Decoder Ring: The Secret Life of Lawn Ornaments

Summary

Slow Burn — Decoder Ring: "The Secret Life of Lawn Ornaments"

Podcast: Slow Burn (Slate Podcasts)
Host: Willa Paskin
Episode Airdate: July 17, 2024

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, host Willa Paskin embarks on an exploration of lawn ornaments—those curious fixtures that dot yards and gardens across the world. The episode seeks to decipher the meanings, cultural history, and sometimes even dark legacies behind these seemingly harmless garden decorations. Through interviews, archival audio, and deep research, the show investigates three categories of lawn ornaments: the whimsical garden gnome, the controversial lawn jockey, and the rare phenomenon of the "ornamental hermit." The episode ultimately asks: What are these ornaments trying to tell us?

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Ubiquity and Mystery of Lawn Ornaments

• Opening Reflection: Willa notes that while many homes have political or belief-driven signs, lawn ornaments offer subtler, sometimes ambiguous communication about the owner.

  “Sometimes, as you’re passing someone’s house, you see a more ambiguous communication… Sometimes you pass a lawn ornament.” (00:12)

2. The World of Lawn Ornament Sellers

• Interview with Tatiana Ziegler (Landscape Designer, Ziegler’s Statuary, NJ)
  • Discusses the variety and popularity of ornaments (aliens, bears, gnomes, pig butlers).
  • Explains that buyers often choose statues that "speak" to them personally, sometimes just to amuse (or mildly antagonize) neighbors.

  “Anything that's odd looking is a better seller.” (01:57, Tatiana Ziegler) "If they don't buy [a gargoyle] because they love it, they buy it because they want to, like, I guess, torture their neighbors with it." (02:19, Ariana Ziegler)

• Ornaments as Self-Expression:
  • “Just like clothing, right, it has to fit you, it has to go with you. It has to be your personality. It's the same thing with a statue.” (02:54, Tatiana Ziegler)

3. Case Study No. 1: The Garden Gnome

• Twigs Way (Garden Historian, Author of Garden Gnomes: A History)
  • Gnomes as divisive: "People either love them or hate them." (05:17)
  • The roots of garden figurines trace back to Ancient Rome, where small, brightly colored statues adorned gardens.
  • Evolution from Roman statues to Italian Renaissance figures, to German mining folklore (gnomes as miners—hence the hats as early safety helmets).
  • Handcrafted beginnings: Ceramic workshops in 19th-century Germany, exporting to English elites.
  • Cultural Shift: From aristocratic status items to suburban kitsch, notably after Disney's Snow White "Disney-fied" their look and mass production made them cheap and popular.

  “It’s only when they dared to descend into suburban lawns, they were dismissed as cheap and tasteless.” (14:45, Willa Paskin)

  • Rebellion and Satire: By 1970s, groups like the "Gnome Liberation Front" stole gnomes from gardens as protest.
  • Revival & Enduring Appeal: Gnomes are presently back in favor, symbolizing fun and a disregard for others’ judgments.

  “Nowadays they’re only telling me that they’re quite fun and they don’t care what other people think about them.” (17:28, Twigs Way)

4. Case Study No. 2: The Lawn Jockey—From Icon to Eyesore

• David Pilgrim (Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University):
  • Describes the "lawn jockey" artifact and its racist caricature.

  “If you look closely at the objects, you’ll see that a lot of the features… have been distorted.” (18:55)

  • The proliferation of racist "black collectibles" post-Civil War, telling the false story of "happy" Black servitude.

  "[Such objects] were part of a whole mythology... that the South... had a special relationship with the enslaved people..." (20:17, Kenneth Goings)

  • Jockeys shifted from generic enslaved groomsman to jockeys due to the prevalence of Black horse riders in early U.S. racing.
  • Postwar Suburbs: Lawn jockeys became yard markers in white suburbs—an unspoken sign of exclusion to Black Americans in the age of "white flight."

  “The lawn jockey was a signal of what we think of you. And you didn't have to put up a sign. You just had to put out a lawn jockey.” (23:48, Kenneth Goings)

  • Myth-Busting: Persistent, feel-good myths claim that the "lawn jockey" honors Black patriotism or was a marker for the Underground Railroad. Historians debunk these; there's no evidence for these stories.

  "That is total nonsense." (25:46, Kenneth Goings, on the George Washington/Lawn Jockey legend)

  • The myth persists, with people sincerely believing in its positive origins as a way to reclaim or justify the ornament.

  “False narratives are still pushback, but I don’t want to leave it there. We don’t need to make up stories. There have just been wonderful stories of African-American heroism… So instead of us promoting stories that aren’t accurate, we need to uncover those that are and then celebrate them.” (28:42, David Pilgrim)

  • Today, lawn jockeys are rarely seen, sometimes "whitewashed" (literally painted white), but their history cannot be so easily erased.

  “If I want to build a statue that honors a Black person, there’s no limit to how much of that I can do. I’d be less interested in reclaiming it and more interested in just building new statues.” (29:55, David Pilgrim)

5. Case Study No. 3: Human Lawn Ornaments—the Garden Hermit

• Ned Harwood (Art Historian):
  • Documents the 18th-century English practice of hiring actual people to live as "hermits" in garden hermitages (artificial caves or huts) for years, sometimes never speaking, growing long nails and beards for authenticity.

