Fred Smith's Wisconsin Concrete Park
The Wisconsin Concrete Park is an outdoor museum with 237 embellished concrete sculptures, built between 1949 and 1964 by Fred Smith, a retired lumberjack and self-taught artist. Installed throughout Smith’s northwoods property, the site is a historical panorama of life-size and larger-than-life tableaux depicting people, animals, and events from local, regional and national history. Throughout this remarkable site Smith depicted history as an elastic, organic entity in which local and national people, events, and histories are intermingled with animals, all sharing a common landscape. The site is recognized as a masterwork in the genre of vernacular art environments and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The park has been to hell and back, damaged severely by two major wind storms and ongoing effects of existing outside. Friends of Fred Smith, Inc. works tenaciously to preserve this outdoor museum; preservation is conducted according to high standards and is guided by an extensive archive of vintage documentation. Funds are much needed to support efforts to preserve this vernacular art environment, which falls outside the boundaries of most conventional historic preservation definitions and is a local and national treasure.
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