The Backyard Sphinx: Inside Gilgal, Utah's Strangest Garden

There is a 25-ton stone sphinx wearing the face of Joseph Smith sitting in the middle of Salt Lake City, and it has been there for more than 60 years. You will not find it on a mountainside or out in the desert. It is behind a row of houses on 500 South, tucked into a half-acre lot between a busy street and a quiet neighborhood, and most people who live a ten-minute walk away have never seen it. This is Gilgal Sculpture Garden — the only place the state of Utah officially recognizes as a “visionary art environment,” and one of the most genuinely peculiar spots you can visit for free anywhere in the West.

Here is the short version, because it is the thing everyone asks first: yes, the Joseph Smith sphinx is real. It is not a rumor, not a rendering, not a story someone made up online. You can stand in front of it this afternoon. Admission is free, the gate is open seven days a week, and the address is 749 East 500 South.

The longer version is stranger, and better.

The man who built it

Gilgal was the life’s work of one person: Thomas Battersby Child, Jr., a Salt Lake City masonry contractor and a bishop in the Latter-day Saint church. Child was not a trained artist. He was a builder — a man who spent his career pouring foundations and laying brick — and in 1945, at 57 years old, he started turning the yard behind his house into something he could not fully explain to anyone.

He kept at it for 18 years, spending his own time and his own money, until he died in 1963. When he was finished, the garden held twelve major sculptural arrangements and more than 70 stones carved with scripture, poetry, and his own philosophical musings. There is no other place quite like it, and Child seems to have known that. He once said he expected the garden to make people think, and told visitors plainly that he did not expect them to agree with him — only to reason for themselves.

That is the honest frame for the whole place. Gilgal is not a museum laying out established history. It is one man’s private theology, built in stone. The sculptures are real and documented. What they mean is whatever Thomas Child decided they meant, and he wrote a lot of it down.

Why “Gilgal”

The name comes from the Bible. In the Old Testament, Gilgal is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan River into the promised land and set up a circle of stones to mark the spot — “a circle of sacred stones.” The name also appears in the Book of Mormon, which is why it carried double weight for Child.

He saw a parallel he found irresistible. The ancient Israelites crossed their Jordan into a new homeland; the Latter-day Saint pioneers crossed the plains and settled a valley beside their own river named Jordan, in Utah. To Child, the migration that built Salt Lake City was a modern echo of an ancient one, and the garden was his circle of stones marking it. That single idea runs underneath nearly everything in the yard.

The sphinx, and the torch that made it

The centerpiece is the sphinx. Child selected enormous quartzite boulders — he went to remarkable lengths to haul in stones weighing as much as 62 tons — and assembled them into the crouched Egyptian form. Then, instead of the head of a pharaoh, he put the face of Joseph Smith, the founder of his church, on it. It is the most photographed thing in the garden by a wide margin, and standing in front of it is a genuinely disorienting experience: two symbol systems that have no business sharing a sculpture, fused into one.

How he built it is almost as surprising as what he built. Child did not carve stone the way a traditional sculptor would, with chisels. He used an oxyacetylene torch — the kind of tool used to cut steel — to melt and shape the rock. The heat burned away the waste stone and fused the surface of what remained, leaving it with a strange glassy sheen you can still see up close. The technique was pioneered by his son-in-law and assistant, Bryant Higgs, a skilled welder, and a sculptor named Maurice Brooks did the detailed carving of the faces and figures under Child’s direction. As far as anyone can tell, no one had built a sculpture garden this way before.

The rest of the yard

The sphinx gets the attention, but it is not the strangest thing in the garden. That title has a few contenders.

Across from the sphinx stands Child himself. He built a life-size self-portrait — a standing figure in a stone enclosure surrounded by the tools of masonry — and dressed the figure in a suit. From the waist down, the “pants” are made to look like a wall of laid brick. It is a bricklayer who became, in his own telling, part of his own monument to the trade he loved. Nearby, a carved inscription declares that of all the crafts followed by man, masonry has “the moste notabilite.”

Then there is the shattered giant. One arrangement, called Daniel II, renders the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar from the Book of Daniel: a colossal statue with a head of gold and feet of iron and clay, struck and broken apart by “a stone cut out of the mountain without hands.” Child left the pieces scattered across the ground the way the story describes, and you walk among the fragments.

Another piece, Malachi, is quieter and, once you understand it, oddly moving. Two stone hearts sit side by side — one white for the dead, one red for the living — and two carved hands reach down to turn them toward each other. It is Child’s rendering of a verse he read as a promise that families are bound together across generations. Elsewhere a headless captain grips a sword, marking the fall of Jericho, and the last chapter of Ecclesiastes is carved into stone in full.

Woven between the big sculptures are those 70-plus engraved stones — scripture, but also poetry and Child’s own reflections on work, faith, and mortality. People wander the paths reading them like pages.

From private yard to public park

For decades Gilgal was exactly what it looked like: a private backyard. Child’s family kept it after he died, and for years you could only see it if you knew someone or knocked and asked. That it survived at all is a small miracle of a certain kind of Utah stubbornness — a neighborhood unwilling to let a one-of-a-kind thing get bulldozed for infill.

In 1997 a group called Friends of Gilgal Garden formed to save it. Working with the Trust for Public Land, Salt Lake County, and Salt Lake City, along with private donors, they bought the property and handed it to the city. On October 21, 2000, Gilgal reopened as a public park. It has been free and open to the public ever since, maintained by the city with the Friends group still watching over it.

What it costs, when to go, and what to expect

Gilgal is free. There is no admission, no ticket, no reservation. It is open every day except New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. From April through September the gate is open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.; from October through March it is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The whole garden is about half an acre, so a visit is short — most people spend 20 to 45 minutes. It sits mid-block, and the entrance is easy to miss: you walk in through a gap between buildings off 500 South, and the city suddenly falls away into a green, shaded, deeply weird little world. Because it is small, quiet, and residential, it rewards a calm visit. Read the stones. Look closely at the torch marks on the sphinx. It is not a place you conquer; it is a place you sit in for a while and let get under your skin.

Bring your questions and leave your certainty at the gate. That is more or less what Thomas Child asked of everyone who came, and it is still the best way to see the garden he spent the last third of his life building.