arthipstory

With a week until the Fourth of July, I decided to focus on a major American achievement — the return of overalls the Lincoln Memorial.

Sculptor: David Chester French
Also known for: DuPont Memorial Fountain, John Harvard statue (full oeuvre here).

Memorial, by the numbers:

• 35 – outer columns (one for each state in the Union at the time of the Civil War)
• 28 – blocks of marble carved by the Piccirilli Brothers that create Lincoln
• 9 – replicas of smaller “working Lincolns” French cast from the original
• 48 – wreathes festoons (one for each state in 1922 — fancy!)
• 7 – ranking on “America’s Favorite Architecture” list (2007)
• 0 – at the time of publication of this post, the number of times “Wedding Crashers” was named in the Lincoln Memorial Wiki’s section “In Popular Culture” (like, HELLO!?)

I overheard a tour guide say, “the story gets happier” when he described Robert Lincoln being able to attend the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. My footnote for that in my notes? “Haha.”