President Heads

What do you do when you have dozens of 20-foot-tall busts of nearly every U.S. president and nowhere to put them?

This was the problem that Howard Hankins faced in 2010, after Presidents Park in Williamsburg, Virginia—where the giant busts had been on display—closed down.

The statues were sculpted by Houston artist David Adickes. In 1994, he was commissioned to sculpt a 67-foot tall statue of Sam Houston, the city’s namesake and former governor and president of Texas. Adickes’ favorite part of the project was sculpting the head, especially the eyes.

Adickes took a roadtrip in the middle of the project to visit friends in Canada. On the way home, he visited Mount Rushmore, and was disappointed with how he couldn’t see into their eyes. This inspired him to sculpt a set of all the presidents’ heads on a smaller scale.

They’re not all exactly the same size, however. Adickes decided the size of each bust according to a survey of historians on how well the presidents did in office. He divided them into three categories: great, average, and failures.

According to the survey, there were eight great presidents, two failures (Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding), and the rest were average. Adickes made the busts of the average presidents all the same size, and the eight great presidents about a foot taller.

To get an idea of how the backs of their heads might look, Adickes frequented the movie theater and studied the backs of older men’s heads.

Upon completion, Adickes moved the busts to Williamsburg, Virginia, where entrepreneur Everette H. “Haley” Newman II put around $10 million into the creation of the open air museum Presidents Park. In 2004, the heads were open to the public alongside the Presidential Pet Museum.

The park never took off, however, and when the economy plunged into a recession in 2008, the park shut down. Contractor Howard Hankins, who’d assisted in building the park, was hired to destroy the busts. Instead, Hankins adopted all 42 heads and lugged them back to his private family farm 11 miles up the road for safekeeping.

With each bust weighing as much as 20,000 pounds, it took nearly a week to move them all, and the backs of the heads were destroyed when they were transported by forklift to the farm. The eyes, however, remain intact.

For years the giant heads have sat tucked away on the farm, which is private property and not open to tourists. There is a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to relocate the statues to a place where they can be visited by all. A short documentary, called All the Presidents’ Heads, showcases the heads and Hankins’ efforts.