Art: The Sculptor & Noah Webster

To celebrate the 183rd birthday of Lexicographer Noah Webster, 500 citizens of the well-heeled, suburban town of West Hartford, Conn, tricked themselves out in costumes and gathered before their Town Hall. For West Hartford’s most famous native son is Noah Webster.

Focus of this celebration was a huge 13-foot, beetle-browed, unfinished marble statue of Lexicographer Webster which stared glumly down at them through a surrounding clutter of scaffolding. The

Mattatuck Drum Corps, from nearby Waterbury, paraded in Revolutionary uniforms, rattling loud tattoos. Traffic Cop Arnold Belanger dressed up like George Washington. The Rev. Rockwell Harmon Potter, dean of Hartford Theological Seminary, read a prologue. But, in spite of this whoop-dee-do, West Hartfordians’ emotions were mixed. They had been mixed ever since Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski had first suggested adorning West Hartford with his statue of Noah Webster.

When Boston-born Sculptor Ziolkowski moved to West Hartford five years ago he was shocked to find no statue of the town’s famous son, said he would create one if West Hartford would raise $16,519 to pay expenses. When public-spirited West Hartfordians kicked in a mere $3,700, Sculptor Ziolkowski was hurt, but agreed to carry on. Saying that the money would not provide him a shed to work in, Ziolkowski borrowed a trailer and carted a 32-ton block of Tennessee marble onto the lawn in front of West Hartford’s prim Town Hall. There, stripped to the waist, Sculptor Ziolkowski hacked and chiseled. He turned night into day with glaring floodlights, rang West Hartford’s rural welkin with an electric drill. When the West Hartford clergy protested his working on the Sabbath, bushy-headed Ziolkowski snorted: “There seems to be no objection to golfing, tennis, motoring and sports in general on the Sabbath, so why the rumpus over the creation of a masterpiece of art?” As months passed, Sculptor Ziolkowski’s marble cutting became the biggest show in West Hartford. Crowds gathered daily, and tourists parked their cars to have a look. Hawkers sold peanuts and soda pop. To his audience, Sculptor Ziolkowski sold marble chips, at 60¢ to $2, to be used as doorstops and book ends.

Climax of Sculptor Ziolkowski’s monumental campaign came last month when he chiseled an inscription at the base of his statue. It read:

For you I labored, not for my own day,

That by the Word men should know brotherhood.

My Fellow Men! You have not understood,

Since each of you would go his separate way.

Sculptor Ziolkowski said the lines came from a letter Webster once wrote to John Jay, but to jittery West Hartfordians this looked like a personal insult. Sniffed the Hartford Courant: “If Mr. Ziolkowski chooses to use his statue of Noah Webster as a billboard on which to publish his feelings toward his fellow townsmen, that, of course, is his business.” Wailed the West Hartford Metropolitan Shopping News: “Perhaps he has forgotten, as many men do today, the teaching of the Good Book which advocates in one place the turning of the other cheek.”