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1928 - 1932
The commission: In 1928 the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, a Fort Wayne firm built on the Lincoln name, commissioned the most fashionable sculptor in America to make its monument: Paul Manship. The subject was the company's namesake in the years that belonged to Indiana, Abraham Lincoln as a boy and young man in the state where he spent fourteen years of his youth.
The statue: Manship worked, as the WPA guide to the city took care to record, with neither model nor photograph. What stands in the forecourt of the company's building at 1301 S. Harrison Street is a symbolic figure, twelve and a half feet of bronze: the young Lincoln leaning on a stump, an ax for the rail splitter in one hand and a book for the reader in the other, youth and its attributes made visible. Around the pedestal, designed by architect Benjamin Wistar Morris, Manship set four bronze bas reliefs of his own, Charity, Fortitude, Justice, and Patriotism, the traits the company wanted read off its founder-figure. The statue was dedicated on 16 September 1932, with the Lincoln National Life Foundation publishing Franklin B. Mead's book on Manship's Lincoln the same year to introduce it.
The standing: It remains the finest piece of sculpture the city owns by an artist of national rank, and the pattern matters to this section: when Fort Wayne wanted a monument at the highest level, in 1916 as in 1928, it bought the work from the national market and set it in a Fort Wayne street, where it became, by staying, Fort Wayne art. The sculptor went back to New York. The Hoosier Youth stayed.
Sources:
- Brief Guide to Fort Wayne (the WPA Indiana guide, reprinted by the Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1962) (the statue in the forecourt at 1301 S. Harrison Street; Manship working with neither model nor photograph; the symbolism of youth).
- Franklin B. Mead, Heroic Statues in Bronze of Abraham Lincoln: Introducing the Hoosier Youth of Paul Manship (The Lincoln National Life Foundation, Fort Wayne, 1932) (the commission, the conception, the dedication program of 16 September 1932).
- List of public art in Fort Wayne, Indiana (Abraham Lincoln: The Hoosier Youth, Paul Manship, 1932, bronze, about 12 ft 6 in).