Mrs. Pope's Museum - Laura (Forester) Pope

Artist-built Environment | Sculpture environment | Private property -- Visible from the street

"Surrounding her general store and house in a rural area near Ochlocknee, Georgia, Laura Pope built a sculpture garden that eventually included about two hundred accomplished life-size cement figures of famous women and heroes of the two world wars."

This environment was dismantled after her death. Current owners have reopened it as a BnB and event space, while living on premises. They are in the process of finding and attempting to return the missing sculptures.

Museum did contain more than 200 statues, all the work of Mrs. Pope Forester Statues honor heroes of both World Wars, Martha Berry, Red Cross, Gold Star Mothers, and many others, including old maid school-teachers.

From SPACES archives:

Between 1900 (other accounts say 1908 or 1919) and her death in 1953, Laura Pope built an extraordinary garden around her antebellum rural residence. The garden was comprised of over 200 figurative sculptures, mostly three-dimensional, but others bas-reliefs or busts set into or topping the walls and the elaborate arched gateway on the periphery of her rural property. She built her works up on a metal infrastructure composed of found objects such as scrap iron and tin cans, later covering them with concrete. She often later colored them with vegetable dyes she brewed from flowers and berries.

Her subjects, mostly “outstanding individuals of fact and fancy” and mostly female, featuring diverse and wide-ranging significant or iconic women (the founder of the Red Cross, Japanese war mothers, spinster schoolteachers, the first woman to successfully sue for divorce in Georgia, the first woman Senator Mrs. W.H. Felton, and Revolutionary War heroine Nancy Hart), but also figures from both sexes from tales and legend (Scarlett O’Hara, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Indian hero Uncas of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and Cleopatra), and history (illustrious generals  such as Eisenhower and MacArthur). There was also a series of seven faces representing the world’s major religions; they appeared to be plaster casts, and it has been suggested that they were molded from her friends.

Mrs. Pope’s husband had been a justice of the peace, so she also created “Cupid’s Room” within her museum:  she placed a mirror so that when the bridal couple entered she could say, “Take a glance behind and get a last look at freedom.” Her sense of humor pervaded many of her sculptures and bas-reliefs as well. It was said that she preferred a sack of cement to a new dress any day.

After her death, the family held onto the property without making significant changes, and for some time it remained a local tourist attraction and roadside curiosity that was supported, in part, by a civic club and Pelham’s Chamber of Commerce. However, in 1974, her only surviving son sold it to a mill owner from the nearby town of Meigs. He thought that the sculptures “had done passed their days of bein’ useful,” so they dismantled and destroyed most of the freestanding works, leaving only some dozen that had been built into the walls. Most of the rest were destroyed in 1981, but by 1990 several still remained within the garden walls. The present owners (since 1995) have not effected additional damage. The house had been put up for sale in 2009, but is no longer on the market.

Those remaining works that had been part of the street-side wall and gateway are viewable from the road, but the site of the museum is now held privately and is not open to the public.

~Jo Farb Hernández

Credits:

SPACES https://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/laura-pope-forrester-mrs-popes-museum-and-garden/

Excerpted text and partial images graciously provided by Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, from "Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments."

From "Unsigned, Unsung . . . Whereabouts Unknown" by Jim Roche, Florida State University Gallery and Museum Press, 1993; out of print.

 

Creator: Laura Pope (Forester): 1873–1953
Creation date: 1900-1953

192 Pope's Store Road
Pelham, GA