This Labor Day, there will be a very special dedication ceremony taking place in Lake View at 1 p.m. at Crescent Park Drive. Lois Long, a member of the Lake View Historic Preservation Commission, says this year the Chief Black Hawk statue will be rededicated to commemorate improvements that were recently concluded at the site.
Long has been a member of the commission since returning to her hometown of Lake View in 1996. She said the first order of business at that time was to oversee repairs to the statue of the Sauk tribe leader that was originally constructed and dedicated on Labor Day in 1934. She added it was a combination of factors that had resulted in the damages.
Because REAP/HDRP grant money was used for that restoration, a conservator, Mayda Jensen of Jensen Conservation Services of Omaha, Neb., completed that renovation in 1999. In 2000, the statue was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Since then, it has been included on the Iowa Save Outdoor Sculpture Register, which is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Modern Art. Harry E. Stinson, a member of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Iowa, constructed the statue of a special type of very dense concrete to better withstand the Iowa elements.
Long says it will be a brief ceremony, but it will feature speeches by local officials, including Marilyn Kaiser, who was the Secretary of the Historic Preservation Commission at the time of the restoration and who was five years old when the first dedication took place. Rebecca Conard, a historian from Iowa City who was instrumental in getting the statue listed on the Historical Registry, will also speak at the event.
