Soldier's story to end happily on old pedestal

Nobody will guarantee it to be totally tree-resistant, but the new statue being mounted on the fountain in Courthouse Park will be more sturdy than its fallen predecessor, the sculptor says.

A wayward limb smashed the cast iron Civil War soldier, erected by the Women's Relief Corps in 1911, to pieces in June. Restoration seemed hopeless to Cape Girardeau County employees but not to Dexter artist Alan Gibson.

He will attend a ceremony at 9 a.m. today where visitors can see the new statue, made of a mixture of polyester resin and bronze, and then watch it be lifted by a bucket truck to its perch. The soldier weighs about 200 pounds, Gibson said.

He saw video footage of the damage three months ago and felt compelled to intervene.

"When I picked up the statue, it was in a couple hundred pieces in five-gallon buckets," he said. "It was like a jigsaw puzzle. When I saw two pieces that matched, I attached them with baling wire."

He later applied adhesive between the pieces, removed the wire, filled in the cracks and made a rubber mold. It was used to cast the new statue.

Don McQuay, county building and grounds superintendent, said he was amazed when he saw the result. "I think it is going to be more tree-resistant than the other one. It was getting old and brittle."

The statue cost $13,200, with 80 percent paid with Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief funds, McQuay said.

The new soldier has a surprise inside: a plastic tube holding Wednesday's Southeast Missourian and an article about Gibson that ran in The Daily Statesman in Dexter, Mo. Future generations can get to the tube by unsealing a small section of the soldier's hat.