My great-grandfather E.T. Wickham didn’t become an artist until he was 67 years old, after a lifetime of tobacco farming and raising nine children in Palmyra, Tennessee.
With nothing but cement, chicken wire, and rebar, he spent the next 20 years building nearly 40 life-size concrete sculptures along a rural road. My favorite is a self-portrait of himself riding a longhorn bull with electrified eyes with the inscription “ET Wickham headed to the wild and wooly west, remember me boys while I’m gone”
He worked until he was 87 and never stopped. Today his site is recognized as one of only seven folk art environments of its scale and significance in the entire country, standing alongside names like Howard Finster and the Watts Towers. Most of his work is now vandalized along the rural road which made for a ton of urban legends growing up but some of his work remains untouched in museums, universities and one standing in front of the Soldiers Chapel at Ft. Campbell Kentucky.
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