A community is divided as plans to replace an iconic statue in Marietta are underway
By: Noah Cavin
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MARIETTA, Ohio (WOUB) – The Start Westward Memorial has sat in the middle of Muskingum Park in Marietta for 87 years. It could soon be removed and replaced with a bronze replica.
Many people in Marietta, including Start Westward Memorial Society President Joe Grimm, do not agree with the decision.
“Why are we bothering making it a bronze? Why don’t we save it and conserve it?” he asked.
It was created by world-famous sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who also sculpted Mount Rushmore. The statue was sculpted out of sandstone from Marietta, and over the years it has begun to erode.
The memorial was dedicated on July 8, 1937, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to commemorate what he called 150 years of Americanism. Thousands of people crammed into Muskingum Park to get a glimpse of the memorial as it was unveiled for the first time.
Borglum did not attend the statue’s reveal, and insisted the statue should have been made of bronze.
“He refused to come to the dedication,” said Marietta City Councilman Harley Noland. “He refused because he thought this was an inferior product, local sandstone. He knew it would erode and he was not pleased.”
The statue was also promised to become a national landmark by then-Ohio Gov. George White, according to Fred Smith, a consultant to the city of Marietta for the memorial.
“The idea at the time — the agreement — was that this would eventually become a National Historic Landmark,” said Smith. “Then what happened? Well, World War Two happened and Congress had bigger things to do than turn this into a national landmark.”
As time went on following World War Two, the statue was forgotten in a sense.
“The sculpture got ignored, and even who owns it got lost,” said Smith. “It wasn’t until just recently that people looked into old records and they found out that actually the sculpture did not transfer to the federal government as was planned. It went to the state of Ohio. But the state of Ohio didn’t know it was theirs for all this time. They thought it was federal property or city property.”
Now, after decades of wear and tear on the statue, the city of Marietta, in coordination with the state of Ohio and the Ohio Historical Society, is planning to replace the sandstone structure with a bronze replica.
“Through a 3D scanning process, we’ve scanned the entire sculpture,” said Smith. “We’re actually replicating Borglum’s original tooling on areas where there is loss, so we’re not having a sculptor put that tooling back in. We’re trying to actually use Borglum’s original work to put that tooling back, but it’s all in a replica.”
This decision has provoked a lot of mixed reviews within the Marietta community.
“I do feel that a bronze statue would last longer, allowing future generations to appreciate it. But, it also doesn’t have the age to it,” said Richard Lambeth, a lifelong Marietta resident. “And I do feel like the wear and tear of it adds a sense of importance to it. It talks about how long it’s been part of a community. So I do feel like allowing it to age naturally is also very important sometimes just to really give a feel for its place in the community.”
“It’s very important,” said Lambeth. “We use it as an important landmark in the city. When we cover local history in our school, we talk about the statue and who made it.”
“The Start Westward Memorial is the single most important piece of art in town,” said Noland, the Marietta council member.
The Start Westward Memorial is so iconic that Joshua Schlicher, Marietta’s mayor, changed the city’s logo to the statue in 2020.
“I thought it was more important to put the emphasis on the memorial in the park depicting the original pioneers that settled Marietta and the Northwest Territory move that Marietta is known for,” he said.
Grimm, the Start Westward Memorial Society president, said the statue’s importance cannot be overstated for the city, but most residents pass it by without a second thought.
“So many people don’t know its significance,” he said. “They know, ‘Oh, that’s the picture they have on the city vehicles.’ They know it’s important, but they don’t know what the importance of it is, what it really represented.”
The Start Westward Memorial Society is vehemently against the replacement of the statue, even though it was their idea to bronze it in the first place.
“The artist told us to make it bronze, it should have been made of bronze,” said Grimm. “Well, let’s make it bronze, we thought.”
The Start Westward Memorial Society, of which the granddaughter of Gutzon Borglum is a member, then created a $7 million plan to make a bronze replica and conserve the old sandstone statue.
They quickly abandoned that plan as concern arose that if the statue was moved, it would no longer be eligible to be on the National Register of Historic Places.
“All this work, what we put together, we had people say they’re going to raise money for it, and we had to start all over again,” said Grimm.
Smith says those concerns are legitimate, but believes a replica should still be able to be on the National Register of Historic Places.
“The concern is legitimate because this is such an odd case being a sculpture,” he said. “But it’s not going to change the fact that it is eligible. It will always be eligible. It will always have significance.”
“The sculpture commemorates a history. Is the sculpture history itself? That’s the question,” he said. “I don’t want the Northwest Territory history and westward expansion of the United States to get lost when people are talking about the sculpture. It can divert the whole idea because the main thing is that this is commemorating the end of the Revolutionary War and possession of the Northwest Territory by the new United States and then the expansion of the U.S. Huge growth of our country came after that in 1787.”
Despite this, Marietta’s city council shot down a resolution to support the Start Westward Memorial Society’s application to put the memorial on the National Register of Historic Places .
Grimm is concerned the city and state are rushing the process of replacing the statue in order to have it completed by America’s 250th birthday next year. He’s also worried about what happens to Borglum’s original sandstone statue.
If the statue is removed, it needs to be placed in a climate-controlled building to preserve the original sandstone. However, as of now, there isn’t a set place for the statue to go.
Grimm is urging the city and state to not replace the statue, and rather preserve it in place.
“They don’t have enough information about the conservation in place,” he said. “They just don’t have that information. They haven’t taken time.”
He also said replacing the statue is unnecessary, and compared the Start Westward Memorial to the Liberty Bell.
“One of the icons of the American Revolution is the Liberty Bell,” he said. “The word is when they rang it at George Washington’s funeral, it cracked. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it cracked. And they tried to repair the cracks. But the cracks in the Liberty Bell are part of its nature. Would we recreate the Liberty Bell? No.”
He says the sandstone of Marietta is just as iconic as the statue itself, and the decision to carve the statue out of local stone should not be changed 87 years later.
“We cannot change history. We can only preserve it,” he said.