By Bridget Goodman, Daily Yonder · August 11, 2026

Howard Finster, the Southern Baptist preacher and repairman who became known as “the grandfather of Southern folk art,” was 59 years old when God told him to create 5,000 pieces of sacred art. 

Finster — through the power of instant coffee mixed with Coca-Cola — created over 46,000 pieces. 

“You don’t have to be 16 years old and have this idea and go to art school — you can be 59 years old,” said Davia Weatherill, Paradise Garden executive director. “I think it’s a wonderful lesson for senior citizens out there that it’s never too late, right? You always have time, and if you want to leave a mark on the world, you can.”

Finster built Paradise Garden, a 4-acre art environment in what once was a duck pond in Chattooga County, Georgia.

“Sometimes people forget that art can be created outside of major cities,” Weatherill said. “That’s a really important lesson when you’re thinking about Howard Finster and Paradise Garden — where it’s located.”

Following Finster’s death in 2001, the county purchased the garden in 2012. The garden is now leased to and managed by the Paradise Garden Foundation, a non-profit of three staff.

“When Howard created this, he wanted to be a sort of Noah’s Ark for humanity,” said Mary Shewan, Paradise Garden operations manager and curatorial archivist. “He didn’t view himself as a Noah, but he wanted a safe space for everyone. I think, in a similar way, that’s the Southern ‘y’all-come-back-now’ culture.”

The garden celebrates human inventions with collections of man-made items — shoes, typewriters, bicycle parts, sharpies — displayed throughout the grounds.

“Howard was not a man of means,” Weatherill said. “He was the ultimate recycler, everything that you see in the garden was something that either people brought to him or he went to the dump to get.”

At Paradise Garden, Finster built the World’s Folk Art Church, a mosaic garden, various workshops and an enclosed ramp, which functioned as a gallery space during Finster’s life.

Finster purchased the World’s Folk Art Church, which was a once one-story Southern Baptist church, through the help of an NEA grant. Finster raised the roof and turned it into a five-story chapel.

The church, the garden’s main example of vernacular architecture, a self-taught art architecture shaped by the materials and land where the structure is located, was restored and reopened again to the public this year through the same NEA grant.

“He felt like humanity was taking for granted what other humans did for each other,” Shewan said.

An Archive of Rural Northwest Georgia

“So much of what’s in the mosaic garden are pieces from other people in Somerville: they donated it, so it is also an archive of Sommerville,” Shewan said.

Chattooga County is now 35% Evangelical Protestant, according to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census. During Finster’s life, most Chattooga County residents were Evangelical Protestants, the Christian tradition that Southern Baptists belong to.

“It is the most beautiful presentation of rural Northwest Georgia there is, and I think it is the most realistic,” Shewan said. “It is impossible to escape religion while you are here. There’s religious iconography and text everywhere, and it is all Southern Baptist.”

The Paradise Garden Foundation aims to preserve the environment for future generations without changing the effect.

“It’s an authentic piece of rural American creativity and history, and so we never want to remove Howard’s hand from the garden,” Weatherill said.

Weatherill is designing a guided tour of the garden, narrated by a CD of Howard’s voice, alongside visitor’s stories of their time at the garden.

“The really cool thing about Chattooga County is that all of their grandparents knew Howard,” Shewan said. “They do not view it as this four-acre art environment. They know it as the place the guy who built their granddaddy’s bikes worked at and made.”

An Economic Spark for Northwest Georgia

Paradise Garden doesn’t just preserve Finster’s legacy, but also brings economic activity to the county.

“We try to spark the economic engines because that’s equally important to us: that we’re located in a thriving community, and that our community members are doing well,” Weatherill said.

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) 2027 report designates Chattooga County as the only economically distressed Appalachian county in Georgia. 

Chattooga County ranks in the bottom 10% of counties nationally, based on the Appalachian Regional Commission’s county economic status classification system, which compares county-level three-year average unemployment rates, per capita market income and poverty rates, with national averages to rank U.S. counties.

Chattooga County residents have free admission to the garden. 

“We love Chattooga, but it’s not like this whole community comes every single day, and we don’t need that,” Shewan said. “Because this is their home. They don’t need the art environment, it’s their home.”

Weatherill said that as the county’s main arts organization, she feels a responsibility to serve the community.

This year, Weatherill brought Paradise Garden into the Leroy Massey Elementary, leading a class in making sculptures out of found materials, in the style of Finster.

Art Environments: Keeping a Rural Spirit Alive

“The artwork and the landscape are inseparable,” Weatherill said. “So every mosaic, every mural, sculpture pathway in every building that Howard created, it’s always facing threats from the weather, time deterioration, and so preservation is not optional, it’s our responsibility.”

Starting in the 90s, Finster, thinking the garden would fall into disrepair, encouraged friends to take pieces from the garden to save them from the garden returning to swamp. 

With the reopening of the World’s Folk Art Church, some items — like the original windows designed by Finster and a mosaic cross built by him — have returned to the garden. 

“When art environments were created, the land couldn’t exist, or the art couldn’t exist without the land, but at this point in time, land can no longer exist without the art,” Shewan said. “They’ve become one.”

Shewan said that art environments are largely a rural invention, highlighting rural culture. 

“I’m not going to sit here and say rural America is always this great utopia, but there’s so much culture there and so much art,” Shewan said. “I think for a very long time it wasn’t taken seriously, and I think art environments have really started to show people that folk art is probably one of the most human arts we have.”

Many of the pieces at Paradise Garden — like tractor enamel paintings on cars — can be challenging to preserve because there’s limited research preserving those materials.

“These art environments are so fragile — and Paradise Garden included,” Weatherill said. “But once they’re gone, they’re gone forever, and I feel like it’s our responsibility to ensure that future generations can experience Paradise Garden as a living space, and not just read about it in a book.”

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