Stuart began construction in 1925, working alone. He mixed and poured every concrete block himself, shaping them into a circular, domed hut just 14 feet in diameter. He sank the structure two feet into the Alabama clay, giving the interior a cool, cave-like quality. Six top-hinged windows circled the building, and two skylights pierced the dome. The hut was small enough to heat with a single body and solid enough to endure decades. A hurricane swept through in September 1926, delaying completion, but Stuart finished within the year. The result looked like nothing else in Baldwin County -- a miniature observatory, or perhaps a concrete igloo, sitting in a clearing among the pines and live oaks of the Gulf Coast lowlands.

Stuart named himself a hermit, but his solitude was porous. He grew much of his own food, wove rugs on a loom he had hauled from Idaho, and taught weaving at Marietta Johnson's Organic School in Fairhope. He gave talks in town. And he kept a guestbook at the hut's door. Over two decades, more than 1,300 visitors signed it. The most notable was Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney of the Scopes Trial, who visited Stuart's tiny concrete dome not once but six times. What drew the most famous lawyer in America to a hermit's hut on the Gulf Coast is anyone's guess, but the visits speak to Stuart's reputation as a thinker and conversationalist, not merely a recluse. The man who came to Alabama to die had become a local fixture.

The tuberculosis diagnosis that sent Stuart south turned out to be less of a death sentence than an invitation to a different life. Whether it was the warm Gulf air, the physical labor, or the sheer stubbornness of a man who would pour his own concrete blocks at 67, Stuart outlived his prognosis by more than two decades. He remained at Tolstoy Park until 1944, when he was 86 years old. He then sold his holdings and moved to Oregon to live with his son. Stuart died there in 1946 at the age of 88. The man who had been told to go somewhere warm and wait for the end had instead built a home, planted a garden, welcomed over a thousand guests, and earned the quiet admiration of an entire community.

Today, Stuart's concrete dome still stands on Parker Road in Montrose, though the ten acres around it have long since been developed. A parking lot for a real estate office surrounds the hut -- a poignant irony for a man who came to Alabama seeking simplicity. A large oak tree near the dome is the only other surviving element of the original estate. The skylights have been permanently sealed, but the six circular windows and the domed roof remain intact. In 2005, local author Sonny Brewer published The Poet of Tolstoy Park, a novel based on Stuart's life that brought renewed attention to the site. The hut was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Community efforts have raised funds to preserve and potentially relocate the structure, ensuring that Henry Stuart's unlikely monument to reinvention endures.