Gilgal Sculpture Garden

The story

You don't stumble onto Gilgal by accident. It sits wedged inside a block behind suburban houses and commercial strip buildings on 500 South, invisible from the street unless you know which alley gap to duck through. Between 1945 and his death in 1963, Thomas Battersby Child Jr.—a high-ranking LDS bishop and professional stonemason—spent 18 years turning his quarter-acre backyard into a dense theological vision carved out of raw stone, masonry equipment, and industrial slag.

Child didn't carve conventional garden statues. He hauled in massive boulders, using custom oxyacetylene torches and stone-cutting machinery to etch Mormon scripture, poetry, and esoteric symbolism straight into the rock face. His most notorious piece is an uncanny limestone sphinx bearing the detailed facial features of Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, staring silently across the lawn. Nearby stands a representation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream from the Book of Daniel—a multi-layered figure forged from stone, clay, iron, brass, and gold leaf—alongside a sacrificial altar and a dedicated shrine to his wife, Bertha.

When Child died, the lot fell into private hands and faced real risk of being bulldozed for residential development until the Friends of Gilgal Garden, Trust for Public Land, and Salt Lake City stepped in to preserve it. Today it functions as a municipal public park, preserving a rare pocket of visionary outsider art where deep LDS scripture meets raw heavy machinery.