  “Mr. Charles Hamilton... advertised for a person who is willing to become a hermit in that beautiful retreat.” (30:59, ad read by Ned Harwood)

  • The hermit was both a status symbol and a device for inspiring reflective, philosophical contemplation for the landowner and guests.
  • Sometimes, fake hermits or even automata (robotic mannequins) took the “hermit” role for show.

  “We know about a wooden hermit that was an automata that could talk to people.” (38:33, Ned Harwood)

  • Eventually, this custom declined—abolitionist sentiment raised questions about the hermits’ well-being, and the fad faded by the mid-19th century.

  “Keeping a hermit to some extent becomes problematized because there is uncertainty in the community as to whether the person is being kept against their will or not. So we know of liberated Hermits, I mean, people who are freed from being hermits. One of whom did not want to be liberated…” (40:37, Ned Harwood)

  • The “hermitage” as a place of retreat echoes into modern “man caves” and is tied to the universal cycle of engagement and withdrawal.

  “A man cave is a hermitage as far as I’m concerned… I think that desire … to get away is still very much with us.” (41:58, Ned Harwood)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Social Function of Lawn Ornaments:

  “It’s a bit like looking in their underwear drawer.” (04:56, Twigs Way, about gardens revealing character)

• On Gnomes and Taste:

  “To me, I mean, a gnome is… just a chunk of concrete… it ebbs and flows all the time [in popularity].” (15:03, Twigs Way)

• On Reclaiming Myths:

  “We don’t need to make up stories. There have just been wonderful stories of African American heroism…” (28:42, David Pilgrim)

• On Living Hermit Ornaments:

  “If he lived there under these restrictions till the end of the term, he was to receive 700 guineas. But on breach of any of them, the whole was to be forfeited.” (31:48, Ned Harwood)

• Personal Reflection:

  “A little gnome hiding out in some corner that passersby would only see if they were really looking, really noticing the things around them… Maybe I’ll have to find a spot for one.” (42:24, Willa Paskin)

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Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Summary / Notable Content | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:05 | Opening reflection on signs and lawn ornaments as communication | | 01:04 | Ziegler family discusses contemporary ornament trends | | 04:24 | Introduction of the garden gnome and history begins | | 10:08 | German gnome workshops: craftsmanship and history | | 13:21 | Disney’s impact on the popularization of gnomes | | 15:28 | The "Gnome Liberation Front" and the cultural backlash | | 18:37 | David Pilgrim introduces the lawn jockey and its history | | 20:06 | Kenneth Goings on the societal myths of post-Reconstruction collectibles | | 23:48 | Lawn jockeys as racial markers in postwar America | | 25:46 | Debunking the George Washington “Faithful Groomsman” myth | | 28:42 | The necessity to celebrate real Black history, not comforting myths | | 30:59 | Introduction of the English “ornamental hermit” phenomenon | | 35:22 | The construction and decoration of garden hermitages | | 38:33 | The emergence of dummy, robotic, and mannequin hermits | | 40:37 | The problematic ethics and decline of live-in hermits | | 41:58 | The modern legacy—hermitages to “man caves” as spaces for retreat | | 42:24 | Willa’s closing reflection: openness to the whimsy of a garden gnome |

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Overall Tone

• Thoughtful, reflective, and deeply curious—with wit and a touch of self-deprecating humor.
• Direct engagement with complex and sometimes uncomfortable historical realities.
• Invites critical thinking about what seems harmless (lawn ornaments) and their hidden meanings.

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Conclusion

Through tales of gnomes, lawn jockeys, and hermits, this episode of Slow Burn/Decoder Ring uncovers how what we put on our lawns is never simply ornamental. These decorations are loaded with meanings—personal, historical, playful, and sometimes harmful—offering insight into our desires for identity, status, amusement, and even retreat. In peeling back the layers, Willa Paskin and her guests challenge us to reconsider our judgments and pay closer attention to the stories—funny, kitschy, or shameful—quietly embedded in our communities.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

Foreign.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

If you take a walk or a bus ride or a drive. These days, it's hard to miss the signs. I mean, literal signs. It doesn't matter if you're in the city or the suburbs of the country. People have signs in their windows, in their yards, telling you in no uncertain terms what they like, what they hate, what they believe. But sometimes, as you're passing someone's house, you see a more ambiguous communication, a message that they maybe couldn't put into words or wouldn't want to anyway. Sometimes you pass a lawn ornament.

[Tatiana Ziegler]

Some people, they want to look outside and enjoy the waterfall, or they want to enjoy. We'll see an angel. I think every statue that we sell has a reason for people.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

This is Tatiana Ziegler. She. She's been a landscape designer for the past 25 years, and she's the proprietor of Ziegler's Statuary, a store in North Jersey that sells concrete lawn ornaments of all shapes and sizes.

[Tatiana Ziegler]

This trend, like, during COVID we couldn't keep a Buddha in if we tried, really. Everything from the smallest to the largest sold out immediately. This year it's been bears. It's just bears.

[Ariana Ziegler]

People come in and you ask them, like, what are you looking for? And they're like, well, I don't know. And it's like, it really has to sit, speak to you.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

This is Tatiana's daughter Ariana, who works at the shop, too.

