter his pancakes. The Des Moines Register, August 1904.

Ed Ayers: For Carolyn Shock-Brooks, butter was not just butter. Before the centennial exposition, Brooks was a farm woman from Arkansas. She had no formal artistic training, just a couple of wooden tools for molding.
After her work was a hit at the exposition though, Brooks studied in Europe and became a professional sculptor who worked in marble. Ken Robinson has been going in the opposite direction. He’s been an artist for decades, but until a few years ago, had never dabbled in dairy.
Nevertheless, he says he’s happy to add butter to his artistic repertoire.

Ken: I’m a painter, a sculptor, a calligraphist. I’ve been called a Renaissance man. I wasn’t really sure what that was. But the reality of it is, I’ve taken on many jobs in my life without knowing how to do them and yet, I do them nevertheless.
I just get my hands dirty and go to work. I do a little bit of everything. In fact, I’m looking for something I can’t do.

Ed Ayers: That was artist Ken Robinson, the Michelangelo of milk products.

Nathan Connolly: More lik the DaVinci of dairy.

Brian Balogh: No, no, no. The Botticelli of butter.

Whale on a Train!

Between 1880 and 1882, a whale visited towns in the Midwest on the back of a train. Scholar Jamie Jones has traced the story of the show men who put the whale on display, and reconstructed its increasingly smelly journey across the US.

American Midwest; freakshow; whaling; zoos

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: Okay, Brian. Here’s a question for you. What would you do if you really wanted to see a whale and the Discovery Channel wasn’t due to be invented in about another hundred years or so?

Brian Balogh: Gotta admit, Nathan, that’s a question I’ve really never thought about.

Nathan Connolly: You just wait for the train.

Brian Balogh: The train?

Nathan Connolly: For two years between 1880 and 1882, a whale toured the Midwest on the back of a train. People came from far and wide to see the sideshow attraction like no other and the best part, it was called The Prince of Whales.

Brian Balogh: No, it wasn’t!

Nathan Connolly: There’s more. Because of course, the longer the whale was on tour, the worse it smelled. Jamie Jones is assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and she has traced the story of the whale and the two entrepreneurs that put it on the train.

Jamie: The two proprietors were George Newton, a lawyer and sometimes a real estate agent from a small town in Massachusetts called Monson. He’d had an idea for a long time that it would make a great Barnum-esque sideshow exhibition to get a whale and tour it around the country.
In fact, George Newton wrote to P.T. Barnum initially in 1880 before he eventually teamed up with his partner to see if Barnum did want to get to him and Barnum’s secretary wrote back to him and said quote that Barnum’s time was so taken up that he could not give any speculations to such attention, although I think we can read between the lines and see that Barnum thought this was a bad idea, a smelly idea.
But eventually George Newton partnered with a man named Fred Engleheart who was a sports promoter and former sports journalist in the Midwest, in St. Louis and Chicago. Fred Englehart had a lot of connections. He knew how to set up these pop up exhibitions. He had a lot of contacts in the Midwest.
He partnered with George Newton and they formed the Pioneer Inland Whaling Association in 1880.

Nathan Connolly: You have to walk me through the logistics of something like this. How do you take a living animal the size of a whale from the ocean, presumably on the East Coast, and get it on a train heading west towards Chicago?

Jamie: What happened is George Newton went up and down the east coast meeting with whaling captains and by this point in 1880, the U.S. commercial whaling industry is really on the decline. Starting in the 1860s, petroleum, a rock oil, came into the market to replace whale oil as a source of machine lubrication and illumination.
Commercial whaling for whale oil was really on the decline and I think that Newton might not have been able to find a whaling captain to bring him a whole whale if in fact the market for whale oil had been stronger. In some ways, the fact that this whale made it to shore at all I think is a testament to the decline of this industry and the rise of fossil fuel mineral extraction and consumption.
Newton goes up and down the east coast looking for a whaling captain who is willing to harpoon a whale as close to shore as possible, tow it back to him on shore. Sounds like from Newton’s letters that he tried a lot of different whaling captains before he finally found one in Provincetown.
Then in November of 1880, he got a telegram saying that his contact in Provincetown had captured him a whale. Newton then hired someone to tow the whale from Provincetown Harbor to Boston Harbor which is a good distance.
There at Boston, they contracted with the dry dock people to create a kind of cradle, something that might be used to lift a large ship out of the water and bring into dry dock for repairs, but they adapted all of this dockside infrastructure for a whale and they lifted it out of the water and put it on two specially reinforced rail cars that had been built for the purpose of exhibiting this whale.
From what I understand, although the proprietors are very cagey about the details for reasons you can probably imagine, it seems like the whale was at least partially cut open and gutted and filled with a combination of salt and ice.

