Now set prominently at the south end of the Portage lift bridge (i.e., in the ‘Yooper Loop’), the Houghton Co. War Memorial in Veterans Memorial Park has a statue of a Civil War soldier and a WWII-era field piece. Parking is available in the lot immediately east of the memorial (last left-hand turn on westbound Shelden Ave. before the bridge; across from the Downtowner pub). The statue was initially installed on Pearl St. in 1912, so it never contained any WWI soldiers’ names, but the park now honors all the veterans of Houghton Co.
Robert Finch has a good post on the history of the statue and we will soon include a post on the field piece.
Alex Atkinson (B.S. Anthropology, 2014) did his senior thesis on “The Conservation of Copper Alloy Public Artworks in Houghton, MI.” . The memorial soldier was one of the artworks Alex studied. He concluded that the statue was in remarkably good shape for its age, but some preventative and some restorative conservation was necessary sooner than later, particularly in one foot, which is experiencing “core migration” that if left unchecked will compromise the structure of the statue. Below is a poster on the project, or read the whole report here.