[Ariana Ziegler]

And then they see something like, oh, my, this is amazing. And then they get that. And then you leave with something so, like, random, like. Like the aliens, you know, like, there's aliens.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Oh, there's the alien. Oh, my God, I haven't seen the alien. People buy that alien? Yeah, the alien, a classic little green man in gray concrete, is sprawled on the ground, resting on its elbow, making a peace sign with its other hand. They also sell swans, Virgin Marys, dolphins, mermaids, lions, mushrooms, fountains, little boys peeing into fountains, even Bigfoot.

[Tatiana Ziegler]

Anything that's odd looking is a better seller.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Really? Yeah. Odd. Are the peeing boy statues popular?

[Tatiana Ziegler]

So people love it, but they usually.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Go in the backyard. They don't go in the front yard. Fair enough.

[Twigs Way]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

They don't sell anything plastic, though. So no pink flip flamingos here. But they do have a lot of gargoyles.

[Ariana Ziegler]

If they don't buy it because they love it, they buy it because they want to, like, I guess, torture their neighbors with it. Because, I mean, even one lady, she's like, this lady thinks her property line is here. I'm putting this gargoyle here, it's staring right at her house.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Ariana personally loves this one big pig butler. A concrete pig standing on its hind legs, wearing a chef's hat, holding out a platter.

[Ariana Ziegler]

You put it by the girl, you can actually hold, like napkins or condiments.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

But Ariana and Tatiana both know that not every lawn ornament is for everyone.

[Tatiana Ziegler]

So, just like clothing, right, it has to fit you, it has to go with you. It has to be your personality. It's the same thing with a statue. The pieces do mean something to people.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

But what exactly they mean? Well, that's what we're about to find out. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Lawn ornaments are everywhere. But for something so ubiquitous, they're also mysterious. What's the person with the flamingo or the gargoyle in their yard trying to say? Why do they want to say it so publicly? In today's episode, we're going to take a hard look at three specific lawn ornaments. The garden variety and the not so common, the adorable and the odious, the plastic and concrete and the flesh and blood. Those that are still with us and some that are long gone. And all that speak volumes without saying a word. So today on Decoder Ring, what are the lawn ornaments trying to tell us? When I started thinking about lawn ornaments, there was one that popped into my mind first.

[Ned Harwood]

They're called the gnomes. What, you've never seen a gnome?

[Willa Paskin]

Well, they're all around us.

[Ned Harwood]

Just take a closer look.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

That's from the 1980s animated series David the Gnome. And those bright plastic, chubby little sprites with pointy hats and rosy cheeks placed in a garden's nooks and crannies are what I picture when I hear the phrase lawn ornament. And so I reached out to the very aptly named garden historian Twigs Way, who's fascinated with gardens because of what they reveal about the gardener.

[Twigs Way]

It's a bit like looking in their underwear drawer. You know, are they uptight? Are they kind of casual? Are they loose? You know, what's their attitude towards the world in general? What's their attitude towards not just their gardens, but also, you know, kind of society? How do they see themselves?

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Twigs is also the author of a book called Garden Gnomes A History.

[Twigs Way]

Gnomes are absolutely fascinating. They're incredibly divisive. People either love them or hate them. You know, some people might go, this garden isn't for us. And they make assumptions about the gnomes. They make assumptions about the people that have the gnomes that they are basically rather tasteless. And that's kind of predicated, they think, on the history of the gnomes.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

I'm delighted about this because I, if I see a garden gnome in a yard in America, I'm just like, you have plastic schlock in your yard. And I don't understand this.

[Twigs Way]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And I don't understand what you're trying to tell me. I think it's tacky, just like you said. But I'm about to learn all the ways that I should interrogate that feeling.

[Twigs Way]

Well, that's the thing. You just have to step back from everything you think you know about them, take a great big breath and go, right, where are we starting with this? Hang on. Why do we actually even have a small figure in the garden? Where do these come from?

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And the answer is not mid century suburbia.

[Twigs Way]

So what if I took you back to Rome and we could for a moment go back in time and I took you into one of the gardens in Pompeii? So instead of this plastic gnome, brightly colored, you would see in that courtyard garden maybe 20 statues, small statues, all brightly colored, all painted of little figures, some of them pissing against a wall, some of them, you know, pissing up against a fountain. Would that still be tactless schlock, you know, or would that be, wow, it's Roman?

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Centuries later, rich people in the Renaissance and Baroque eras knew their answer. That's when the tradition of putting little statues in gardens began in earnest, because it seemed like a connection to the Roman past.

[Twigs Way]

Well, there are all these statues again, colorfully painted, playing musical instruments, that kind of thing.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

These little figures could be found in elegant gardens across Europe. The statues, however, depict people, characters out of the Italian commedia dell', arte, not gnomes.

[Twigs Way]

To get to the gnome, we then have to mix in the idea of the pan European idea, in fact, of the little folk that we can't quite see that you glimpse out of the corner of your eye.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Fairies, leprechauns, brownies, sprites. Nearly every, every country has their own version of the mythical little creature. But the most direct connection to lawn ornaments are the little folk in the mining communities of central Europe who would.

[Twigs Way]

Help or hinder, depending on their moods in the mine.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Have they always had the cute little hats?

[Twigs Way]

They've always had hats. Always had hats. And the reason they have hats is because when you're down the mine, you need to have head protection and the pointy hat has padding in it. It's like an early safety helmet.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Amazing.

