Hampton worked as a janitor and secretly built a large assemblage of religious art from scavenged materials, known as the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.

Over the next 14 years, Hampton built a complex work of religious art inside the garage with various scavenged materials such as aluminum and gold foil, old furniture, pieces of cardboard, light bulbs, jelly jars, shards of mirror and desk blotters held together with tacks, glue, pins and tape.

Hampton wrote that God visited him often, that Moses appeared to him in 1931, the Virgin Mary in 1946, and Adam on the day of Harry S. Truman's inauguration in 1949.

[8] The work is based on biblical prophecies of the millennium, including St. John's vision of God seated on a silver and gold throne surrounded by angels, references to Judgment Day, the crowns to be worn by the saved and other events described in Revelation.

[10] Art critic Robert Farris Thompson describes the Throne as "a unique fusion of biblical and Afro-American traditional imagery.

In the notebook, Hampton referred to himself as St. James with the title "Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity" and ended each page with the word "Revelation.

"[4] Hampton also created wall plaques with Roman numerals one through ten and his undecipherable script suggesting commandment-bearing tablets.

Denney brought art dealers Leo Castelli and Ivan Karp, and artist Robert Rauschenberg, to see the exhibit in the garage.

[4] Harry Lowe, the assistant director of the Smithsonian Art Museum, told the Washington Post that walking into the garage "was like opening Tut's tomb.

[18] In 2007, composer Jefferson Friedman premiered a musical piece inspired by Hampton's artwork titled "The Throne of the Third Heaven," commissioned jointly by the National Symphony Orchestra and the ASCAP Foundation.

[6] The indie music group Le Loup named their 2007 debut album The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.

[19] In 2015, author Shelley Pearsall published a young adult novel, The Seventh Most Important Thing, which put the artwork and the artist in a fictional context, imagining a meeting between Hampton and a troubled thirteen-year-old boy.

"[21] In 2018, Cheyenne/Arapaho author Tommy Orange published a short story, "The State,"[22] that references Hampton and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.