Bizarre Statues off a Highway in Virginia Have People Totally Puzzled
Thousands of people drive past Williamsburg, Virginia on I-64 every day, unaware of an army of oversized oddities hiding just out of sight. If you were to pull over on a certain stretch of the highway just north of Williamsburg, head into the woods, and march up a hill, you'd find something truly strange waiting for you on the other side.
Hiding just off of the highway near an industrial zone is a field with a collection of giant statue heads, each one measuring around 20 feet in height. This October 3 TikTok clip from Discovery introduces us to one of Virginia's weirdest mysteries!
This is definitely not your average road trip attraction. Hidden away from the public in a random field, these giant statues are lined up like an army regiment. It already looks pretty ominous, but look closer. As the clip from @discovery's Mysteries of the Abandoned revealed, these aren't just any random heads- they're the busts of the first 42 presidents! Move over, Disney World's Hall of Presidents!
OK, now the plot has thickened even more. Why are there 42 giant presidential busts sitting alone in a field? I turned to an old favorite resource of mine, Atlas Obscura, and finally started unlocking the mystery of Virginia's strangest abandoned site.
These statues once hailed from nearby Williamsburg, VA- home to Colonial Williamsburg, the Presidential Pet Museum, and, until 2010, President's Park. According to the write-up on Atlas Obscura, President's Park was home to these giant busts, all of them designed by Houston-based artist David Adickes after a trip to Mount Rushmore.
In 2010, the park closed, leaving its designers with a dilemma: what do you do with 42 20-foot-high, 11-ton busts of the presidents? No one wanted to see them demolished, so instead, one of the park's constructors, Howard Hankins, gave them all a new home on his family farm. He had to take on the task of hauling them over, which proved tricky due to their immense size- hence why some of them look beat up.
But hey, cool- an exciting road trip attraction, right? Well, not exactly. The heads are on private property, which is why you can't just easily walk up to them (and why I didn't give exact directions on finding them from the highway). However, local photographer John Plashal occasionally offers tours, and there are ongoing crowdfunding efforts to one day secure a more public venue for the busts. Until then, these statues will remain in obscurity as some of Virginia's biggest oddities!
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