Appleton's 'Spirit of the American Doughboy' statue to be restored
by FOX 11 News Friday, July 14th 2017
Original plaque form the 1934 dedication. Sculpture Valley will be adding a new plaque to the other side of the monument with the names of all the Outagamie County doughboys who perished in WWI (Photo: Post Crescent)
APPLETON (WLUK) -- A monument honoring soldiers from Outagamie County who fought in World War I, is being restored for a fifth time.
The "Spirit of the American Doughboy" will be removed from its pedestal Saturday. The statue sits in the median of Memorial Drive. Since 1934, the memorial has caught the eye of drivers on Appleton's Memorial Drive.
"This is our commitment to anybody we lost in World War I," said Appleton veteran Alex Schultz. The sculpture is of a doughboy, a nickname for American soldiers and Marines during the Great War.
Sadly, it's falling apart.
"If you look at his legs you can see it's splitting at the seams," Schultz explained. Schultz told FOX 11 News there have been four previous attempts to save the statue. "It was destroyed in 1986 by someone who fell asleep at the wheel," he said.
That trauma aside, Schultz told us it was built during the Great Depression, when the sculptor did not have access to strong metals.
"So he started making them out of this zinc alloy material, which is not made to last 100 years and it just does not stand up outside," the artist explained. So Appleton is going to have the Doughboy recast in bronze.
"Removing the current statue, making a mold of it and then making a reproduction of that with the mold," explained Dean Gazza, Appleton's parks director.
The tentative plan for the original sculpture is to put it on display at the History Museum at the Castle. "As part of a war memorial installation that they're currently raising funds for," said Schultz. Recasting will take a few months.
Saturday there will be a small ceremony for the sculpture's removal. "That's the anniversary date of the death of Harvey Pierre, who was Appleton's first doughboy to lose his life in World War I," Schultz told FOX 11.
The cost of the project is $28,000. It's budgeted under the city's Memorial Restoration Fund to restore ailing war memorials across Appleton. "So a couple years ago I recognized that and I started creating a budget for that," Gazza told us. Schultz has been working with the city to figure out what to fix and how to fix it.
"I'm a veteran of Desert Storm so it hits very close to me to take care of these things. We've been ignoring them for far too long," he told us. But soon it will hard to ignore the new, stronger Doughboy.
The ceremony for the statue's removal is Saturday morning at the statue at 10:00. The statue is in the median at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Cherry Court.