Our Lady of Perpetual moisture.

HA!!

My friend moved from a northern Midwest state to the deep south and I teased her about finding appliances and plumbing fixtures in her yard. (No rants, please. I love the South)

Well, she called my bluff and made the most adorable flower planter out of an old toilet and included it in her landscape.

Sometimes, ya just gotta go for the giggle.

we moved to the suburbs last year and our neighbors have boat motors in their yard. These bathtub shrines remind me of visiting my grandmother's neighborhood which was actually a trailer park on a lake in michigan. Everyone seemed to have some sort of homemade lawn art/shrine on display.

Vivo en Phoenix, and I see these beauties everywhere! There's a fantastic electric Maria on 3rd St east of Mill in Tempe that I particularly like. On Washington and ~12th St in Phoenix there's a super cool pintura oro de Maria on a Catholic church. I love this stuff!

Lots of them in my Michigan youth and lots of them in my New Hampshire dotage -- can't seem to escape them! I always thought they'd make a great photo essay, glad to see someone is handling it the blog way!

in pittsburgh, mary on the half shell

As a fifth grader, my CCD (Continuing Catholic Development) class was invited to our teacher's rural Ohio home to plant flowers around his Bathtub Mary and have an end-of-year cookout.

Right until this moment, that never struck me as weird. After moving out of the pocket of Catholics that I grew up in, I am often finding myself realizing that there are quite a few quirks us Irish and Italian Catholics consider to be normal.

These are all over northern Michigan.

I'm from Lafayette, Louisiana and these are everywhere around there as well. My grandparents had one for the longest time, as does everyone in their neighborhood.

I, too, have grown up with these in central NYS but for the life of me can't remember where a single one was/is. Now you've done it! I'll have to carry my camera with me and start driving around to snaps photos just to add to your collection. Cool. I love Bathtub Marys, always thought they were a little strange.

As mentioned, they cover Michigan. We called them the Lawn Goddesses.

i am so excited to go on a Bathtub Mary (or Mary on the Half Shell) hunt! i live in stearns county, mn (mentioned in the bathtub mary wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_Madonna)

I must have led a sheltered life because I've never seen one of these. I got a good chuckle out of this post though.

You know, I'm pretty sure I saw more than one of these in Ireland when I visited 4 years ago...

Why do people do this and like it? Please share. I will admit I have a bias: I can't get with any cherub, gargoyle, ceramic frog, bird bath, or peeing statue in a garden, but I'm open to understanding why others love them. So what's the history/symbolism of the Virgin in the... cast off tub?

Ah, the ubiquity of Folk Art!
These are folk adaptations of the Italian custom of making sacred spaces out of natural rock grottos. The bathtub imitates the shape of the grotto. Sometimes you'll see a carefully constructed rock niche instead of the bathtub. In South Louisiana, some of these niches were made of plaster and/or concrete.
It's possible that in areas with a lot of rocks available in the soil (such as New York state), you might still find hand-stacked rock grottos.

Our Lady of the Golden Showers

What a great tradition! In Tucson, many barrios have la Virgen de Guadalupe in their yards with shrine, christmas lights, plastic flowers, all sorts of marvelous touches. People sit on their front porches, too. Not like my current neighborhood.

@ ohmersaud, oh yeah, there are plenty of these in Ireland. They tend to be more of the rock/blue-painted grotty (oops..grotto) variety though. The statue in one of them, located in a small village in County Cork, Ballinspittle (I kid not...) was alleged to move.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballinspittle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZjM83wZmWw

MsDonnaGirl - there is a link in the post to the wikipedia article about Bathtub Marys

A good bathtub Madonna needs white painted rocks laid out in a circle around it with flower (real or plastic) inside the circle.

Boy, does that carry me back. It's not just an Italian thing, I've seen it in the yards of friends, neighbors, and yes, relatives. It's a Catholic thing, about a generation ago.

when my family went on vacation in northern wisconsin when i was growing up, we knew we were almost there when we turned the corner at "our lady of the bathtub." i'm shocked to see that same name here - i've never heard it outside my family inside joke!

Where I'm from in St. Landry Parish (southwestern Louisiana), there are Marys in bathtubs galore. We used to call a particular stretch of the highway "Mary Central," due to the unusually high density of Marys in bathtubs.

My favorite, though not in a bathtub, was known as "Our Lady of the Fence Post." :)

Gross. This is almost as bad as old toilets and bedpans incorporated in gardens.

what a great collection of photos. Very nostalgic for me, as I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood in Ohio.

I actually have a plain cement Mary on my balcony....and I'm Jewish. I figured she was a Jewish mother too, so why not?

Years ago, I was driving my brother around showing him the pretty countryside near my (then) home in Worcester MA. When we saw one of these bathtub shrines he turned to me with a puzzled look on his face and said, 'I guess that proves cleanliness _is_ next to godliness'

Every time I see one now I think of this and laugh.

Sistervashti,

First, I loved your comment. Then I saw your name--the same as my daughter's!

As for the Mary in a Bathtubs, yes, I grew up in Michigan and there were many!

Terry in Silver Spring, you are a better folklorist than I! Yes, yes, yes, the white-painted rocks and the plastic flowers! How could I have forgotten?

as a boston native, we call her mary on the half shell too! haha

I've seen these on tv, but I had no idea there was this whole THING (following?) about Bathtub Mary.

I grew up in Little Italy, in Toronto. These were everywhere, though a lot of families actually bricked their whole front yards and created red brick grottoes for their Marys. There was one yard around the corner from our house we called "the Smurf Jesus garden" because it boasted both a well-made brick and glass shrine with a statuette of Jesus and a huge fiberglass Smurf hugging a tree.

I grew up in the Ohio Valley and these were EVERYWHERE. I have great affection for them. I live in Austin now and there's a great deal of lawn-iconography here too, although nothing as simple and personally nostalgic as this. Thanks for the awesome post!

How cool to see all the South Louisiana posters! We end up everywhere.

Had to grin at the slammer comments - how many of these folks fawn over repurposing fruit crates and industrial salvage? One person's bathtub grotto is another's oscilloscope bookshelf support.

I know I'm late, but thanks for the information guys! I've got a new regard for these now.

Most of them in Somerville are on half-shells, not bathtubs: http://www.somervillemadonnas.com/

Also:

Bathtub Mary, bathtub Mary;
Sittin' by the front porch on my lawn.
I don't care if it's dark and scary
Long as I got my bathtub Mary
Sittin' by the front porch on my lawn!

Cleanliness is next to Godliness.