[Twigs Way]

So the first thing that hits the mine top is your padded, pointed red hat.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Artisans in Central Europe began turning these little folk into little figurines, carving them out of wood as good luck charms or casting them in ceramic. And in the 19th century, one mining village in the center of Germany would become the gnome capital of the world. This is Sven Berar. He works at Zwergstadt Grafenroda, a small ceramic gnome workshop in the state of Thuringia that's turning 150 this year. We sent a German producer to help us record him in his shop. And, and why this town? Why did this town become the center? Sven told me that in the 1800s, the area was rich in clay deposits, and so a flourishing ceramics industry grew in the village. The process they use for making gnome figurines hasn't changed much since then. The ground clay is mixed following a secret recipe, and then it's poured into molds. After drying for several days, it's removed, scraped clean, and fired in a kiln. Once it's cooled down, the gnome can be hand painted. And that part is Sven's specialty. It's all a delicate, painstaking process, a far cry from the plastic gnomes you find in a Home Depot today. And Twigsway says it's the artistry of these little figurines that caught the eye of English tourists taking fashionable jobs to Germany in the 19th century.

[Twigs Way]

They see these figures very nicely made, very expensive, hand painted, hand molded, all the rest of it, and they buy them as tourist mementos and take them back home with them to England.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

As the figurines entered England, they took on a new name, gnomes. Most of the tourists importing these handcrafted German goods were very wealthy, and they installed these gnomes indoors. They used them as dining table ornaments or place card holders. But then a man named Sir Charles Isham had the fateful idea of moving them outside.

[Twigs Way]

So we always look back to him as the person who kind of introduced the gnome to the garden. But he is eccentric. You might say that quite a few of the aristocratic classes in those days were eccentric. He is particularly eccentric. He is a vegetarian, he's anti hunting. He's a firm believer in mesmerism, in mediums, in spiritualism. And his connection with the gnomes comes about because he actually believes that dwarves and gnomes and little folk really exist.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And Sir Charles decides to construct a giant Alpine rock garden or a rockery on his estate, and he thinks gnomes will make it look more realistic.

[Twigs Way]

And so he decides he's going to put These little figures from the inside of the house out onto the rockery. It's right in front of his bedroom window, actually, right next to the hall itself. And he makes little groups of them with little signs and all the rest of it. And he really starts the thing off.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Sir Charles Isham's gnome populated garden was featured in horticultural magazines from the time. Soon, other eccentric aristocrats were heading off to Germany to follow his lead. And an entire gnome industry emerged. Sven Berar says the gnome workshops began to sprout up like mushrooms in the small village of Gefenrode. At the turn of the century, they had 13 companies solely dedicated to manufacturing gnomes. And a single workshop might produce five to 600 different models. But in England, it only took a few decades before the fad started to wane, as rich people began to look askance at garden gnomes as just a little too eccentric. And then something else got in the way.

[Twigs Way]

First World War breaks out. That close connection between Germany and that doesn't play well with the idea of having gnomes and dwarfs back in this country.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

In Germany, many of the gnome workshops were shut down due to the war. Sven says some managed to reopen afterward. But under the Nazi regime, garden gnomes were shunned. After World War II, the new East German government officially banned gnome production as unsocialistic. One workshop was forced to switch to making ceramic busts of marks and angles. And that might have been it for the garden gnome, if not for Walt Disney.

[Twigs Way]

Now, you may have thought that Snow White and the seven Dwarves was seven dwarves, but actually, Snow White and the seven dwarves are nothing more or less than seven garden gnomes.

[David Pilgrim]

Hi ho, it's home to.

[Twigs Way]

And that is when the whole Disneyfication of the gnome happens. An enormous wave of popularity of these small dwarf figurines, cheaply made, cheaply available mostly in concrete. And it pushes the price right down. It makes them enormously part of popular culture. So anybody that can afford to go to the cinema, but, you know, next stop, the nearest hardware store or whatever, to pick up your Snow White seven dwarfs and put them in your garden.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

This was happening on both sides of the Atlantic. And it only ramped up further as some gnomes started to be manufactured in plastic, which made them even cheaper and more colorful. You can now affordably pepper your yard with dozens of gnomes whose looks had been Disneyfied, too.

[Twigs Way]

They take on this really kind of babyish look, you know, with the big, bulbous nose and big bulbous cheeks.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And they're cute.

[Twigs Way]

Yeah, they. Depending how you feel cute is. And they are just no longer associated with upper class gardens. They are associated with, you know, suburban gardens.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

I think this is relevant to understanding where anti gnome sentiment originated. It's not because gnomes began as middle class kitsch. It's because they began as upper class status objects. And it's only when they dared to descend into into suburban lawns, they were dismissed as cheap and tasteless.

[Twigs Way]

To me, I mean, a gnome is.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Just a chunk of concrete.

[Twigs Way]

I mean, it's a bit weird.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And once they were there, outside regular people's homes, gardening magazines called them out as eyesores. Realtors begged homeowners to hide them. In the 1970s, various satirical organizations with names like the Gnome Liberation Front began secreting them out of gardens in the dark of night.

[Willa Paskin]

In their place was this note. To whom it may concern. We regret to say that to endeavour to keep the gnome population at zero growth rate for this area, we have redistributed a number of your gnomes to areas of low population in order to stabilize urban numbers through the nation.

