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    "headline": "A sprained ankle, 40 concrete statues: the Wisconsin farmhouse folk art site Grandview is trending again",
    "description": "Nick Engelbert built Grandview outside Hollandale between the 1930s and 1950s; after 29 years of neglect it was rescued in 1991 and is open from sunrise to sunset.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-26T06:05:10+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Folk art, Nick Engelbert, outsider art, road trips, Wisconsin",
    "articleBody": "A Wisconsin farmer laid up with a sprained ankle in the mid-1930s mixed some concrete and made a sculpture. By 1950 Nick Engelbert had filled his yard outside the village of Hollandale with more than 40 of them and covered his farmhouse in a mosaic of stones, shells and broken china. The story of the place he called Grandview has been circulating widely online again this week. It is not new, but the site is real, restored and still open, and its history is stranger than the viral summary suggests. From Engelbert Koletnik to Nick Engelbert He was born Engelbert Koletnik in Austria in 1881, according to the Kohler family’s arts foundation, which later rescued his work. He trained under a master machinist, was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, served two years and then left Europe for good, changing his name in America to start over. In 1913 he married Katherine Thoni, a Swiss immigrant. In 1922 they bought a seven-acre farm just outside Hollandale, in Iowa County in southwest Wisconsin, and raised four children there. A University of Wisconsin page on Midwest concrete parks adds that he also worked as a cheese maker and that the couple ran what they called the Grandview Dairy. How a yard became an art environment Family members later recalled that Engelbert said little about his sculptures; he simply kept making them. What he built drew on his own life and on the popular culture around him: Snow White with the Seven Dwarfs, and Neptune’s Fountain Swiss patriots, a nod to Katherine’s homeland, and a Viking of Norway An American eagle, and Uncle Sam alongside a Democratic donkey and a Republican elephant An organ grinder with his monkey, a street act common in the Europe of his boyhood Katherine designed and tended the flower beds that framed the figures. By the early 1940s Engelbert had also encrusted the whole exterior of the plain clapboard house with concrete set with glass shards, shells, fragments of dinnerware and pieces of porcelain figurines. He named the place for the “grand view” of rolling farmland around it. Then he started a second career. On his 70th birthday in 1951 he was given a set of oil paints, taught himself to use them, and over the next decade produced about 74 paintings of Grandview, places he had traveled and everyday comedy. Those paintings are held by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Timeline: decline and rescue Katherine died in 1960. Within a short time Engelbert had sold the farm and gone east to his daughter’s home in Baltimore, painting a mural of the Hollandale countryside on the living room wall before he left. He died in 1962, on his birthday. What followed was close to three decades of neglect: wind, ice, falling branches and vandals broke the statues apart, according to the University of Wisconsin account. The arithmetic of the rescue shows how close the site came to vanishing. Engelbert’s death in 1962 and the foundation’s purchase of the property in 1991 are 29 years apart, and by then most of the sculptures were in pieces or missing. Conservators used old family photographs to rebuild them, conserving some originals, reproducing others and replicating a few; the work took about three years. In 1997 the foundation gave Grandview to the Pecatonica Educational Charitable Foundation, a volunteer group from Hollandale and nearby Blanchardville that still runs it. The restoration is ongoing. Winters are hard on concrete, and the foundation says it has brought back one of the three Swiss patriots, the Snow White tableau and, recently, the full Uncle Sam group, while pieces such as a Paul Bunyan and a Carinthian forest ranger wait in storage. Visiting Grandview The site sits at 7351 Wisconsin Highway 39, just west of Hollandale, a village of about 305 people roughly midway between New Glarus and Mineral Point. It is open from sunrise to sunset, and the organ grinder by the entrance doubles as the donation box for upkeep. The foundation lists its phone number as (608) 574-7169 and also runs summer art workshops on the property. Engelbert’s own view of the place is quoted on the foundation’s website: “If a man can’t be happy in a little place in Wisconsin, he hasn’t the makings of happiness in his soul.” Further reading University of Wisconsin: Concrete Parks of the Midwest, Hollandale Image: TheCatalyst31, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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