Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden by Herman Rusch
We found ourselves on a roadtrip to Minneapolis this past week and we were able to cross this one off the list.
It’s not a place we would have drove 5 hours just to see, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone to drive an extensive drive exclusively with the purpose of visiting, but it was on our way so making the pit stop was easy.
Enjoy the photos, the Noweigan hunter fighting a bear sculpture was so detailed, down to the spiked hair on the bear’s nape and I personally loved the multi-arched sculpture titled “Arches”, felt like something you could make a game out of.
On the property there’s a bio of the artist, Herman Rusch. In brief he was was an immigrant of Prussia and farm hand at an early age. He lived a very Midwestern life, farming most of his life until retirement. Retired, he purchased the Prairie Moon Pavilion in 1958, which he planned to convert into a roadside museum with taxidermies, fossils, and random oddities he got his hands on. It was during this year, in his attempt to fill his museum grounds that he began making these sculptures with scraps and rocks around the area. By 1974 at the age of 89 he had created 40 large scale sculptures. He was known for playing the fiddle in his museum and taking people on tours around the property. In 1979 he sold his property so he could have more time to fish and fiddle. And 6 years later, in 1985, 11 days after his 100 birthday he passed away.
It’s an odd property to find, located close to the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, Apple Maps absolutely refused to give us the directions to it, but I found it on Google and so here it is,
52727 Prairie Moon Rd,
Fountain City, WI 54629
Few other notes:
The drive to get there was chill, scenic with the Mississippi River and we passed some cute towns along the way. There was a few missing sculptures on the property including one titled “Indian Scout on Pony”, unclear why they were missing. The pavilion looks like it could potentially be open for visitors, but it was closed when we arrived.
The perfect day to go would be on a clear fair weathered day, you can find some nice scenery with the hills behind and there are two picnic tables on the property making it a good rest stop location to stretch your legs on the way to your destination.
To see more sites on my list of artist sites I would like to visit in my lifetime click here.