[Twigs Way]

So they're very, very popular. They then decided to be fairly tasteless and associated with, you know, naf suburban gardens. And then, you know, they have a revival as being a sort of kitsch thing, and then they become unpopular again. It just ebbs and flows all the time.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Right now it seems like we might be in an upswing. Twig says she's been getting a lot of calls for comments about gnomes. This winter, the new Wallace and Gromit movie will center around a garden gnome gone rogue. And this comes on the heels of animated films like Gnomeo and Juliet and Sherlock Gnomes. We have to get across that river. We'll need a ship.

[Willa Paskin]

No ship, Sherlock.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Sven's gnome workshop, which reopened after the fall of the Berlin Wall, now goes through 6 tons of clay each year. You can stop by to watch them work or host your birthday party there. And they even have a little gnome museum. Sven says that some of their visitors come in scoffing and gnomes as kitsch. But then once they see the work that goes into a gnome and understand the history behind them, some of them change their mind and go home with one. As ever, though, gnomes are not for everyone, including Twigsway herself.

[Twigs Way]

And the reason is I have a very wild, countryfied garden. So it's not that I don't have gnomes. I don't have any artificial thing in the garden.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

We started with your great metaphor that a garden is like an underwear drawer. If you walk into someone's garden into their underwear drawer and you see a gnome. What are they telling you? What is it? Communicating?

[Twigs Way]

Actually, nowadays they're only telling me that they're quite fun and they don't care what other people think about them. One person actually recently said to me that she had a collection of gnomes in her front garden and she knows that people either kind of love them or hate them. But she said she sees people walk past and smile when they see her gnomes because they're fun. And, you know, I mean, what's wrong with having fun in your garden? And actually, that's probably what's missing from my garden.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

But fun isn't all lawn ornaments can be. And if our yards are like our underwear drawers, when we come back, we're going to look at some of America's dirty laundry. So gnomes are fun, but that word does not describe every lawn ornament. Not at all. And this is so much the case. The ones we're going to talk about next don't show up in yards very often anymore. They're more likely to be found in museums.

[David Pilgrim]

We're walking through, we're at a section which shows a lot of objects that are in. Would be in someone's kitchen, for example. And if you notice, if you look closely at the objects, you'll see that a lot of the features, the physical features of African Americans have been distorted.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

David Pilgrim is the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan.

[David Pilgrim]

So what we do is we show how Jim Crow was not only supported by violence, but also everyday objects.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The objects in the museum include racist postcards, cookie jars, sheet music, toys, salt shakers, a Christmas tree topper shaped like a Klansman. Items that are sometimes called contemptible collectibles.

[David Pilgrim]

We have over 30,000 pieces, and I mean, we certainly are the world's largest collection of objects like this, and it's not even close.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And there's an entire corner of the museum dedicated entirely to one lawn ornament.

[David Pilgrim]

Yeah, so these are. These are lawn jockeys. Yeah.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Lawn jockeys are statues that are a few feet high and that typically depict a black man in horse riding clothes.

[David Pilgrim]

Sometimes they're called darkies, sometimes they're called sambo. These often were metal, although I'm not sure what these are. I think this is metal. I mean, they're heavy as hell.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The earliest lawn jockeys are hundreds of years old. But they, like most of the contemptible collectibles, became widespread in the second half of the 19th century.

[Kenneth Goings]

Black collectibles really started after The Civil War, largely during Reconstruction. And they all showed African Americans happy, happy to be working for the master.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Kenneth Goings is an emeritus professor of African American and African history at Ohio State University, and he's the author of Mammy and Uncle Moe's, a book about black collectibles.

[Kenneth Goings]

And they were part of a whole mythology that was being developed after Reconstruction, that the south had had a spatial civilization and had a special relationship with the enslaved people, and that if the north had just left them alone, things would have been fine, literally, the darkies would be happy. So there's this whole attempt to create this mythology physically through the creation of these objects.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

In the last few decades, Kenneth has seen most white people accept that the objects pushing this narrative are abhorrent. The collectibles, like Mammy cookie jars and sambo dolls, are, in fact, contemptible.

[Kenneth Goings]

And that has continued and has gotten even stronger. There's been even a stronger rejection of the collectibles. Except for the lawn jockeys, really. I know both black and white people who still see the lawn jockeys as a very positive image.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And this is because the history of the lawn jockey is complicated and full of competing stories about their origins. The earliest iterations from the mid 19th century didn't depict a jockey at all, but instead an enslaved groomsman or stable boy, often in raggedy clothes, but eagerly.

[Kenneth Goings]

Working like the other collectibles. They were always doing something, still being put to work.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The figure is often holding out a ring in his right hand that a horse could be hitched to or carrying a lantern to light the driveway. By the late 1800s, the statue had started to wear the clothes of a horse jockey, a riding cap and racing boots.

[Kenneth Goings]

There were black jockeys. We need to establish that. And there were black jockeys who were Kentucky Derby winners.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

In fact, African Americans dominated horse racing. But by the 1900s, the sport was becoming segregated. And as actual black jockeys were being pushed out, injured, and pulled off their horses, a new kind of lawn jockey started to be manufactured.

[David Pilgrim]

So these two right here, those would be the ones I think most people would be seeing today.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

David Pilgrim at the Jim Crow Museum.

[David Pilgrim]

Again, the last one is shorter than the others and heavily caricatured with, you know, the natural features of African Americans. Caricatured to the point of an insult.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

These jockeys have pitch black skin and big red lips forming a wide grin. And in the middle of the 20th century, they became ubiquitous in the lawns of a new kind of homeowner. White suburban ones.