Nathan Connolly: This sounds like an extraordinarily expensive proposition.

Jamie: It does seem like a very expensive proposition but it also seems like for awhile, at least, it was a money making proposition. During the whale’s exhibition in Chicago especially in January, it made a lot of money.
It seems thousands and possibly even on some days tens of thousands of visitors who are paying something like 25 cents a head to come into this exposition hall and view the body of the whale. For awhile at least, I think that the whale also made a lot of money.

Nathan Connolly: The whale’s debut is in Chicago. Is that right?

Jamie: The whale was debuted at this huge exposition building in Chicago which was very near the lake and near a lot of the railroad connections at that time. It’s actually at a site that is now the site of the Chicago Institute of Art, so this place where there were a lot of industrial trade shows in Chicago and it was a place where big public exhibitions like this could be staged.
The whale debuted to great acclaim. A lot of people came, visitors were invited to come and peek inside the mouth of the whale, which was called ‘the place where Jonah went in’. This whale’s body, as it’s being exhibited, is also being embedded in all of these cultural stories about whales from the 19th century going all the way back.

Speaker 6: A visitor begins his observation generally at the head of the fish, looks into his capacious mouth, feels of the long, bony hair that supply the place of teeth. Hunts for the eyes, the snout, and then the ears. Walks along the side of the creature. Catches hold of the huge fin, punches the monster in the side as if to ascertain if it is ribless. Finally, brings up at the tail of the huge fellow where the broad flukes are spread.

Jamie: After Chicago, the whale goes to Milwaukee, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.
Now, in April, things were starting to go bad. The whale is starting to smell and Newton, from the very, very beginning, Newton’s very anxious about how long this show’s gonna last. In his letters home to his son, he nicknames the whale ‘the bird’.
He writes constantly “if the bird gives out, we go out of business for a while.” He’s very worried about the bird giving out and in April of 1881 in Cleveland, the bird was giving out. Newton and Englehart tried their first big spectacular effort to try to preserve the body of the whale and make it fit for exhibition.
They hired a team of butchers to treat the whale’s body with some kind of chemical substance and they said in some reports that they fumigated the whale or that they coated it or that they embalmed it. There’s a lot of this language of decontamination or even preparing the body as if for a funeral.
Because Newton and Englehart are masters of publicity, they’re writing about their efforts to remediate the whale to save the whale from it’s own putrefaction and they’re making another press event out of the whale’s decline because they are such geniuses of publicity and promotion.

Nathan Connolly: In spite of these efforts, I have to imagine that as the whale starts to rot, people do start to slow down to a trickle.

Jamie: That’s right. The news coverage of the whale show really changes starting even as early as February but intensifying around April and May. The coverage is less about the spectacle of the whale and what a marvelous exhibition it is and more about how ungodly it smells and how you can smell the whale for miles before you see the whale.

Nathan Connolly: I can only imagine.

Jamie: I can only imagine, too. I had the opportunity to see a beached whale in Connecticut a couple of years ago in fact and just the smell, it really is overpowering. I can only imagine how it’s been from November to April. It’s been six months that the whale has been out of the water and decomposing.
It seems as though the whale show itself was thrown out of Toledo because of the enormous smell and civic leaders were getting involved and treating the show as a public nuisance in some places.

Speaker 6: Toledo. Phew! What a smell. Fishy smell. To the heavens it seemed to swell. We asked our friend if he is acquainted here. He says, no. To do no good to ask why this aroma. But passing along a hand bill is thrust into our hands, telling us of the whale dead and in bad odor being in the city and then we understood whence this all pervading perfume. The Kalamazoo Telegraph, May 1881.

