According to a recent study, Kansas ranks third in the nation for the highest percentage of cultural attractions.

Many of these are found along the highways and byways of the Sunflower State.

Throughout Kansas, there are a lot of roads and a lot of roadside attractions.

If you look for them or if you ask about them as you pass through, they might be geological.

There are also cultural things.

Sculptures.

There's so many.

And so you can stop in these areas.

You might get a guidebook.

But it's also good if they're a little off the road to be able to talk to this.

Your the local historical societies.

Throughout the state there were in many years, big signs advertising something to stop and see.

Oakley, Kansas, for instance, was the biggest prairie dog in Kansas.

Had a prairie dog town, had rattlesnakes and stuff like that.

Prairie Dog Town is long since closed, but if you swing through Oakley there is the Buffalo Bill Cultural Center and the fick Fossil Museum.

Or travel south for the natural wonder of Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park or Monument Rocks.

A lot of things in a lot of towns.

The Art and Car Museum in Hill City.

It might be a motorcycle.

Well, there is a motorcycle museum at Saint Francis, Kansas.

Motorcycles.

I guess we're going to Saint Francis.

Saint Francis Motorcycle Museum began kind of as a dream.

Several collectors got together and and with some people here.

And so in 2015, we began working on this building.

This at that time was an empty lot.

We put up a brand new building.

It's approximately 10,000 square feet.

And then we had a grand opening in approximately a year later in 2016.

We have bikes as old as 1902.

We have a 1902 Orient.

Our newest bike is a 2016, which is a Suzuki race bike.

And we have a lot of early American iron in here, a lot of Indians, Harley-Davidson, and then a lot of the names that you're not so familiar with.

Oh, they're all my favorites.

But yeah, I do have a couple that are certainly I would have to pick as a personal favorite.

We have a 1922 Ace, and that's a beautiful, beautiful machine.

It's fully restored.

But that's a that's a very special bike in that that was a really a fast bike in its day.

Beautiful machine, that's an inline four cylinder.

The little bike that is sitting right here, this little Cushman underneath this big parachute is certainly a fan favorite.

That is our second one of those that we've had.

And that and those little Cushmans were dropped out of airplanes in World War Two back in Normandy and places like that.

The first one we had actually went back to the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Normandy invasion here just last year.

And it was sold to a man in Europe.

We don't draw big traffic, but we are a draw and we do bring people to town.

We've had visitors from every State of the Union.

We've had visitors from 60 some foreign countries.

And so we get people from all over and we have people communicate with us by email, text, phone from foreign countries, you know, asking questions about, you know, what size is that bolt.

Can you send me a picture of this?

I'm trying to restore that.

And so we are sort of a resource for people doing those kinds of things, which has been pretty fascinating for us on our end.

I think if you're a motorcycle enthusiast of any kind, you certainly would be appreciative of what you see here.

But what's really fascinating is the number of people who come into the museum, who have little or if any interest in motorcycles, and they just happen to see the sign or maybe come with a husband or a friend or whatever and walk out the door going, that's amazing, you know, because you see all the mechanical engineering and so forth that's gone through from the very beginning of motorcycle history up until, you know, fairly new bikes Opened in 2016.

The Motorcycle Museum is one of the newer purpose built attractions in the region.

For one of the oldest, we traveled to Lucas, Kansas.

We welcome you here to the Garden of Eden.

It has been a tourist attraction since 1907.

Samuel Perry Densmore was very enthusiastic and a visionary to create some sort of a tourist attraction in Lucas.

When he retired from farming in 1905, his idea was moving into town, building a house that would draw people into the community as a tourist attraction.

So making it pretty much a mansion at that time period for this area here.

As far as in Kansas, probably one of the oldest attractions that was actually built as an attraction.

You see the big mansions, the big family mansions, but those were for family first and then made into attractions later that are old, too.

But this was an attraction first.

Now when he moved to Kansas as a farmer, this was a time that the Homestead Act of Kansas was going on.

So that's what drew him to Kansas to farm.

In 1905 he retired from farming and started building this house when he was 62 years of age, and it did take him two years on the house and then 20 more years he worked on those sculptures around the outside after that, which have a lot of his populist party ideas that he wanted to get out there and show people.

The thing you will learn about grassroots artists is that they like to decorate their own yard environments and they don't really care what their neighbors think and stuff.

So he was considered a grassroots artist.

This means he did not have any formal art training.

This was something he just did on his own, something he had a love for.

This is an arbor, a grape arbor at the time.

It's no longer a grape arbor, but this was the first thing he worked on after he had built the house.

And it is two snakes going down to Adam and Eve.

So we have Adam and Eve being some of the first sculptures he worked on with the arbor.

You can see the snake is giving an apple to Eve.

And then we have his sign up here that he built out of the concrete saying Garden of Eden.

So other sculptures you see up around behind are the devil over here, back up above Adam.

And then over on the other side, behind Eve is the big all seeing eye of God with the guardian angel of the Garden of Eden up there.

So the children of Adam and Eve are Cain and Abel up here, offering their sacrifices to God, and the wives are down below swinging in a tree.

And then we head on down to the next sculpture is where Cain killed Abel.

