Court Square Fountain

Court Square Fountain
Year 1885
Material Cast iron
Dimensions (25 feet in)
Location Montgomery, Alabama
Coordinates 32°22′38″N 86°18′33″W / 32.37722°N 86.30917°W / 32.37722; -86.30917Coordinates: 32°22′38″N 86°18′33″W / 32.37722°N 86.30917°W / 32.37722; -86.30917

The Court Square Fountain, in the Court Square-Dexter Avenue Historic District of Montgomery, Alabama, was established in 1885 on top of an artesian well, which native Alabamians used long before the area was settled. The fountain contains statues based on Greek mythology. The surrounding area, once the location for Montgomery's bustling slave trade, has seen most of its historical buildings torn down; the fountain's statues were replaced with aluminum ones in the 1980s.

Location, history

The fountain was built on top of an artesian well, a watering hole already for the native Alabamians long before the coming of whites.[1] By June 1853 the well was 475 feet deep and flowed at two gallons per minute.[2] The location is also the place where two communities, Alabama Town and New Philadelphia, had grown together to form what would be called Montgomery.[3] Later, the area was the central location of the Montgomery slave trade.[4]

Description

The fountain was long believed to have been the work of Frederick MacMonnies; the director of the Alabama Archives and History in 1935 asked him if it was his design, and he denied.[5]

On top of the fountain is a statue of Hebe, the Greek goddess of eternal youth.[6] The fountain itself is made of cast iron. The statues came from a catalog of zinc iron statues: on top, a "Canova's Hebe", one layer down four "Seated Boys" holding towels, one layer down four "Narcissus" figures, and at the bottom a "Stem Bitterns", "a group of three free-standing birds around the base stem of a cast-iron fountain". All these statues were replaced in 1984 by aluminum versions; those, however, were corroded by chlorine in the water only twenty years later.[7]

The historical buildings around the fountain, which was known as the "romantic center" of the city, have mostly been demolished, one entire block of them in the 1960s to make way for a Pizitz department store, which opened in 1972.[6] Across from the fountain on Court Square is the Winter Building, whence the telegram giving the order to fire on Fort Sumter was given.[8] Section 486 of the Montgomery City Ordinance (1888 version) forbids the interfering with fish and fowl in the basin of the statue, or the disposing of liquids or solids in it; violators could be fined $100.[9]

In art

Montgomery-born painter Anne Goldthwaite depicted the fountain with a cotton wagon running along in front of it in her painting Bringing Cotton Bails to Market.[10] Zelda Fitzgerald played here as a child,[11] and poet Andrew Hudgins located one of the poems in A Clown at Midnight (2013) at the fountain.[12]

References

  1. ↑ Windham, Kathryn Tucker (2007). Alabama, One Big Front Porch. NewSouth Books. p. 28. ISBN 9781588382191.
  2. ↑ Blue, Matthew Powers; Neeley, Mary Ann (2010). The Works of Matthew Blue: Montgomery's First Historian. NewSouth Books. p. 208. ISBN 9781588380319.
  3. ↑ Williams, Donnie; Greenhaw, Wayne (2007). The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow. Chicago Review Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9781556526763.
  4. ↑ Graetz, Robert S. (2011). A White Preacher's Message on Race and Reconciliation: Based on His Experiences Beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. NewSouth Books. p. 44. ISBN 9781603060691.
  5. ↑ Mertins, Ellen (5 October 2014). "Court Square Fountain known by many names". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  6. 1 2 Pell, Karren; King, Carole (2015). Montgomery. Arcadia. pp. 8, 18, 19, 29, 73. ISBN 9781439651445. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  7. ↑ Grissom, Carol A. (2009). Zinc Sculpture in America, 1850–1950. Associated University Presse. pp. 287, 302, 382, 383, 395. ISBN 9780874130317.
  8. ↑ Serafin, Faith (2013). Haunted Montgomery, Alabama. The History Press. p. 56. ISBN 9781609499303.
  9. ↑ Thorington, William S. (1888). The Code of Ordinances of the City Council of Montgomery: With the Charter and Captions of All Acts of the General Assembly of Alabama Affecting the Charter of the City of Montgomery. Brown Print. Company. p. 220.
  10. ↑ "MMFA Online Collection: Anne Goldthwaite". Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  11. ↑ Foxwell, Trish (2013). A Visitor's Guide to the Literary South. Countryman Press. p. 17. ISBN 9781581577136.
  12. ↑ Hudgins, Andrew (2013). A Clown at Midnight: Poems. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 17. ISBN 9780544105522.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, December 13, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.