FF celebrates 200-year evolution
in a renovated statue
The Fort Fairfield Public Library is reclaiming a century-old Joan of Arc memorial statue and with it the life of one of the town’s most promising pioneer settlers.
Studio artists from the Guist Gallery in Woburn, Massachusetts, came to Fort Fairfield last week to begin restoration on the plaster statue. The model of Joan of Arc has long greeted visitors to the library, but suffered from collisions with passersby and graffiti — the pull of teenagers to carve their initials into things as far back as 1940 — and some underappreciation.
“When I first came in the library, I fell in love with her and wanted to find her story,” said librarian Jennifer Gaenzle, who led the effort to piece together the scattered history of the memorial and get it refurbished. “Thankfully we had the digital newspapers. I was able to search and I found out a lot.”
The Joan of Arc statue was made in Boston by Italian-born artist Pietro Caproni, who sold replicas of sculptures and statues from the Louvre in Paris, the National Museum in Athens, the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery in Tuscany and the British Museum. In 1916, Alforetta and Adelaide Edwards donated the statue (based off a neoclassical sculpture by Henri Chapu) to the then-3-year-old library, in honor of their late husband and father Delmar Edwards, an entrepreneur originally from Bethel who built Maine’s first wheat roll mill in Fort Fairfield in 1898.
The statue was meant to cheer Fort Fairfield’s 100th birthday and remember Edwards, whose life was cut short at the age of 42 in 1909 after a suspected bout of appendicitis. Edwards was among a wave of Aroostook settlers following the Civil War who helped build thriving small cities and rural farming and natural resource industries. Among other things he ran for the state legislature in 1896 as a Democrat and worked as vice president of the Frontier Trust Company.
Alforetta never remarried, and daughter Adelaide also lost her husband at a young age and never remarried. “And [Adelaide’s] daughter never married at all,” Gaenzle said. “There’s no living relative.”
It’s uncertain why the Edwards chose a statue of Joan of Arc, a French Catholic heroine who fought against the English and was executed in 1431. While the Edwards were not Acadian, Fort Fairfield and other towns were home to Catholics as well as Protestants by 1916. Interestingly, too, Gaenzle learned, the other five Joan of Arc statues from the same Capponi mold are all in Virginia, a southern, traditionally non-Catholic state, at Longwood University, Radford University, James Madison University and the University of Mary Washington.
Most likely, the choice of Joan of Arc was for a cross-cultural memorial of broad appeal, at a time when waves of new Catholic immigrants came to the United States and when Boston was “really the cultural center of the Northeast,” Gaenzle noted.
Regardless of why the Edwards chose Joan of Arc, the statue helped galvanize the civic spirit of Fort Fairfield in 1916 for its centennial celebration and link it with people and places far away. (Another woman that year donated a photograph of the Cathedral of Cologne.)
Today, the Joan of Arc statue is restored and ready for Fort Fairfield’s 200th founding birthday next summer.
Using sandpaper and brushes, Giust Gallery artists and mother and daughter Kathleen Shure and Lisa Benson removed chips, filled in gouges, reconnected a thumb and then applied a fresh coat of paint to the statue.
“This is actually in pretty good condition compared to some others we see,” said Shure.
“It’s always great to come and see where the casts are, and to see how they are part of the culture locally,” said Lisa Benson, noting that she noticed an engraving of “Lisa 1977” among the graffiti, which was preserved in photographs.