Jamie: They tried their second last ditch effort to preserve the whale or rebuild it or keep it a going show in the summer of 1881. Again, a very highly publicized event, Engehart set up in rural Michigan, a site that he called Camp Bailene, again kind of publicizing and making myth even out of the disaster of this show, where he hired a team of taxidermists from Detroit to come up and rebuild the whale from the inside out.
Englehart’s account of Camp Bailene is very colorful. Newton by this point has gone home to Massachusetts. Who can blame the guy? And Englehart writes home to Newton to give him a report on how the project of rebuilding the whale is going.
At one point Englhart says this, “We are here. In saying that, I say almost all that can be said. Mosquitoes, flies, bugs, and snakes predominate and form the largest part of the atmosphere. The work is terrible. You have no idea.”
But to the press who are trying to find this site and visit it and see exactly what kind of alchemy is going on at Camp Bailene, Englehart is nothing but positive, talking about the genius of these Detroit taxidermists and the fact that the whale will be ready for its grand redebut in just a few short weeks or months.
Again, Englehart is making of this a great spectacle of publicity even as the whale itself is rotting down to nothing.

Nathan Connolly: And the fact that I guess that whaling itself was literally a dying trade is also not lost on some of the observers.

Jamie: Right. Absolutely. Whale oil production reached its peak, peak whale oil in the 1850s. In the 1840s and 50s were when the U.S. commercial whaling industry was booming.
For example, during the decade of the 1840s, we know that at least 2,363 whaling voyages were launched from U.S. ports. By the 1880s when the Prince of Whales is making its tour across the U.S., only 736 whaling voyages are leaving.
That’s, I think, because the market for whale oil in the U.S. is declining very rapidly given the abundance and the relative cheapness of producing petroleum that’s coming from the oil fields in Pennsylvania.

Nathan Connolly: What’s the ultimate fate of this giant carcass?

Jamie: It’s hard to know. The archive starts to run cold in the spring of 1882 and 1883. I know that things are not always what they seem as exemplified in the case of this whale. The skin and tail of this [inaudible 00:23:42] of the vast deep was all that it purported to be but it’s frame, alas, was of iron and hickory and it’s flesh of sawdust and other deceptive lightweights.
Which I think, in some ways, allows us to reverse engineer what happened perhaps at Camp Bailene or in Cleveland when Newton and Englehart were frantically trying to remake the body of the whale to keep it on the road as it decomposed.

Nathan Connolly: I was talking to Jamie Jones, assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is working on a book about energy, obsolescence, and the decline of the U.S. whaling industry.

Ed Ayers: And on the subject of whales, check out our wonderful two part show, Thar She Blows and Thar She Blows Again. You’ll find that alongside Jamie Jones’ interview at backstoryradio.org.

Small Town America just got even smaller.

Roadside America has been entertaining drivers along Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania since the 1950s. But as scholar, and fan Samantha Boardman, and Dolores Heinsohn, granddaughter of founder Laurence T. Gieringer explain, there is more to this miniaturized vision of America than meets the eye.

Pennsylvania; automobiles; interstate highway system

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Now picture this scene. You’re driving along Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania and you find yourself intrigued by billboards advertising Roadside America, the world’s greatest indoor miniature village.
Of course, you pull off the road and that’s exactly what happened to Samantha Boardman.

Samantha: Years ago, I was a traveling performing singer songwriter and I did a lot of work in the Mid-Atlantic. I was on my way to a gig and had some time to kill before sound check and I kept seeing these billboards on I-78 for Roadside America.
All the billboards said “Be prepared to see more than you expect” and I was like, okay, I’ve got some time to kill. Show me more than I expect. I pulled off to this outwardly unassuming roadside attraction with no preconceived notions. I had not heard of this place before and I walked in, bought my ticket, walked into the room where the model is and was just stunned.
It was huge. It was just stirring. It was genuinely emotionally stirring.

Brian Balogh: Roadside America had been built by Lawrence T. Gerringer and it had been delighting motorists since the early 1950s with its unifying tiny vision of the U.S. It fascinated Samantha so much that unlike most visitors, she decided to write a Ph.D dissertation about it.

Samantha: What interested me so much is that it was an attraction that declared itself to be a portrayal of America and I thought that was really interesting and really bold and not necessarily something that you would get in a modern tourist attraction because you have this very diverse, polyglot, multiethnic, multiracial country and to stake a claim and say this is representation of America is … You’re playing with fire.

Brian Balogh: Is it fair to say that claiming to have an exhibit that portrays all of America would not have seemed bold or ridiculous in the early 1950s?

