Gilgal Garden Visit
Gilgal Sculpture Garden is a wonderfully quirky hidden gem. Tucked away at 749 East 500 South in Salt Lake City, it’s the only designated visionary art environment in Utah, featuring an all-season garden, 12 original sculptures, and over 70 stones engraved with scriptures, poems, and literary texts.
It was designed and built by LDS businessman Thomas Battersby Child Jr. (1888–1963) in his spare time, starting as a backyard project when he was 57 years old. Each sculpture and stone represents an idea that resonated with Child in his lifelong spiritual quest.
The most famous piece is a sphinx bearing the face of Joseph Smith.
After Child’s death in 1963, a preservation group called Friends of Gilgal Garden (FOGG) formed in 1997 to prevent development on the site, and it became a Salt Lake City public park in 2000. It’s free to visit and a surprisingly peaceful spot tucked between residential buildings in the middle of the city.
Child named the garden Gilgal after the Biblical location where Joshua ordered the Israelites to place twelve stones as a memorial. The name “Gilgal” is sometimes translated to mean “circle of standing stones,” which is an apt name for a sculpture garden.
Gilgal is also the name of a city and a valley in the Book of Mormon.