[Willa Paskin]

The average American can now own a home and a more luxurious home than he ever dared dream of.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

After World War II, suburban development boomed as white home ownership was being subsidized by the federal government. And as the Second Great Migration triggered what Kenneth Goings describes as a racial panic in the north, because you have.

[Kenneth Goings]

Even more African Americans moving north, and there's more need to control African Americans and try and keep them in their place. And that's when the racial restrictions and the racial covenants start.

[Twigs Way]

Well, I just could not live beside them. I don't feel that they should be oppressed. But I moved here. One of the main reasons was because it was a white community, and these.

[Kenneth Goings]

Lawn jockeys were sort of a marker, sort of a signal to black people that you weren't wanted here. The lawn jockey was a signal of what we think of you. And you didn't have to put up a sign. You just had to put out a lawn jockey.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Do you remember seeing them as a kid?

[Kenneth Goings]

Yes. Yes. And we're talking about a little, tiny farming town in northwest Ohio, about 3,000 people. I didn't really think about them too much, just knew that those people didn't like black people.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The history of the Lonjacki thus far shows them to be nothing but odious. Yet Kenneth has encountered people who think otherwise.

[Kenneth Goings]

I don't know why, of all the collectibles, people just sincerely believe that somehow these weren't racist.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

This belief stems from another story about how the lawn jockey came to be, a story set in 1776 that involves one of our Founding fathers.

[Kenneth Goings]

So when George Washington was crossing the Delaware during the War of Independence, he had his horses with him. But there was an African American man who wanted to help the American forces. So what he did is he had his son hold the horses on the riverbank as they rolled across to attack the British forces.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The boy's name was Jocko Graves. And the story goes, even as an ice storm raged around him, he faithfully carried out his duty, never abandoning. The troops were horses.

[Kenneth Goings]

And when they returned after having successfully defeated the British, that little boy was frozen, holding the horses.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

George Washington, moved by Jocko's noble deed, commissioned a statue of him titled the Faithful Groomsman. It would become the model for all future lawn jockeys and put in a place of honor at his home in.

[Kenneth Goings]

Mount Vernon in tribute to his sacrifice.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And that.

[Kenneth Goings]

That is total nonsense.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Scholars of George Washington have looked into it, and they found no evidence that Jocko Graves ever existed or that any statue like this was ever on display at Mount Vernon, an estate where Washington Kept slaves. But the legend that the lawn jockey is actually a tribute to a black hero has persisted for decades. And it's alive and well online.

[Kenneth Goings]

You wonder where the lawn jockey came from. You can thank George Washington.

[David Pilgrim]

Yes, many people out there have the wrong information, when in fact it is a statue that represents a hero.

[Twigs Way]

That little boy holding the straps of those horses.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

True story.

[Willa Paskin]

The next time you see one of.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

These, think of Jocko videos like these. Emails and viral posts circulate all the time, purporting to reveal the true story of the lawn jockey's origins. There are even children's books celebrating Jocko as a real American hero. David Pilgrim's been hearing it for as long as he can remember.

[David Pilgrim]

I've heard that story from some historians. Certainly I heard it growing up in African American communities. And it's a good story. It's a chest puffer. It's a feel good story, and it didn't happen.

[Kenneth Goings]

But it's just part of a whole mythology that grew up about these collectibles, I think, to make them more acceptable.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The legend of George Washington and Jocko Graves isn't the only story out there that suggests there's more to the lawn jockey. That despite its caricatured appearance, it's actually a symbol of African American resistance.

[Kenneth Goings]

Well, and that's just as bizarre, and that is that these lawn jockeys were part of the Underground Railroad, that they signaled to the conductors on the Underground Railroad which houses were safe places.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The story goes that a ribbon would be tied to the lawn jockey. If it was green, it meant that it was safe to bring in the runaways. If the ribbon was red, it signaled danger and to keep moving on.

[David Pilgrim]

What I would say is enslavement lasted so long in this country that my general answer to whether or not something occurred is, yeah, it probably did occur because you're talking about a couple hundred years. But there's no evidence that that was common at all.

[Kenneth Goings]

The myths about the Underground Railroad are legion. I mean, if every myth about the Underground Railroad were true, there would have been no slaves left in the South.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

How often have you encountered the suggestion that because of these stories, lawn jockeys are somehow not racist?

[Kenneth Goings]

Oh, constantly. Constantly. From black people also? Oh, yes. Oh, no. From both. From both. And both are as sincere about it as the other. They really do believe it?

[David Pilgrim]

Well, yeah. I mean, there are actually people that are upset when you say, well, that that likely didn't happen.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

David understands, though, why black people in particular might want a story like this to be true.

[David Pilgrim]

For most of the experience of black people in this country. You know, every major societal institution was designed to make folks feel like they hadn't done anything, that they hadn't contributed and weren't deserving of fair treatment. In a way, false narratives are still pushback, but I don't want to leave it there. We don't need to make up stories. There have just been wonderful stories of African American heroism, African American achievement, African Americans living lives of everyday dignity. So instead of us promoting stories that aren't accurate, we need to uncover those that are and then celebrate them.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

David still sees lawn jockeys in people's yards from time to time.

