would please thank me in -- please join me in thanking james. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this is american history tv, on, c-span3 where each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nation's past. hours. >> you are now currently on the property. this is an industrial recycling area. he owned as much as 600 acres here. he has partitioned off some of that to a nearby golf wars. this is a small sliver of what is remaining. the significance of that is he was involved with the creation of the president part. it is a site five miles from

here. -2010. open from 2004 it was home to all 42 of these cultures. he was instrumental in take theseng to come when that park went bankrupt. he did not have the heart to put them in his stone crusher. he spent a considerable amount of his own money to transport from there. the sculptor of all of these is

henry adicks. based out ofter houston. he became so inspired by mount rushmore that he wanted to re-create the president on a smaller scale. he ended up creating all set -- three sets of them. he has a set himself in his now defunct in houston. and this was the third set. it was in the park and it is now here in this little town. here we are nine years later and you can see that all of them have asked.

a significant amount of decay. they have become an internet station. here they set -- sit in this field. we now have people who come down to see them. they were off-limits for a number of years. when they originally were moved here, he went to the public to enjoy the, and he kept it open for everyone to come down. they were young children climbing on them. the liability was a mess. it became completely private.

the only people getting here were trespassers. i proposed something to him that would allow the public to enjoy them. modestr form and a entrance fee for the walking tour. eveninghave separate photo shoots. it has been a wonderful thing so far. now untila standstill we figure out what the future of these will be. they were originally slated to go somewhere in the northeast. that has temporarily been put on hold. there are all kinds of other proposals on the table for people who either want to buy them, move them, or possibly even create a studio here.

there is some clarity to that situation, on random weekends, i conduct tours. does anyone know what his nickname was? why did they call him old hickory? e was tough. he was one bad dude. the interesting thing it was kind of an engineering feat or how he moved them. despite the fact that these are hollow, they are anywhere from 17,000 to 22,000 pounds. not that many people would find that easy to transport. is thatended up doing every one of these presidents has a whole intentionally put in the top of their head. to purpose of that was

expose the steel in the skeleton. it allowed one of his excavators to gain enough purchase of lift to be able to put it onto a flatbed full of tires. then they strapped them down and moved them here one by one. not all of these are the same size. there are 42 of them here. the sculptor decided he wanted to make seven of them grander than the remaining 35. that is because he thought it thed be neat to recognize vip presidents.

seven presidency identified through interviewing historians, presidential experts, academics, history teachers, and such. were the sevent most influential presidents. are 25% largery than the remaining 35. it was pretty easy for him to go and take the 35 smaller ones and move them here and stack them in rows of 11. for some reason, thomas jefferson got stuck in the back. that is for reasons that are on the notes to me.

he is the only vip president two is not in the front room. the problem he encountered was when he got to the larger wouldents, one excavator not work. so he had used to. he realized that if he took the final three, washington, jackson, and lincoln, it would be obscured by the remaining ones. so he had to pick and choose which toys he wanted to come up. these are the three chose.

we will talk about why a moment. that is why the schematic and the order of occurred. it is not chronologic. it is fairly random. george is one of the favorites. he was born around 95 miles from here. many people that he was a redhead. he pouted his hair. he was a distillery of whiskey and the father of the american foxhound. he had up to 30 different foxhounds. two of which were named drunkard and tipsy. being an intense fear of

buried alive. that was not terribly uncommon in the 1700s. he will never be outranked militarily. he was also the only president to never live in the white house. he did die of a throat infection. they were bloodletting him.

, itas andrew who actually was the only sculpture he attempted to clean up. he was trying to clean up some decay on his cheek. when he was a young man, he took a sword to the face from a soldier. he died with a couple of bullets in his chest. the other interesting fact about

president jackson was he apparently taught his. how to swear. that sometimes became problematic in the white house. people often ask me, they understand why abraham lincoln and george washington are prime. but they question andrew jackson. all three of these are on dollar bills. people suspect that thomas jefferson or fdr should probably be appear front and center with the victory. i don't disagree with that. i finally asked the owner why andrew jackson ended up air. his response to me was very interesting. he said, he has really pretty hair and i like his epaulets.

i started doing these tours and talking about legitimate presidential accomplishments. people were not entertained. then i started saying how andrew jackson's parents swear and people of that stuff. hear the silly odd stuff. president lincoln, the tallest of all the presidents at 6'4". madison, whojames pounds.and 99 president lincoln assassinated in the ford theater. he actually predicted his death from a dream he had had the night before.

his guest had to bail out at the last minute. officedesk in the oval was legislation to create the secret service. counterfeiting. he was also a world-class wrestler. wrestled in over 300 matches, losing only one of them. someone told me he is enshrined in the world wrestling hall of fame. i want to show you something over here. of all 42 sculptures, the only one to take a spell off of the abe.ed was that hole in the back of his head was unintentional.

