Table of Contents ~ Sept. 1992
What's that statue doing there? by GEORGE RINGWALD
ff and on over my eight years of residence in Humboldt County, I've brooded about what I came to pose as this dual dilemma:
How come the statue of William McKinley, 25th president of the United Sates, is in the town plaza of Arcata and not just up the road in the town called McKinleyville? And why is it "McKinleyville" if it doesn't have the statue?
My casual inquiries of fellow residents brought replies ranging from "I haven't the foggiest" to the indifferent or even irreverent. One student I know at Humboldt State University suggested that the extended right hand of the McKinley replica might have signified a grubby plea for campaign funds.
Right: George Zehndner, courtesy Humboldt County Historical Society.
The inscription at the statue's base says it was presented to Arcata by George Zehndner. But who was George Zehndner? No clue from the statue, and to people I asked it seemed a matter of less than monumental -- so to speak -- import.
Then one day while thumbing through a three-inch-thick copy of a 1915 "History of Humboldt County" -- most of its 1,000-plus pages taken up by local hagiography -- I stumbled on none other than George Zehndner.
Old George, as I've come to fondly call him, sports a full white beard in the history book photo and looks stern on mien, with a strong nose coming straight from forehead to mustache. He's wearing a side-brimmed bowler hat of the kind favored by early-day German settlers, a non-nonsense vest and suit coat, and a broad dark tie.
He was a native of Bavaria, born in 1824 "of humble parentage" and had come to America in 1849. He worked his way to California, chopped wood in Sacramento, invested in a pack train in Weaverville, up in Trinity County east of Humboldt, then traded 20 mules for 20 cows, which he drove to Angel's Ranch, near Arcata, and started ranching, only to be burned out
by Indians in 1862, narrowly escaping with his own life. By 1866, though, he was back in business at the ranch. Did well enough to sell out four years later and invest in a home and other "valuable business properties" in Arcata.
Left: McKinley statue being lifted onto pedestal, Peter Pamquist collection.
The I came on this sentence: "Republican in his political faith and an ardent admirer of the late William McKinley, during 1906 Mr. Zehndner erected a bronze life-size monument in memory of the martyr president and this memorial, which he presented to the city of Arcata, now stands in the center of the park and, mounted on a granite square, commands the admiring attention of passers-by."
"Eureka!" I exclaimed -- which was appropriate of course because that's where I happen to live. "I've found it!"
But there was that missing part of the puzzle: How come that town up the road from Arcata is named McKinleyville? With no statue to its name. It does, however, sport what McKinleyville folks tout as "The largest totem pole in the world," the product of a giant redwood log, which stands 160 feet tall.
Again I encountered at first a total lack of information -- "I believe there was a man, a Mr. McKinley ..." one resident ventured -- to complete misinformation -- "It's because President McKinley visited here," I was told authoritatively, and mistakenly, by another.
The trail finally led to the McKinleyville home of Loberta Gwin, a retired school librarian and unofficial town historian.
"Well, Isaac Minor settled up here," Mrs. Gwin told me. "He had lumber and a lot of different things. He had the Minor Store, where the A&L Feed Store is now."
Left: Isaac Minor at McKinley statue, Humboldt County Historical Society.
The store, which had a post office downstairs and a dance hall above, was established in 1897 and quickly became the focal point of a developing settlement that was at first called Minorville.
"It was at the time McKinley was president," Mrs. Gwin went on. "Most of the settlers around here were die-hard Republicans, you know. So after he was assassinated, on Sept. 6, 1901, they changed the name to McKinleyville."
(Isaac Minor was also big in Arcata business, and his name is memorialized there in a "Minor Alley" and the "Minor Theater." I was glad to learn that. Until I'd heard of Isaac, I thought it was the "Minor" Theater because the other one was the "major" one.)
Voila! -- the missing piece of the puzzle.
Right: Sculptor Haig Patigian standing at base to right of unidentified man, date unknown, courtesy of Monica Hadley.