And we have the guardian angel coming down to take the body on up to heaven.

And then the further tree post there has where Cain and his wife are fleeing from the Garden of Eden.

And we are looking at more of his modern civilization sculptures here that he was working on that were more into his populist party ideas.

And when you're looking at these sculptures here, they really do have a lot of detail on them as you're looking at them.

One thing is that the Kohler Foundation came in 2011 and did some restoration work on the sculptures.

One of the main things they did do was clean the sculptures.

And as you're looking around at the sculptures, all of this concrete posts have a metal rod and wire reinforcement.

He did use 113 tons of concrete on the project, so it took 2273 sacks of dry cement that he mixed up by hand in buckets.

And as far as the house going through several different time periods, as far as people owning the Garden of Eden after Mr. Densmore had died in 1932, it went through where it was neglected for a while with apartments.

And then in 1968, there was a couple here in town who envisioned to get it back to the tourist attraction Densmore did, and they were very instrumental in that.

And then the group from the Kansas Grassroots Art Association purchased it in 1988, and they did a lot of preservation on it and getting it out to where people could see it again.

And then they were very instrumental in marketing the town as a grassroots art niche.

One artist drawn to Lucas is Erika Nelson, who has made Roadside Attractions a life study.

So my name is Erika Nelson, and I am the cultural resources director for the Garden of Eden.

But I'm also an independent artist and educator working on art in rural locations, artist built environments.

But my specialization is in roadside attractions that are billed as world's largest.

So I also own and operate the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things Roadside Sideshow Expo in Downtown Lucas.

I've always been enthralled with people who are making things on their own with the materials available to them.

So it was a natural affinity for art environments.

But my other big passion were these roadside attractions that small towns would build that were full of superlatives.

So like the biggest, the smallest, the longest, the shortest, all of those always just kind of struck a really happy nerve with me.

So Lucas has always had arts at its core in a very special way.

It's art that doesn't call itself art, which is the absolute best kind.

It's art made by normal average people that expands something so much that it becomes extraordinary.

So the Garden of Eden started that off.

1932, Densmore passed, but that's not when that art making stopped, because by then he had inspired the Millers to start creating Miller's Park and Ed Root to make his art.

And while they were building, another generation was looking at these creative endeavors.

And then Florence Deeble's your art environment started.

And all of those celebrations would not have been possible without this sort of cornerstone of the Garden of Eden starting that creative ball rolling.

And it just keeps continuing, not from outside influences, but this is a real internal growth of self-expression that everybody here has a permission slip to do.

And so finding a rural community of 400 that has an art activity that rivals any metro area is really, really spectacular.

So now there's the Grassroots Art Center.

Welcome to the Grassroots Art Center here at Lucas, Kansas.

I'm Roslyn Schultz.

We have been working discovering Kansas outsider artists for 28 years now.

And so we have covered the entire state from northwest to southeast.

And these are yard environments.

The reason Lucas started lifting up these self-taught individuals who created yard environments was that we realized that what was unique about Lucas was that we had these individuals who were creating yard environments.

So we had four of them, Garden of Eden, well known with S. P. Densmore.

Ed Root, which we have some over here to my right, he created with concrete with colored glass embedded, and rocks.

Roy Miller created Miller Park and he used concrete and rocks and and then Florence Deeble, who was a schoolteacher here at Lucas.

She created in colored concrete postcard scenes in her yard of places she had visited.

And so we're thinking there is nobody else around that has people doing this.

I wonder if it's something unique or what is it?

Anyway, and so the more we researched it and actually there was an organization called the Kansas Grassroots Art Association, they had been researching people's environments for 20 years before we started.

And so Kansas has had a rich history in this.

So we are at like 144 individuals.

We have actually documented, gone to their site, interviewed them, photographed them.

We lifted up our Lucas people.

Several people have moved to town now that have brought their environments or their creativeness with them.

So we have mosaics and see prints and it's been a wonderful journey.

So, Bowl Plaza, our public restroom, which is world famous now, is started by 30 people, meeting saying what was a real need in Lucas.

And from that group of people, it was the public restroom.

At that meeting, the first one of the people said, Well, it can't be any ordinary restroom because you don't see ordinary things here at Lucas.

So then it was to go down that path.

How do you design a weird bathroom?

We got lots of guff when we came up with the idea of a sunken toilet.

We just kept moving forward and we said if we put a lot of mosaic on there and get people involved, then you know you're giving up your mother's dishware to be broken and put into the public restroom.

You'll want to come back and bring your kids back and see it.

You know, we had people give us travel plates.

We broke up John Deere plates and mugs and floor tile, leftover floor tile.

Now it's won national and international awards, and is quite an art attraction.

We had all 50 states within four months had signed the guest registry.

We had a lot of hoopla.

Actually, there's a painting was done the First Flush We had a big celebration.

But it was funny because like I was being interviewed by Wichita TV station and so he said, Well, let's just sit here and see what people think when they're coming up to here.

So we say, Well, what do you think this is?

And they say, I think it's an art center, is what they're going in to.

We'd laugh.

You know, it's a public restroom.

So we we we knew we had to checked the box.