the one was. that occurred when he fell off latbed.tbread -- fk the remaining 39 statues are clustered together in this patch of grass. at first i had a problem with the. but then we realized it made for neat photography. almost like this haunted forest you could walk through. it finally became so overwhelming that the groundskeeper came and took it all down. it is beginning to grow back right now.

some of the presidents here are obscured bysome of the presidene obscured by weed and other dead grass that is growing up. this is james buchanan. he is the only of all the presidents to kinda be staring down. of them are staring straight at you. the angle of where his head is looking right down at you. whether it is the day or at night, this is kind of a super creepy feeling that makes me uneasy. someone also once told me that he was the only president to never marry. the bearded presidents, hayes, , they all to me

looked kind of similar. you can tell that all of the neckwear from every sculpture is time specific. me looked kind ofthere is some milh grant where he has some stars on his shoulders. go down to george bush junior, he has some elements on his tie. garfield, from what i have , had an interesting talent where he could write with one hand in latin while simultaneously, had an interestt where he could writing another sentence with his other hand in greek. i thought that was fascinating. bill clinton, difficult for people to recognize. i think he is pretty true to form. he sits there in the back and he

looks fairly young. gerald ford is right next to him. he was the most difficult of all of the sculptures to create. his features are so un-pronounced. president lincoln was the easiest because his features are so pronounced. thomas jefferson is the third president here.

on tried days in the summer, we allow our guests to walk through here. wet.area is pretty we have had significant weather here lately. we have never seen snakes back here. but it looks like an area that is completely conducive to stakes. the most interesting thing i have seen as a bald eagle circling george's head. we have been out here during an electrical storm. it looked like lightning strikes 's mouth.ng out of fdr i have not been out here in the wintertime but i know people would like to photograph this in

the snow. this is one of my personal favorites. fdr. he died in his fourth term. he was supposedly a victim of polio. some are not convinced that he had polio. instead, he had another syndrome.

this is george bush junior. he is also highly decayed. the most decayed president is woodrow wilson. pretty much looks like he has leprosy. the question noise comes up, is there a rhyme or reason why decaying faster than the remaining? i just don't understand if there is any reason behind it.

perhaps he is in a wind pattern or rain pattern that makes them more susceptible to cracking. if you look pretty closely at this president, who was one of eight virginian presidents, look into his right eyeball. that is a wasps nest. them ines you will see the nostrils of the sculpture. ronald reagan was struck by lightning a few years back. probably the most difficult president to identify his back here behind reagan. no one has ever gotten this right.

i had to really study have hard. that is warren harding. behind him is john adams, who is hard to see because of all of the overgrowth. the most interesting fact i have come across through a lot of my research is ronald reagan, when he was asked what his proudest accomplishment was in life, it had nothing to do with his presidency. or his acting career. his proudest accomplishment was he claimed to have saved 77 man ashen he was a young a lifeguard. up,question noise comes will obama ever be here? is,answer to that question the goal for the original park was every time a president was to come into office, that a two

foot tall prototype was going to thende as a sample and brought full-scale. when obama was coming into office, they approached the owner of the park at the time who had already rest -- realize the financial difficulties. he declined to go full-scale. who kept a little miniature lived in this green shipping container along with a miniature white house. this whole place is rigged with security cameras. we figure out who stole him. he claimed to have had a weak

moment and not to be cupped a maniacal. he brought the statue back. is there a trump? though. -- no. but the owner has bought a little baby one. and i photographer specialize in abandoned structures. my coffee table book started going viral. they ended up putting me on

faculty as an adjunct speaker. when i got free time on the weekends, they send me around the state as a storyteller. all of these beautiful places have stories behind them. the public really enjoys hearing the back story. i started doing that for the museum. i recognized how much the public loved that. then i started doing professional storytelling. that started in libraries. it escalated into theaters. now i do them at the actual abandoned places themselves. i approached the owner about that and told him i could protect them legally and make him some money to go back into his foundation.

you guys have been great. any questions? you have until 4:00. >> why are you attracted to abandoned and decaying places? , the mood,he texture the mystery. to me, the challenge of going out into the community, walking into fire stations, interviewing people. hanging out in diners. what started as a simple hobby to grow and instagram following has quickly graduated into a

strong devotion allowing virginians to have a deeper experience with their past. ♪ >> tonight, a look at american

presidents. the story has often been that kennedy's father was the one pulling strings. but that is not true. he wanted the pulitzer prize. he said he would rather win a pulitzer prize than be president. because he had this strong desire for literary fame, he got himself the prize. and washingtony dc, people asked, did he really write that book? i wonder how much money they are getting out of those royalty checks. but then the pulitzer change the equation. it made it a moral and ethical question. i wonderreaders realize this as. they looked at the letters that kennedy was receiving. librarians were sending letters. school teachers.

>> next, from the kansas city theic library, a talk about book great wartime escapes and rescues. focusing on world war ii prisoners of war and concentration camps. >> good evening. thank you so much for joining us tonight. thank you to the u.s. army command and general staff. one of our favorite programming partners for yet