Southern Cemetery

I know I sound like a broken record when I say ‘I LOVE OUTSIDER ART!’ but I can’t help myself. It’s just so. darn. cool.

One of my bucket list experiences was to visit the E.T. Wickham sculptures as well as the cemetery where the only remaining fully intact ‘in the wild’ statues remains. And I’m so glad that I recently had the opportunity to embark on an epic road trip to Tennessee with some goods friends, and we got to see soooo much cool stuff including all/everything Wickham! Literal outside art right here!

Enoch Tanner Wickham left an artistic legacy in the form of a permanent concrete sculpture park by the side of the road near Palmyra, Tennessee, across the Cumberland River from Clarksville. Wickham, a descendant of early settlers of Montgomery County, was a farmer, a woodsman, and a self-taught artist with a penchant for engineering. Around 1950, he began creating larger-than-life-size statuary using a combination of bought materials and whatever was at hand. Sometimes he smoothed concrete directly onto iron bed frames, electrical cord, or bailing wire; at other times, he used metal stovepipe to cast it into sections. Most of Wickham’s sculptures were placed on pedestals, usually with dedicatory inscriptions. Clearly, he meant these to be public monuments. During what for most people would be retirement years, E.T. Wickham was just hitting his stride. He produced as many as forty sculptures over the twenty-year period before his death at age eighty-seven.

The sculptures ranged from the Kennedy men to an overall clad Jesus Christ to Wickham’s favorite hunting dogs. He definitely mixed politics and personal.

Sadly, the majority of the statues fell hard to vandalism and there are only 2 exceptions to that rule: one are the statues moved to safer locations (a university campus and a museum) and the other is this specific angel he crafted for the family cemetery.

E.T. Wickham, his wife and various other family members, including his son who was killed in France during the war, are all buried here. This was a family who didn’t stray far and still own a goodish amount of land in the area…

The majority of the original and now damaged sculptures rest in the two locations just about 1/2 a mile from one another and they’re all accessible to the inquisitive visitor but please note that they are on that aforementioned private family-owned land.

So another checkmark for my travelin’ bucket list. Wahoo! And I’m making a 2025 specific list that will be part of my next year’s goals. Roadtrip > resolution!

And if you’d like to read/see more about Wickham then you should pop over to my friend’s blog Y’all Waterfall. She’s got some stellar photos and a more detailed history on the sculptures…