Samantha: This is what’s so interesting about this particular cultural moment when Roadside America, which had existed in various permutations since the 1930s. It started out as being kind of like one of those little scenes you would put under a Christmas tree.
Lawrence Gerringer, the guy that started it, started with an under tree display that grew so large that it became a local attraction and people would come to his house just to see this model that ended up taking over his living room.
Then it was displayed in different places through the 30s and 40s and then it eventually arrived at where it is today in 1953. In 1953, you have this confluence. You’ve got a couple things going on. It’s post World War II. You’ve got the highway construction with the interstate, highway active 56 and you also have an American heritage tourism boom where Americans were encouraged to see America first.
Rather than go to Europe and spend your tourism dollars there, to take in the local and domestic wonders. There’s this cultural moment when American heritage tourism sites are very desirable and you also have the nuts and bolts, you’re able to get to them.

Brian Balogh: You’re able to get to them which ironically is gonna flatten most of them, right? Those very interstate highways that allow you to get to these places more quickly, more conveniently are gonna [inaudible 00:28:29].
You can predict what you’re gonna see when you get off an exchange on any of these interstate highways today.

Samantha: Yes. You have this one singular cultural moment where you have these very different kinds of roadside attractions. It’s not all homogenized yet. You start to see some of the ways that communications enabled ideas to circulate more quickly.
At the same moment that you have Roadside America in Chartlesville in 1953, a competitor miniature American tourist attraction opens up just 50 miles down the road in Denver, Pennsylvania called America Wonderland.

Brian Balogh: Ooh.

Samantha: It was built by a gentleman named Adam S. Hawn and he’s got a story similar to Gerringer’s. He was also a model maker. He had had a local attraction called Mountainside Wonderland, something like that, before that he had exhibited but he creates this competitor miniature American tourist attraction less than an hour away.
Something I think is so interesting about this moment is that that was in operation until 1973. For 20 years, you have a market that can support two different miniature American tourist attractions in that kind of proximity to each other.

Brian Balogh: How were they different?

Samantha: They were quite different. They gave completely different views on American-ness and the American experience in some really interesting ways. Structurally, Roadside America, you walk in and the model itself fills an entire room. It’s massive. The way it’s designed, you walk around the model and you see these different scenes portrayed in miniature.
You have a modern American suburb, modern of course circa 1963. You’ve got kids playing ball in a baseball field. You have a circus practicing and then you have these vignettes from American history. You’ve got a frontier town, you’ve got an Old West town. There’s a model anthrocite mine because he extrapolated a lot of American-ness from sites that were close to him, like the town of Hamburg, Pennsylvania sort of fills in for the downtown section which is still a small town America.

Brian Balogh: The discovery of oil in Pennsylvania or did that not make it?

Samantha: Yeah, it’s there.

Brian Balogh: Great.

Samantha: The Titusville Well, that’s there. You’ve got these scenes of local pride but taken from that, it’s this idea that it stands in for a common American experience. You have the historical and the modern existing cheek by jowl on this model as you’re walking around which creates this sort of American cosmology that America is something that exists in an eternal now.
You also have this interactivity with it. People that were walking around could press buttons that activated things in the model. You press a button and two men are sawing a log and then you press another button and a trolley zips down a street.
The entire time, the model is alive with kinetic activity. There’s model trains that are zipping through it and there’s a waterfall and there’s running water that goes through it. Then, every 20 minutes, there’s the night pageant which is when the lights in the room where the model is dim and the lights inside the model come on and the Star Spangled Banner is played over a PA along with Kate Smythson “God Bless America” which images of Jesus are projected on the back wall next to a fluttering American flag.

Brian Balogh: If you had to pick a year that you would identify with each, what year does Roadside America really capture and what year does America Wonderland really capture?

Samantha: Roadside America was installed at its present location in 1953 and it was largely complete. There wasn’t a lot that was added after that. Gerringer dies in 1963. But I think what you get when you go to Roadside America is a very specific vision of a specific American moment rather than a year.
Because Gerringer passes in 1963, this is a moment that comes, it’s in his world, in his vision, there’s no Kennedy assassination, there’s no moon landing, there’s no Vietnam, there’s no women’s movement, there’s no 9/11. You do get a very unambiguously patriotic and affectionate vision of a shared American experience.
Then when America Wonderland opens in 1957, that’s the year of Sputnik and Little Rock, there’s already a great deal of anxiety in American culture, a great deal of Cold War anxiety.

Brian Balogh: Of course, if you were African American, you had good reason to be anxious even in the early 1950s. Is any of that reflected in Roadside America?

