Capitol Visitor Center Spotlights Unsung Heroes
D.C. Tourist Attraction Displays Statues of U.S. History's Unknowns
Nov 21, 2008
When the Capitol Visitor Center, Washington, D.C.’s latest tourist attraction, opens on Capitol Hill on Dec. 2, 2008, it won’t quite be revealing a virtual “Who’s Who” of American history. It’ll be more like the “Who’s That” part of the nation's past.
Already famous for monuments dedicated to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, the nation's capital will now honor Ephraim McDowell, too.
What’s that? Ephraim McDowell doesn’t ring a bell?
Well, Dr. McDowell of Kentucky is, of course, the surgeon who removed a gallstone and repaired the hernia of President James K. Polk. Oh, he also helped write the Constitution of Kentucky.
The statue honoring Dr. McDowell is just one of two dozen that will appear in the Capitol Visitor Center, located on - or rather under - Capitol Hill in honor of the under-appreciated possibly entirely unknown Americans who left their mark on history even if few others noticed.
“The statues represent the diversity of the country as well as the diversity of the contributions made by its citizens,” according to the visitor center’s website.
The granite and bronze sculptures, some weighing several tons, will be arranged all around the new visitor center to honor, among others, the “father of television," (Philo T. Farnsworth of Utah); the founder of Arbor Day (Julius Sterling Morton of Nebraska, who celebrated it on April 2, his own birthday); and “The Best Loved Woman in Minnesota” (Educator Maria L. Sanford).
Before being given a home in the Visitor Center, 23 of the statues were among 100 pieces – two from each state – shoehorned into the Capitol’s picturesque Statuary Hall, the Hall of Columns on the Capitol’s first floor or, for some, in out-of-the-way nooks and crannies of the Capitol not even open to the public.
A 24th statue, of Helen Keller, the Alabama author and activist who became the first deaf and blind person to graduate college, will be added to the center later. A dozen of the statues are of Americans who lived in the 20th Century, though even their contemporaries may have trouble recalling their names. Remember Ernest Gruening? He was a former journalist-turned-politician and the first U.S. Senator from Alaska.
The statues, including a Montana suffragist, a Colorado astronaut and a Shoshone warrior from Wyoming, were sent to the Capitol by individual states, starting in 1864, in a move Congress hoped would reunite the country following the Civil War. The 100th statue was unveiled in 2005.
When Congress decided to name the center’s main exhibition space “Emancipation Hall” in honor of the black slaves who helped build the Capitol, it raised some sticky questions about what the center should do with three of its statues – those honoring leaders of the Confederate military, James Z. George of Mississippi, Wade Hampton III of South Carolina, and E. Kirby Smith of Florida. Visitors will find the three in the lobby of the lower auditorium.
There some issues also about where to put the king. King Kamehameha I of Hawaii, weighing in at six tons of bronze and gold, was, at the request of Hawaiian officials, placed beneath one of the center’s massive skylights so that no one could walk above his head.
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