[David Pilgrim]

You'll also find new ones that are being made because they're still a market in terms of today. If you have one in your yard today, you've made some decisions.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Sometimes you see them painted white, as if their significance can be changed or covered up or literally whitewashed. But David doesn't think that's really possible or necessary.

[David Pilgrim]

If I want to build a statue that honors a black person, there's no limit to how much of that I can do. I'd be less interested in reclaiming it and more interested in just building new statues.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Coming up next, a lawn ornament that wasn't a statue at all. So far, we've been talking about figurines that are modeled more or less on people, whether caricatured or mythological. But what if lawn ornaments weren't just modeled on people? What if, once upon a time, they were people? Like. Listen to this job listing. A wealthy landowner supposedly placed in an English newspaper. In the middle of the 18th century.

[Ned Harwood]

Mr. Charles Hamilton, the proprietor of Paine's Hill near Cobham, Surrey, advertised for a person who is willing to become a hermit in that beautiful retreat of his his.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

When the landowner says hermit, he means an actual human being willing to live in solitude. In this case, they would be required to reside in a little room dug into the side of a hill in a garden.

[Ned Harwood]

The conditions were that he should be provided with a bible, optical glasses, a mat for his bed, an hourglass for his timepiece, food from the house, but never to exchange a word with the servants.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The hermit would have to wear a robe at all times and was forbidden from ever cutting his beard or his nails, or from leaving the grounds, all for a period of seven years.

[Ned Harwood]

If he lived there under these restrictions till the end of the term, he was to receive 700 guineas. But on breach of any of them, the whole was to be forfeited.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

We don't know if Anyone actually made it through the seven years at this particular estate. But people were really seeking living, breathing human hermits for their gardens.

[Ned Harwood]

Yes, yes, they did hire hermits.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Ned Harwood, who you heard reading that ad, is an art historian who studies Gardens, especially 18th century English landscape gardens.

[Ned Harwood]

Now, these are big gardens. They're like 25 acres to 250 acres, even a thousand acres.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

These are about the same size as the gardens you heard about earlier, belonging to the eccentrics who had garden gnomes. But it's more than a century before that trend. Ned says you can study the history of garden styles the way you do the history of painting, with one movement evolving into the next, the baroque giving way to the rococo. And in the early 1700s in England, one thing was giving way to another.

[Ned Harwood]

There is a movement towards making gardens more natural. Now I'm putting natural in quot because they're completely manufactured, it's completely artificial. But instead of, let's say, in a 17th century French garden where you have topiary, trimmed hedges that are 30ft high and things like that, the 18th century garden that begins to emerge in England in the 1720s and 1730s is quite deliberately planting in a much more naturalistic way so it doesn't look like it's all been carefully put there and maintained.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And inside these new natural gardens, they began building a new type of garden structure. Ancient looking buildings meant to trigger what Ned describes as imaginative flights of fancy. Temples to Greek gods, Chinese pavilions, Gothic ruins.

[Ned Harwood]

But if you were going to put in one building by the middle of the 18th century, that building would be a building you would call a hermitage.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

What is a hermitage?

[Ned Harwood]

Definitionally, what makes something a hermitage is that a hermit lives there.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

The tradition of hermits has existed in the west for more than a thousand years. Early Christian fathers renounced all their possessions and went into the desert to live in isolation. Medieval monks and nuns found monasteries were not secluded enough, so they set up homes in swamps and caves to get closer to God.

[Ned Harwood]

These people who are willing to go away and totally abase themselves nonetheless are the people that people go to for instruction, they go to for guidance, they go to for enlightenment.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And it doesn't carry like the same charge it does for us of being like weirdo.

[Ned Harwood]

No one chooses to be a hermit. It is choosing to give up being well fed, being well housed, being any of those things. So hermits were admired for their ability to separate, admired for their ability to walk away and seen as people who as a result of that, could actually comment on society.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

By the time of the 18th century, garden religious hermits had more or less disappeared from the English landscape. But the hermit as an idea was still highly valued. And so, as wealthy landowners started decking out their gardens with fake old structures, many of them decided to build hermit homes.

[Ned Harwood]

A hermitage itself can take many, many different forms. They can look like very elegant little pavilions, but most of them are quite rustic. The most famous of them are often what were called root huts. If you are a hermit living in the woods, what are you going to build to live in? You don't have a salt, you know, you don't have anything like that. You're going to cobble something together. And so they would cobble these structures together out of roots, out of twigs.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Other hermitages were caves dug into a mound, or what they imagined ancient druids lived in.

[Ned Harwood]

There are books of designs published in the 18th century of hermitages.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Was it like a catalog? Like, was it books of design so you could do it yourself?

[Ned Harwood]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's great stuff.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Many of the hermitages built into English gardens were designed as sites of contemplation for the landowners who would gaze across their gardens at their huts made of roots and twigs and dream about what it would be like to live a life of solitude. Most of the time they were uninhabited, but decorated to give the illusion that someone lived there. Like they might have a book sitting open on a desk next to a half melted candle to imply that a hermit had just stepped out.

[Ned Harwood]

There was sort of a common interior design concept for what you put in a hermitage, even if there was not a hermit ever there.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

It's ready for a hermit.

[Ned Harwood]

Yeah, it's ready for a hermit.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And sometimes an actual hermit would arrive, sometimes. And this is where you get the stories like the one you heard at the beginning. It's unclear if that one is entirely authentic, but landowners did put out classified ads for ornamental garden hermits.