Samantha: I think something that’s interesting about Roadside America is that you do find, to a degree, suggestions of people. You would see, they’re not fully formed representations. They’re not detailed enough to see expressions.

Brian Balogh: I see.

Samantha: There’s a little kid who drops her ice cream cone and there’s a kitten licking at it. You have these vignettes but you don’t really see the personality.

Brian Balogh: Tell us how someone visiting Roadside America in the 1990s, you perhaps, what is your lasting image a couple days after actually going to Roadside America?

Samantha: I think I was and continue to be surprised at how emotionally resonate I found the experience, especially the night pageant. I was legitimately and unironically moved by the care and the time that this man had put into his singular vision and the great deal of affection that he felt for his country and the way that he was able to convey that so well. That’s what stuck with me.

Brian Balogh: Delores Heinson is the granddaughter of Roadside America’s founding father Lawrence T. Gerringer. I put a call in to her and found her, of course, in the gift shop.

Delores: He started in 1903. This is an honest to goodness true story ’cause I even have it on old ’78 records, told by my great-grandmother. They were underfoot in the kitchen and she shooed him out of the kitchen to get out and play and they climbed up on the side of the mountain overlooking Redding near the pagoda.
The two young boys hatched this idea to build buildings miniature, small buildings.

Brian Balogh: How old were they at the time?

Delores: My grandfather was nine. His brother probably was a little younger than nine. He might’ve been about eight. He went home all excited. They went home and they told their parents, that was my great grandparents, and they encouraged and I emphasize the word encouraged them to do this.
My great grandfather built them a work bench in the basement, taught them the proper use of tools and my grandmother, when it was cold, she would let them do their work on the kitchen table and they started building.
As real young boys, they didn’t get the scale so good so the buildings were quite crude in the very beginning but the idea was still there. Eventually, my grandfather decided to stick with one scale which is three eighths of an inch to the foot then he stuck with that the rest of his life. All the buildings, they’re three eighth of an inch to the foot.

Brian Balogh: He sounds like a very exact kind of man.

Delores: I always say pay attention to the detail and to him, good enough wasn’t good enough. It had to be right.

Brian Balogh: Was he a patriotic man?

Delores: Yes. He was a very religious man. He was a very patriotic man. He loved his country and he loved children. I always said, as years went by, decades later, after he died, the best way to describe him was a common genius.

Brian Balogh: You know, no saying better embodies a part of America than new and improved.

Delores: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian Balogh: When your grandfather died in 1963, shortly there must have been discussion of new and improved.

Delores: No.

Brian Balogh: Adding, changing, modernizing.

Delores: No.

Brian Balogh: Expanding.

Delores: No, because it’s all my grandfather’s work and I always tell people say, “Why don’t you put the World Trade Center in?”, “Why don’t you do this?” He died in 1963. That’s pretty much the era, there and prior, where he lived and knew.
If you add something, I always tell people, it’s like you have a painting like a Picasso and it’s half finished and Monet comes along or somebody and finishes the picture. Whose picture is it? What is it? It’s nothing. That’s how I look at it. This, to me, is a tribute.

Brian Balogh: Delores Heinson. I know you wanna hear Roadside America’s night pageant again, so here’s some more.

Wish You Were Here?

Photographer Alfred Stanley Johnson created a magical world where carrot-tops tickled
the clouds and corn cobs were the size of mighty tree trunks. Historian and Radio Producer Erika Janik delights in the work of this Wisconsin Wizard and his Tall Tale Postcards.

Music:

Bliss by Podington Bear
The Riddle Song by Podington Bear

art; folklore; magic; photography; storytelling

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Ed Ayers: You might need to rub your eyes after looking at the postcards produced by the photographer Alfred Stanley Johnson. Starting around 1908, Johnson turned his photographer’s studio in Waupin, Wisconsin into a magician’s workshop.
There, he produced images of vegetables and animals blown up to a scale rarely seen outside fairyland. In Johnson’s Tall Tale Postcards, as they were known, corn cobs were like tree trunks and geese are the size of horses. Historian and radio producer Erica Janick is an aficionado of Johnson’s work.

