George E. Ganiere: the general's second sculptor

1916 - 1918

The commission: The Anthony Wayne monument was decided in 1916, and it was not, at first, Ganiere's. The monument commission viewed models from several of America's well-known sculptors and awarded the work to Charles E. Mulligan of Chicago; the Fort Wayne Sentinel of 11 March 1916 announced Mulligan's accepted model for the equestrian statue in Hayden Park. Then Mulligan died suddenly, the plans were revised, and the work fell to George E. Ganiere of Chicago, a pupil of Lorado Taft, for $15,000 in bronze with $900 more for two tablets, on the site at the northwest corner of Hayden Park facing the Lincoln Highway.

The statue: What Ganiere delivered was the city's defining piece of public sculpture: the general on horseback at heroic size, about twenty feet of bronze, dedicated by the city on 4 July 1918 by the commission's own account, though the record also carries 1917 as the year of erection, and the leg prints the dedication as the bracket the sources leave, 1917-1918, rather than a single fixed year. With the statue went three bronze plaques from his hand, Little Turtle, an aerial view of the fort, and Tecumseh, made for the granite base. Ganiere's other civic work ran to Lincoln: the statues at Webster City, Iowa, and Burlington, Wisconsin, are his, which makes Fort Wayne's general one panel of a Midwestern triptych of heroes by the same Chicago hand.

The afterlife: In 1973 the statue moved to Freimann Square, and the granite base did not move with it. The base was scrapped in 1985, and Ganiere's plaques survive because a local artist and stone carver, Timothy E. Doyle, rescued them from the scrap, after which Julie R. Waterfield bought them and gave them to the Allen County Public Library, where they can still be seen. The general kept his sculptor; the plaques kept theirs only by a rescue. Ganiere's own birth and death dates are not given by any Fort Wayne source found, and stand as an open item.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society, Anthony Wayne Statue page, drawing on Griswold and Taylor, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917) (the 1916 plans, Mulligan's award and death, Ganiere's selection, the $15,000 and $900, the Hayden Park site, the dedication of 4 July 1918 and the captions' "1917, or 1918").
2. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 11 March 1916 (the commission's acceptance of Mulligan's model).
3. History Center Notes and Queries, "The Anthony Wayne Statue" (April 2013) (the three plaques; the 1973 move; Timothy E. Doyle's 1985 rescue; the gift to the Allen County Public Library).
4. Franklin B. Mead, Heroic Statues in Bronze of Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln National Life Foundation, 1932) (Ganiere as Taft's pupil; his Lincoln statues; the Fort Wayne Wayne).