[Ned Harwood]

One of these texts that is really interesting. The landowner has created a suite of underground rooms which are exquisitely kitted out. There's an organ down there. It's a luxurious suite of rooms underground. Whoever comes to live in it is to have absolutely no contact with another human being. And so this is a scientific experiment masquerading as a hermit. What will happen to that person?

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

And sometimes it worked the other way around, with people essentially cold calling landlords to say, hey, do you have a hut in your yard? I could crash in.

[Ned Harwood]

And these are people who are down on their luck. They write to a landowner and say, I will come and live in your estate as a hermit, if you will, feed me and house me, sit there, you know, with a long beard and their fingernails all grown out and a cross and a Bible, and just sit there. Because it's better, I guess, than the life that they have.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

If offering yourself up as an ornamental hermit was a way to eke out an existence, then hiring a hermit was a way to show off the wealth you already had. It was such a status symbol that if you couldn't have a living one, you might try to create the illusion that you did.

[Ned Harwood]

There's a wonderful garden called Hawkstone that had a root hut hermitage, and there was a hermit living there. And then that hermit leaves. We don't know why, and he's replaced by a mannequin hermit of some sort. So there were mannequin hermits as well that were. That would be put into these places. We know about a wooden hermit that was an automata that could talk to people.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

I need you to explain that a little more. I actually don't. I don't even. I'm having a hard time imagining even anything about how that could exist. Like, how does it work?

[Ned Harwood]

It would be driven by air pressure, which would be driven by water pressure.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Okay, Ned explained a little further, and I read some more about it. But honestly, I still don't get it. And while I know that all of this is supposed to be about contemplation and solitude and other serious things, I can't help hearing about wooden hermit robots and thinking it just sounds silly.

[Ned Harwood]

Well, it is frivolous. It also is, I think, important to keep in mind that people in the 18th century had a great sense of humor, right? I mean, they laughed at stuff. I mean, the garden of Stowe had several hermitages, one of which, which was a root hut, had utterly lascivious, scabrous texts and pictures on the walls inside of it, like just dirty jokes, dirty jokes about hermits. So you were supposed to go in there and laugh.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

So ultimately, we end up pretty much where we started, with the naughty Roman statues that led to garden gnomes. And like gnomes, hermits are multivalent. They're constantly evolving signifiers of class and taste that sometimes are just for laughs. But unlike gnomes, the phenomenon of ornamental hermits did not last. Thanks to a shift in garden styles and, in part, the rise in Britain of abolitionism, keeping a hermit to some.

[Ned Harwood]

Extent becomes problematized because there is uncertainty in the community, the local community, as to whether the person is being kept against their will or not. So we know of liberated Hermits, I mean, people who are freed from being hermits. One of whom did not want to be liberated from being a hermit. He was quite content to be a hermit. And he sort of is forced back out into the world. By the middle of the 19th century, I think it's done.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Which it turns out is right around the time that a few eccentric English aristocrats started putting a different kind of bearded figure, a gnome, in their gardens. And actually, Ned doesn't really think that was the end for hermitages. He says the idea behind them still endures.

[Ned Harwood]

That the truly harmonious life is a life that is a combination of periods of active engagement when you're out in the world doing something, and then periods of absolutely necessary retreat when you don't do anything and you recharge your jets. And this is the purest manifestation of that idea of contemplative retreat.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

Like, we all think about, okay, we need to, like, recharge. You need self care. Whatever it is, like taking vacation, all of those things.

[Ned Harwood]

Whether we actually do it or not.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

We all talk about it.

[Ned Harwood]

I say, I'm not going to answer email this weekend.

[Twigs Way]

Right?

[Ned Harwood]

Right. I'm going to turn off my phone. All those kinds of disconnections are, I think, or you know, that that phenomenon. A couple. The man cave. A man cave is a hermitage as far as I'm concerned. There are places to get away, and we feel the need to get away. I think that desire and that felt need to get away is still very much with us.

[Narrator/Host (Willa Paskin)]

So earlier in this episode, you heard me say that I was skeptical about garden gnomes. To be honest, I was skeptical about all of the lawn ornaments. I have never, ever considered having one. And not just because until recently, I didn't have a lawn to put one in. Having all these conversations has made me feel a little differently about them, though I would obviously never have a lawn jockey, and I wouldn't want a hermit, even if they were still a thing. But a little gnome hiding out in some corner that passersby would only see if they were really looking, really noticing the things around them. A gnome to make them laugh either at the gnome itself or the person kooky enough to have one. A gnome to inspire some imaginative flight of fancy. Who knows? Maybe I'll have to find a spot for one. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] this episode was written by Evan Chung and Willa Paskin, and It was produced by Evan. We produced Decodering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman. We had additional production by Shana Roth and Martina Weber. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical director. We'd like to thank Freedom Suman, Bernice, Heather, Joseph Witham, and Elise Gramza. Gordon Campbell's book the Hermit in the Garden was a valuable resource in putting together this episode. If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends. And if you're a fan of the show, I'd love for you to sign up for Slate plus. Slate plus members get to listen to Decoder Ring and every other other Slate podcast without any ads. You also get unlimited access to Slate's website, and member support is crucial to our work. So please go to slate.com decoder plus to join Slate plus today. We'll see you in two weeks.

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