Enchanted Highway Roadside Sculptures

The town of Regent, thirty miles south of I-94, was dying, so metal sculptor and retired schoolteacher Gary Greff decided to do something to revitalize and attract attention to western North Dakota’s often bypassed small towns. In 1990 he began to create ten enormous sculptures from scrap metal and placed one every few miles along the popularly named “Enchanted Highway” (as it now appears in tourism literature) on the thirty-two-mile stretch from Gladstone to Regent. All the installations face north toward oncoming traffic from I-94. The Enchanted Highway passes through scenic farm country with intermittent buttes. Each themed sculpture, for example, Grasshoppers in the Field, The Tin Family, and Teddy Roosevelt on a Bucking Horse, has a developed pull-out for parking and several have picnic shelters. An additional sculpture, Geese in Flight, was installed in 2001 at the Gladstone exit from I-94, as an artistic billboard enticing travelers to exit and head south to the Enchanted Highway Gift Shop in Regent. Greff has also endeavored to conserve the historic German Hungarian immigrant Lampl homestead along the same highway (6 miles south of Lefor, 0.25 miles north of Fisherman’s Dream sculpture). Each sculptural construction represents a labor of love by the visionary artist, who scrapes together donations of money and material.