Still, there was another angle that demanded running down. I was beginning to feel like Mrs. Gwin, who told me she'd been working for 10 years on a history book of McKinleyville, which kept being pushed back in part because every time she went to interview one old-timer she invariably got leads to somebody else. That's the way this business goes -- always one more interview you just have to do.
Another McKinleyville source had told me earlier that there was "a big controversy" a year or two back about the McKinley statue being in Arcata and not McKinleyville. Mrs. Gwin though it was just a generation gap issue in Arcata-"The newer people want to get rid of the statue because McKinley doesn't mean anything to them," she said, "and the older people don't want to change."
Nothing would do but I go back to Arcata and check through the files of The Union, Arcata's weekly newspaper. What I found was not much of a controversy.
In the summer of 1990, during a renovation of the attractive block-square Arcata Plaza, the statue was to be temporarily removed in order to rebuild the pedestal and planter boxes around it.
"But City Hall received so many phone calls from people concerned the statue might be injured in the moving process," according to a story by Karin Jenkins, that it decided to let McKinley be and rebuild around him.
Browsing further through the Union files, including some latter-day columns by Monica Hadley and going back to yellowing pages of the newspaper in 1906, I unearthed a bunch of other stuff about the statue that might come in handy for trivia quiz aficionados.
The base of the statue "consists of 25 tons of granite." Just as well they didn't fiddle around with that pedestal!
A bandstand and a flagpole previously occupied stage center in the Arcata Plaza. But Haig Patigian, McKinley's famed sculptor (whose credits were to include a statue of Abraham Lincoln in San Francisco and a bust of Herbert Hoover in the White House), came up from San Francisco on April 11, 1906, for a look at the site. He insisted that "the only place for the statue was in the center of the plaza." Typical flaunting of artistic ego.
Local folks had some qualms because the flagpole "has fallen down on previous occasions," and they worried that if it were moved to one side, it might topple on McKinley.
The artist's argument, however, carried the day. McKinley stands in the middle, the bandstand is gone, and the flagpole stands off to one side. So far it hasn't fallen on McKinley.
Left: Santa atop icicle-covered chimney, Humboldt County Historical Society.
For some days back there-86 years ago-Arcatans worried that the statue might not arrive at all. Seven days after Patigian came to tow to determine the statue's site San Francisco was hit by its famous earthquake and fire of 1906. The fate of the statue in Patigian's San Francisco studio was the subject of anxious questions, and rumors swirled that McKinley has gone into melt-down. But neither quake nor fire had damaged the statue, although it did push back the scheduled May 1 unveiling.
The "handsome bronze figure" of McKinley, standing eight feet tall-considerably more than the "life-size" reported in the 1915 history book-was "intended to represent McKinley as he appeared at Buffalo just before his assassination." In his left hand he holds the scroll of the speech he planned to deliver.
(Actually, McKinley delivered the speech, to the Pan-American Exposition, on Sept. 5, 1901, and he wasn't shot-by one Leon Czolgosz, a reputed anarchist-until the next day. McKinley died eight days after the shooting. McKinley buffs: Please note.)
The statue set George Zehndner back $15,000, certainly a pretty penny in his day, and at the unveiling, on July 4, 1906, before a crowd of 2,000, old George said it was "a gift to the citizens of Arcata for all time to come."
Right: Statue dressed as Shepherd for Christmas, courtesy of Monica Hadley.
Far right: 1987 North County Fair poster by local artist Laura Zerzan.
I guess that rules out any possibility of McKinleyville grabbing off the statue, or perhaps, as a friend recently suggested, trading Arcata the totem pole for it.
Mrs. Dolores Taylor, a McKinleyville native whose roots go back to a great-grandfather who ran away from home in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., jumped ship in Eureka and got a job running the ferry across the Mad River between Arcata and McKinleyvillle, adds a neat touch to the McKinley statue saga.
"When I was younger," she relates, "they used to dress him up on holidays. But newer people thought that was degrading... I don't think he's nearly as interesting anymore."
George Ringwald was a former reporter for the Press Enterprise in Riverside, California, and Business Week magazine.
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