Erica: I’m looking at an image of three adult women and then there’s a little girl and they’re pulling these giant carrots out of the ground. They’re almost like mini palm trees. They’re all much taller than the three women and it looks like it might take all four of them to actually get these big carrots out of the ground.
I think that someone receiving one of these postcards would smile and I think they would be in on the joke. I do wonder if I got one in the mail at that time, if it was 1912 and I opened my mailbox and saw one of these, I think I would definitely do a double take because it would be something that I hadn’t seen before.
Maybe because I hadn’t seen a picture or an image or a moving image of any of these places before, I might for a second think, maybe that is how things really are there.
A lot of these images have to do with fruits and vegetables. A few of them have livestock in them. Another favorite of mine are cows leaping over the roads. You find others that involve men fishing with enormous fish. There’s a guy with a wheelbarrow that has an enormous onion in it and the onion is bigger than the guy and the wheelbarrow.
They really are kind of as the name implies, a tall tale, folk tale image. That’s part of what makes them so charming and so fun to look at is that they relate to a lot of stories we might have read or heard about as a child and then you look at these images and even though they’re unbelievable, in some ways, maybe it’s because I just grew up reading stories like James and the Giant Peach or something that they also seem like maybe they could be real.
A lot of towns really liked these tall tale postcards because it was a way to encourage people to come to their town and hopefully to settle. There were these ideas about agriculture abundance, kind of this myth around farming that were really prevalent in American culture.
You find most of these postcards being made for towns that are in the Midwest and in the West because they’re really hoping that they can get more people to settle in their town because that’s how you make a town. You need people to come there.
They start distributing these postcards to say if you come here, your carrots are going to be huge. All a little bit tongue in cheek and I’m sure people realized that but by the same token, often a lot of these places were really great farming communities so while you might not grow a carrot that’s nine feet long and requires four people to pull out of the ground, you still probably could have a pretty good farming life if you moved to some of these places.
We actually don’t know all that much about Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr. We do know that he produced more than a hundred of these. He didn’t invent the idea of tall tale postcards but he really made it his own.
He took over his father’s photography business in Waupin, Wisconsin in about the 1890s and he started experimenting with tall tale postcards around 1908. He already knew how to do photography but it was really his experimentation over the years that led to all of these tall tale postcards and he really built on the form.
The first ones that he did were a little bit static, just someone holding a position and then there was a large something put on top of them. But as the years go on, he really becomes much more artistic and you see a lot of movement in these images. He’s constantly working on his technique.
All that we really know about how he put these photographs together is that he would take a background image, he would develop that and then he would take a close up of something, a large fruit or vegetable and then he would develop that, cut it out, lay it on top of the background image and then take another photo.
He often used his friends and family in these photos. There’s actually a few in the collections of the Wisconsin historical society that kinda show a before and after. There was one of his kids and some of the neighbor kids and they’re holding a large cardboard cutout.
You can see the wide photo that he took there and then in the next image, you see that actually that cardboard cutout has been replaced by a slice of watermelon that is the size of a canoe.
This is how he did all of the images and when I give talks actually to people, especially students, none of them can believe that this is actually how this photographic process was done because we’re so used to the digital manipulation of photos that someone could actually do this and do it so believably and so artistically in the 1910s.
I think that when people see these images, they’re just delighted by them. I tend to show them to people whenever I can because I think they’re so fun and so amazing when you consider what time period they were made, people just can’t believe it.
Even with all of the manipulative tools that are available today for us to do, these images are still really artistic. This required real skill. I think even actually if you were trying to do this in Photoshop, this would still take quite a bit of skill and experience to make something look as good and realistic as these images actually do.
I think it’s hard to believe if you haven’t seen the images how realistic they actually look. I mean, they are fantastic. Again, I haven’t seen a nine foot carrot. Maybe it’s out there. But by the same token, when I look at this image of the women pulling the carrots, I’m like it looks real.
I can imagine that actually being there. It doesn’t look like fake carrots and fake women. There’s a real artistic sensibility to this that I think continues to impress people who see them today.

Brian Balogh: Historian and radio producer Erica Janick helped us tell that story. We have some of those tall tale postcards on our website backstoryradio.org but for the full range of agricultural hyper abundance, check out the website of our friends at The Wisconsin Historical Society at wisconsinhistory.org.

End Riff

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Ed Ayers: Brian you did that fun interview about Roadside America. Do you think the days of Americana are numbered?

Brian Balogh: I don’t know, ’cause all the things I think of are old. I think of the world’s largest ball of twine. I think of where I grew up. The monkey jungle, the Seaquariam. These were really earnest efforts to capture nature in ways that, today, just out of place to say the least.
I’m curious to know if there are any modern iterations of the largest ball of twine.

