Focus on Statue of John Bridge and discuss the History of the Monument.
The statue was dedicated on Nov. 28, 1882. It was donated by Samuel J. Bridge. It was sculpted by Thomas R. Gould and, after he died while working on it, his son Marshall S. Gould. Bridge also donated the statue of John Harvard on Harvard University's campus. Samuel J. Bridge served as appraiser of the port of Boston and, subsequently, appraiser general at San Francisco.Dedication ceremonies took place at Shepard Memorial Church. Thomas Wentworth Higginson addressed the crowd on the occasion. Higginson described the statue as being noteworthy in representing "the common man," and even suggested that it was "the first time...that the every-day Puritan has appeared in sculpture." He further stated that Bridge "was one of those who kept back the Indian and brought civilization forward." Harvard President Charles William Eliot also addressed the crowd, and hailed how Bridge's life "foretold the life of the teeming millions who in two centuries were to vivify the wild continent."At the time of its construction, some believed that the statue was "the first...of a Puritan pioneer that has been erected in New England."A tablet in memory of Bridge was also placed in Shepard Memorial Church.The statue accompanied many other Gilded Age erections of this genre, in which Puritans or Pilgrims stood for American ideals and reasserted a fantasy of the "moral values, social dominance, and political leadership of the nation's New England, and specifically Anglo Saxon, colonists." Other examples from the post-Civil War period include The Puritan by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Springfield, Massachusetts, The Pilgrim also by Saint-Gaudens in Philadelphia, and The Pilgrim by John Quincy Adams Ward in Central Park.The statue has been toppled on a number of occasions. In 1922, the figure was found with a rope around the neck, and newspapers speculated that "college boys or other young men of Cambridge" had committed the act. In 1935, it was found again toppled, this time with wire around the neck. It took several weeks for it to be restored.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens Harvard University Charles William Eliot Thomas Wentworth Higginson statue of John Harvard John Quincy Adams Ward Springfield, Massachusetts Thomas R. Gould Central Park Harvard University's