Event marks Lincoln statue’s century on campus

For a century, the statue of President Abraham Lincoln has watched over Bascom Hill.

Those 100 years will be marked by a ceremony sponsored by the Wisconsin Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 16.

UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin, the 1st Brigade Band and a number of Lincoln enthusiasts will gather at the iconic statue to mark its centennial and the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

“It’s a unique opportunity to learn something significant about President Lincoln, about his relationship to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and about the role that he played in a variety of ways in the development of the campus,” says Jim Hoyt, an emeritus journalism professor and a member of the Wisconsin Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and 1st Brigade Band.

John Skilton, chair of the state’s bicentennial commission, and Hoyt will speak during the program, which will also include Ron Knaus of the Sons of Union Civil War Veterans, the group that donated the Gettysburg Address plaque beside the entrance to Bascom Hall in 1937.

The 1st Brigade Band, a recreation of an actual Wisconsin Civil War band, will perform 15 minutes before the event and immediately after.

Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant College Act in 1862, legislation inspired by a broad educational reform movement in America that allowed designated universities to expand their curriculum beyond traditional scientific and classical studies.

The university’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, College of Engineering, Cooperative Extension Service and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs can trace their origins to the Morrill Act of 1862 and subsequent additions to this legislation.

The act provided each state with the means to sell federal land to generate an endowment to create programs that would teach practical skills in agriculture and engineering, which was then referred to as mechanic arts.

The act also called for the teaching of “military tactics,” in response to the need for an expanded officer corps at the beginning of the Civil War.

It wasn’t until 1866 that Wisconsin officially declared UW–Madison as its recipient of the land grant. The university purchased an additional 195 acres of land to the west of Bascom Hill to establish the University Experimental Farm at less than $28,000.

Soon after, apple orchards and vineyards were established on Observatory Hill and the first professor of agriculture and chemistry was hired. Later, research on the farm improved varieties of wheat, oats, barley and corn.

“If another college or university in Wisconsin had been designated as the land-grant institute, Madison would look very different today,” says Daniel Einstein, program manager with Facilities, Planning and Management.

The Lincoln statue is a duplicate of the statue located in Lincoln’s native town of Hodgenville, Ky.

UW-Madison alumnus Richard Lloyd Jones worked with the sculptor, Adolph. A. Weinman, to cast an exact copy of the original statue for the university campus.

The Lincoln statue was first unveiled in 1909, a century after Lincoln’s birth. Ten years later, the statue was re-located from its original position between North and South halls to its current site in front of Bascom Hall.

To mark the anniversary, Milwaukee art conservator Cricket Harbeck power washed and waxed the statue to get rid of surface deposits from air pollutants, grit and bird droppings.

Harbeck also cleaned and preserved the Gettysburg Address plaque and the sifting-and-winnowing plaque that flank the main entrance to Bascom Hall. Hoyt and Skilton funded the cleaning.

This was Lincoln’s first detailed sprucing up in a decade.

“He looks 100 percent better,” Hoyt says. “It was a project well worth doing.”