Ed Ayers: I would suggest that the current version of Americana is Dollywood in east Tennessee. I think not only is it one of the most popular places in America, but it’s a place that goes with basically the same pure heart, the same sincerity that you see in Roadside America.
You go there for America distilled, for a certain kind of nostalgia but that’s also affirming. The music would be too earnest for most media. The singing on the stage and the dancing, but somehow it fits into the whole spirit of Dollywood which is this is our home, this is who we are. It’s okay to celebrate it.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, what do you got?

Nathan Connolly: I think part of what makes Americana speak to us or sing to us in some ways is that the context of late 20th century America really did see the evisceration of local places, right? That you have suburbs and motels and billboards.
There’s so many markers of the repeating landscape that if you find a place that has a sense of its local fair and local products and local identity, it really does stick out amidst the Starbucks and the Motel 6s and such.
In some ways, I’m a little bit less familiar with what makes a kind of Americana place where I grew up. I remember, for instance, the Miccosukee Indian Villages or some sense of local antique shop being grounded in a way that, say, the big box retailers of my childhood or the big corporate movie theaters simply weren’t.
I’m curious, Brian, we’re actually from the same place, just a couple years removed I’d say. Was your sense of South Florida, did it have a kind of Americana that you could identify?

Brian Balogh: Absolutely! It had nothing but these tourist attractions that were trying to trade on what the tourists assumed that Miami was, this kind of place where you could be in direct contact with nature. You could sidle right up to Hugo, the killer whale, as though you’d really see Hugo the Killer Whale out in Biscayne Bay. No, you wouldn’t.
But I wanna also touch on the Miccosukee Indians and I wanna touch on billboards and I wanna touch on a place that had signs for a hundred miles before you got there. I don’t know if they ever went by the south of the border.

Ed Ayers: I knew that’s what you were gonna say. South of the border between North Carolina and South Carolina.

Brian Balogh: I’m guessing about the Miccosukee Indians and definitely South of the border, there were a lot of racial slurs embedded in these places and if we had to pick a turning point in maybe the death of Americana as we’ve been talking about it and I hate to pick on Ladybird Johnson, but it might be those billboards.
It might be the quote “beautification” program, of course, a national effort to help clean up the environment, get rid of all this claptrap and make things kind of more sanitized if you will. What do you think, Nathan? I don’t even know if you saw all of those billboards. They looked homemade. Literally hand painted and they’d go on for hundreds of miles.
If you were on a really boring road trip, I loved them. I couldn’t wait for the next one.

Ed Ayers: You’d stop at South of the border just to hope the signs would go away.

Brian Balogh: And today I talk about them because they were horribly racist and they traded on racial stereotypes. I just didn’t know that as a young kid.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah, I mean, I have very little in the way of personal memories of that stuff but I do think just thinking even in broad sweeps that there are ways in which some of the reforms that helped to change depictions of different stereotypes met with an explosion of different forms of marketing and different ways of redefining America.
Even the expansion of the highways and cities off of the highways and suburbs off those highways. It seems to me, at least, that there’s a way to look at the life cycle of Americana and think about it almost in direct relationship to where it’s located relative to mass transit and mass transportation.
Those spaces that had to identify as something that was special, be it the south of the border theme park or the Miami International Airport. There were ways in which they had to evolve or they maintain a certain kind of local flair in the case of south of the border and became almost caricatures of themselves.
In a way, that park is not in any way a reflection of Mexican Americans but is instead a reflection of Americana on its own and how kind of silly it can be sometimes.

Ed Ayers: You said something Nathan that makes me think the form that Americana takes today is the other side of the mirror on that which is a yearning for authenticity. I think it’s farm to table food.
I think that how would you get past the fast food places on the interstate? You’d pull off the interstate and go to a place and see where they’re making something that’s specific not only to this geography but to the season.
I think they know that we’ve kinda come out the other side of Americana and it became sort of corporatized and now we’re trying to find something that couldn’t be mass produced by its very nature because it’s something from here, made by hand, at the farmer’s market and it feels healthy and good to us and it also knows that you’re supporting the same kinds of small family businesses that were running all those things that we call Americana. Now they’re farmers and craftspeople.
That’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BackstoryRadio and whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph & Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University.
Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.
Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.