Traveling along the Enchanted Highway 21 in Regent, ND

You’ve got a dream. Live that dream. Don’t hesitate. If I can do it . . . I think you can do whatever you put your mind to. Gary Greff
As we drove on I-95, near Gladstone, ND, Ted and I were startled to see a huge metal sculpture of Canadian geese flying over the prairie.
Ted pulled into the parking area, and I walked over to the informational sign about the Enchanted Highway and the artwork.
To be honest, the Enchanted Highway sounded hokey to me, probably just a ploy to lure in unsuspecting tourists.
I soon found out differently. The flying geese sculpture was taller than a ten-story building and nearly as wide as a football field with the sun made out of old oil well pipes and the geese and prairie made of repurposed oil well tanks.
The 2002 Guinness Book of World Records cited it as the world’s largest scrap metal sculpture.
When I slid back into the passenger’s seat, my hubby announced, “We’re going on a little detour.” That detour took us 32 miles along County Highway 21 to Regent, ND.
Every four or five miles along the two lane highway, we saw more gigantic sculptures: “Deer Crossing,” “Grasshoppers in the Field,” “Fisherman’s Dream,” “Teddy Rides Again,” “World’s Largest Tin Family,” and “Pheasants on the Prairie.”
It all started in 1989, when Gary Greff visited his hometown, Regent, to help his parents and recognized that the town, population 150, was dying. He said, “I just envisioned that it’s going to be a ghost town if somebody doesn’t do something.”
Greff loved his childhood in Regent, founded in 1910. “It became a place of growing up where you developed yourselves,” he said, “you developed your character.”
Although Greff enjoyed growing up in Regent, he didn’t enjoy school. “I was a D, F student,” he admitted. “I barely made it. I remember the principal telling me, ‘Don’t even try to go to college because you’ll never make it’.”
Not one to be deterred by others’ opinions, he attended college, earned a master’s degree, taught fifth and sixth grades, and even worked as a junior high principal in another town, but Regent’s welfare weighed heavily on his mind.
One day while helping his mom harvest onions from her garden, he came up with an idea to build a factory and sell diced onions in stores. A company bought into the idea, but wanted him available to develop it, so he quit his job and moved back to Regent.
Then, he saw a metal sculpture of a farmer holding a hay bale. Greff said, “I thought while nobody’s going to stop for normal sculptures, they just might stop for the world’s largest....”
The idea of selling chopped onions died an honorable death as he began work on the gigantic tableau, but he had no experience sculpting. “I never laid a bead of weld in my life until I started this process,” he said. “I never had an art class. I just said one day, the town is dying.”
While creating his sculptures, Greff lived in an old trailer on an average of 1,500 dollars a year and said sometimes he was down to his last penny.
The sculptures cost money to build, erect, and maintain even though he used scrap metal. His early estimate of the overall cost was 400,000 dollars with each scene taking about six years to complete.
In addition to his own money and donations from friends, he received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Archibald Bush Foundation.
The state of North Dakota also loaned him money to establish a gift shop on Main Street.
Eventually, he realized that if tourists came to Regent, they needed a place to stay and eat.
“I went to a bank,” he said, “and asked them if they would fund a hotel in Regent North Dakota, and the bank sort of laughed at me saying, basically, we’re not going to stick a million dollars into a hotel in a town of 100 people—that’s not going to work out.”
When the Regent high school closed in 2010, and students started attending school in Mott, 16 miles away, Greff became depressed, wondering if his creations were helping at all.
However, he wasn’t down long, and when the school building came up for sale, he bid on it, bought it for $100, and transformed it into the Enchanted Castle Hotel, a steakhouse, and a tavern.
That’s what Ted and I saw at the end of our detour in Regent, along with my favorite sculpture: “Sir Albert and the Dragon,” a work in progress which will eventually be animated with the dragon breathing real fire and smoke.
Gary Greff is now 75 and still sculpting, still dreaming. With his artwork attracting nearly a quarter of a million visitors over the years, he now has official backing.
The state has allocated 75,000 dollars to maintain the sculptures, and the Friends of the Enchanted Highway Foundation help with maintenance and funding new projects.
Despite my initial skepticism, I have to admit, of all the wonders we saw on our summer vacation, our little detour in North Dakota was the most enchanting.