Honors to the Fallen
Boalsburg, PA
 [ Excerpt taken from Town & Gown, May 2000 ]
On Monday, May 29, the three women who made Boalsburg "The Birthplace of Memorial Day" will be honored with a life-size bronze sculpture depicting the first Memorial Day in October 1864, six months before the end of the Civil War. That's when Emma Hunter Stuart and her friend, Sophie Keller Hall, both 16 years old, and Elizabeth Weaver Myers, 46, carried flowers to the cemetery beside what is now Zion Lutheran Church to decorate the graves of- Emma's father and Elizabeth's son.
Dr. Reuben Hunter, a surgeon with the 54th Pennsylvania Regiment, had died of typhoid at Annapolis, Maryland, on September 19. Pvt. Amos Myers of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, commanded by future governor and Penn State trustee Col. James A. Beaver, had been killed at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. The women also put flowers on the graves of other war dead, including Revolutionary War and War of 1812 soldiers, and agreed to meet the following year to do the same.
Their next cemetery walk, July 4, 1865, found most of the community joining them. But not until 1868 was the practice observed nationwide on one special day, after Gen. John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, declared May 30 as "a day for strewing flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country." Once called Decoration Day, it later was renamed Memorial Day and still later became a Monday holiday.
The three women had no reason to legally record their first cemetery trek, and Congress was persuaded to declare Waterloo, N.Y., as the first town to celebrate Memorial Day. About two dozen other towns also claim to be the holiday's home, but Boalsburgers know better and annually celebrate their "Day in Towne" with a food fair, crafts festival, band concerts, historic exhibits, firemen's carnival and a 6 p.m. walk to the cemetery.
This year's 136th walk, coinciding with Centre County's Bicentennial, will feature the bronze sculpture's unveiling at noon by the man who turned a dream into reality, Col. James V. Dearing, commander of Battery B, 3rd Pennsylvania Volunteer Light Artillery, the Boalsburg-based Civil War reenactment unit. Working on the statue project since 1993, he found a sculptor, Lorann Jacobs, as enthusiastic as he and spearheaded the fundraising of nearly $ 100,000 "with about $34,000 left to go," he said in late March. "It's all been private contributions, too, except for $2,000 walk-around money from the state from Ruth Rudy," a former state representative whose district included Boalsburg.
More than 100 "Civil War troops," both Union and Confederate, will attend the ceremony along with Maj. Gen. Walter Pudlowski, commander of the 28th Division whose shrine is in Boalsburg, and local, state and possibly national politicians. Members of the Hunter and Myers families also are expected to be there, as is sculptor Lorann Jacobs, who says, "I can't wait to see all this finished."
Rep. Rudy's successor, Kerry Benninghoff, and his governmental counterpart representing State College, Lynn Herman - himself a reenactor with the 148th group - agreed to co-chair the Boalsburg Ladies Memorial Day Statue Fund with Dearing and honorary chairwoman Margaret Tennis. With their help $10,000 gifts came from Bell Atlantic, Wal-Mart and the Pennsylvania Home Builders Association, whose State College chapter added another $1,000. An additional $10,000 came unsolicited from Betty Cannon, whose late husband founded Cannon Instruments, formerly in Boalsburg. Other sums came from, for example, the Harris Township Lions Club's sale of Boalsburg Trivia games.
Jacobs, who lives in Dallastown in York receives a citation from the PA. State House of Representatives for her work.
Laran Foundry in Chester will receive the bulk of the money, $78,000, for taking Lorann's life-size clay model and making a rubber mold, wax copy, ceramic shell and finally a silicon-bronze piece that was ground and finished to its present splendor. The foundry also made desktop miniatures of the sculpture from Jacobs' first model that were sold in the fundraising effort. The sales of these miniatures brought in about $15,000.
"We've had several in-kind donations, too," Dearing says, "such as printing from Colonial Press and landscaping around the sculpture from Narber's. And some area businesses are donating $2,000 a year for three years."
Boalsburg artist Ken Hull led Dearing to Jacobs, who had exhibited Hull's works in the gallery she and her watercolorist husband Joe have in their home. Active in the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen, whose help she credits, Lorann Jacobs became a sculptor 20 years ago after working seven years in a foundry and learning how the process was done. Her largest piece is the 11-foot, two-ton “Workers of York’” which shows three men and a women reaching up to an eagle.
“You can decide for yourself whether they're catching the eagle or setting it free," she says. "The union people were very excited about it."
She likes best to do garden statuary – 42 inch-high fairy-tale animals, nymphs and angels - and has exhibited pieces in the 2000 Philadelphia Flower Show and at the Academy of Notre Dame. She calls the Boalsburg sculpture “Honors to the Fallen.”
“The original plan,” Dearing says, “was to have all the women standing up. But Lorann suggested putting movement into it by having one of them bending at the waist. It really does make it more interesting.”
Jacob’s used Dearing’s wife, Peg, and two other Battery B wives in their Civil War attire - Mary Long and the late Shirley Koontz - as models and for details on their dresses. "But the statues are not portraits," Jacobs says. "I wanted to keep it artistic. Each figure has a different personality through the eves and the expression on the face. I gave one woman no pupils, which gives her a ghostly look."
The women's hoop skirts, one of which is plaid, measure about five feet across and were done in a sand mold of tour or five sections welded together.
The three statues will he grouped on a 25-foot base designed by Mike Siggins, architect with John Haas & Associates and ex-president of the Friends of the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, and built by Alexander Concrete.
A major expense is $40,000 to the Boalsburg Cemetery Association for the space and perpetual care of the sculpture, which will stand between South Atherton Street and the cemetery driveway off Church Street. Margaret Tennis, whose husband Ken is president of the Cemetery Association, says, "it will have a walkway leading up to it, and landscaping, and it will be lighted at night." She adds that it also will have to be waxed every few years to protect its finish, “just like the pigs (sculpture) in State College have
to be waxed."
She too, is excited to see the finished piece, saying “Ken and I saw statues like this in Statue Park in Loveland, Colorado, while visiting my sister. We thought what a nice idea that would be for Boalsburg.”
To the committee’s knowledge there is no statue in the U.S. dedicated to women on the home front during wartime.
To view more of Loran’s public works, click here.
|