It was it was something very unusual.

So Kansas has a long history of roadside attractions.

Garden of Eden was the early 1900s.

But even older than that, the World's Largest Hand-dug Well is in Greensburg, Kansas, done in the 1880s, 1890s and it was too big to actually hold water.

So it was a tourist attraction from almost day one.

So this sort of humble creation of large things really takes root in Kansas.

And that's actually sort of what kept me coming back to Kansas, having this sort of centralized location of Big Sky means that you can build big and it's a convenient pass through point for people traveling.

So people kind of think of this as flyover country, but it's really drive through country because there are these little gems just off the interstate.

Goodland, Kansas has the world's largest easel.

It was an art project that was worldwide, so it's actually one of many easels done on each continent.

So the Goodland easel is the one for the whole United States.

Wilson built one of the newest ones, the Czech Egg.

It's a nice, giant Czech egg, and they've started populating their downtown with smaller versions and different patterns.

The absolute newest world's largest thing is in Abeline Kansas.

They just constructed the world's largest belt buckle, so it's not even a past tense old road culture thing.

This is still happening today because we've got this sort of humble, yet humorous way of telling people about our towns and getting people to come here.

And that's my favorite part about studying these roadside attractions.

We've got one of the most iconic ones in the nation.

Who has not heard about the World's Largest Ball of Twine.

And so any roadside warrior worth his salt is going to take a detour to go up to Cawker City.

I'm Linda Clover.

I have lots of names.

I spend a lot of time at the ball of twine.

I've been called the Belle of the Ball or I've been called Shenia Twine, but I figure I'm the Crazy Twine Lady.

I do spend a lot of time at the ball.

I am what's called the caretaker.

The ball has been on most every TV show that's on.

There's at least four different Hallmark movies I know that it's been mentioned.

It's mentioned in books.

Just within the last few months I have a friend who read two separate books and found them mentioning Cawker City, Kansas, and the Ball of Twine.

Of course, it was mentioned in National Lampoon's Vacation.

Frank Stober started the ball of twine.

He had lived through the dustbowl, the Dirty Thirties, the Depression at that time, and people from that time saved everything they had because they knew you could lose it.

The twine has been around bales of hay or bales of straw, and every time he fed his cattle he would have two pieces, some eight foot long or so of twine.

He decided to roll it into a little ball and in that way he could take off what he needed.

His neighbors saw what he was doing and they had their twine also.

And they thought, We'll just give him our twine too.

So it became a fun thing.

And this man started it this Christmas Eve, 1953, in his barn.

The neighbors would come.

They would watch, but he always did the adding of the twine.

Brought it to town in 1961, when Kansas turned 100 to be in a parade.

And I like to say, would you believe he left it?

But this man kept a list of all of the farmers in the area who gave him twine.

So I know 80 some people that have twine in the middle of this ball.

And someone might come and say, I had family that that lived here and I think they farmed and they can tell me this person's name and I can look up my list and they are sometimes so excited when I tell them, show them this is this is your uncle's, your grandfather's, your great grandfather's name.

And then they put twine on the outside.

The ball of twine makes people smile.

They come, drive here just to add twine.

I've had ladies celebrate their 50th birthdays, and they drove up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I said, "Oh, what all are you doing?"

And they said, "Well, we came to the ball of twine.

We're going home."

So, you know, I've had a lot of interesting things like that.

In the book now, registration book, there just was someone here from China and just from Alberta, Canada.

Within the last month the book itself over over 30 states have people have signed it and because of social media, this is another big reason people know about it now.

They come and they post their pictures.

I had a guy came up, but he rode his motorcycle up from Florida and he said, "Now what am I going to tell all of my friends I'm going to do when I leave on one of these trips?

I've always said, I'm coming to the ball of twine and now I've done it."

I thought when I had a family here from Mongolia a few years ago that sounded like that was way out, way out there.

But it was right after that that I had two gentleman that signed it to Antarctica.

I've had them run up the steps from London, England, and just hug the ball.

I've wanted to do this for years.

People are just fascinated by it.

And Frank Stover would be amazed to know this.

The American road trip does seem to be this very unique American thing, and part of it is because of road culture.

But I think part of it, too, is that we're a young country and so some of our expressions come out in bigger form.

We might not have the oldest cathedral in the world, but we can build a giant chicken.

So yes, some of them have been tourist traps and that's okay.

I personally enjoy tourist traps.

I want to see the imagination of the people, how they brought them in, and how quirky it really is.

It's this sort of need to make your mark, how we've settled in these little pockets and how we sometimes feel passed by.

This was this outgrowth of saying, Hey, remember us, We're here too, And this is a way that you can connect to our histories in maybe a superficial way at first, but if you stop at a roadside attraction and start digging deeper, you end up finding out why the community built it, what that community means to itself that would flourish into this object that is that sort of beacon to bring people in to start telling their own stories of community.

This wasn't built to be the biggest.

It was built because he had the pieces of twine that he had kept, and rather than tripping and falling on them, he rolled them into a ball.

And neighbors joined him.

Yes, and the neighbors joined him.

And the neighbors are still joining him.

And neighbors come from a long ways away to do it.