The Hartman Rock Garden in Springfield recently appointed Kevin Rose as the organization’s first Executive Director. The popular garden is a nationally-recognized eclectic folk-art site built by hand between 1932 and 1944 by former resident Ben Hartman. In this conversation with WYSO’s Jerry Kenney, Rose, who is an historian talks about his goals for the garden.
Kevin Rose: For the past 20 years, I've worked for the Turner Foundation, a philanthropic foundation in Springfield, Ohio, and my role has been history, but it's been really creative placemaking. How can we use the past to build a better future for our community? And one of the main assets we have is the Hartman Rock Garden. So, in a way, I've been working with Hartman since it was created as a as a nonprofit back in 2010. I led that process. So, I've been involved as more of kind of a management side or a philanthropic side for a number of years. So that's what that's what made it a good set.
Jerry Kenney: What has always appealed to you about history? What draws you into that field?
Rose: The first thing that really connected me in the history was a visit to Boston. And it wasn't just history, right? History is interesting, but I find it really powerful when you have history of place where you're at a spot and you know that something happened there, right where history lives in the world around us rather than in books. I, of course, love history and books as well, but I love history. So, I love walking tours. I love being out where history happened and in those spaces. And Springfield is a pretty amazing city, historically speaking, a very rich history. And so, when I was hired 20 years ago it was really to help the city build that identity of understanding its history. So, I mean, it is a job, but it's also a passion. What do they say? Do something you love to do, and you'll never work a day.
And that's kind of how I've always felt. I've been very fortunate to be able to work in history, but it's just knowing the connection to people that came before you, it's a really powerful thing and it's also really important to our tourism industry, a really important part of our economy, really important part of connecting people to a place. I think a lot of times you'll hear people talk about lament, kind of the loss of our community across the country. And really history has its own sense of community. It's how we build community. It's how we identify place, one place from another, and we use that. So, we use that here in Springfield. And Hartman is certainly one of our most important assets in that. So it's just kind of a continuation, maybe a little more specific than what I've been doing before that was so broad.
Kenney: Well, history is very important to navigating the future. So, tell me, what are some of your goals? What are your plans for the Hartman Rock Garden as you move forward?
Rose: Yeah. So, one of the amazing things about Hartman is that it's free, right? It's always free. There's no cost to be there. There's no cost to visit. So, it attracts broad, diverse groups of populations. But we need to continue working on how we interpret all of these audiences, how we make sure that we have the right materials that really cater to a bunch of different audiences. So some of what we're doing right now is we're translating our tour materials into multiple languages because we get a lot of visitors from all over the world and they don't always speak English, and we want to make sure they have a rich experience in Hartman Rock Garden as well.
Another big project we're working on is accessibility. We say that we attract all audiences. Well, obviously, access is a big part of that, making sure that people in wheelchairs, people that have used the aid of walkers or other mobility devices are able to come in. We're in the middle of creating a new touch assisted tour for people who are blind or have low vision. So really a lot of it is just access, making sure that we're reaching as broad of audience as possible. And then a big part of that is we currently have very little in terms of visitor services, so we get visitors from all across the globe. A lot of times they've been in a car for 5 hours. They get out, they're stretching their legs. You know, they're from a car trip, right? And you're just you're so thankful to be out of the car and then they discover we don't have restrooms. So, it's it creates some short visit sometimes.
So really making sure we do more in terms of visitor services that we're a little more welcoming to people. Hartman never had restrooms back in the day, but, you know, for visitors, but this is a new age, and as an institution like it is, we really need to be able to welcome everyone a little bit better than we welcome them today.
Kenney: So, you've got to integrate the accessibility and services while still keeping true to what you have today.
Rose: Yeah, and some of it's possible, some of it's not right. We can't widen the sidewalks through the works of art. Sidewalks are part of the art. So, there's a certain there's certain ways that we're restricted. Any time that you're dealing with historic resources, you can only go so far. But we want to do as much as we can without hurting that experience for for everyday visitors.
Kenney: So, people who want to learn more about the Hartman Rock Garden or maybe even volunteer their time and energy to it, how can they find out more information?
Rose: The best way is at HartmanRocks.org. That's actually a brand-new website we just launched, has a lot more capability putting in stories, and so we're going to be continuing to put new history in pictures, photographs up on our website. So that's a great spot to learn.
Kenney: Kevin Rose is the executive director of the Hartman Rock Garden in Springfield. Thanks so much for your time.
Rose: Yeah, thank you.
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