News

 More than four years after being taken down from the Arcata Plaza in the dead of night, the statue of President William McKinley is back on a pedestal again after an Oct. 21 unveiling ceremony in front of the Canton, Ohio, courthouse where the 25th president felled by an assassin's bullet once practiced law.

The Canton Repository reported that a number of officials — from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to political strategist and McKinley historian Karl Rove — lauded the new location and took a few digs at Arcata’s jilting of the more than 100-year-old bronze work by artist Haig Patigian.

"It's great to have the statue here from our friends in California," DeWine was quoted as saying to laughs, before going on to thank the Timken Foundation of Canton for its work in bringing the sculpture to the city.



McKinley’s return to the spotlight — and the outdoors — comes after being cloistered away by the Timken Foundation for years, basically ever since the sculpture was placed in a bed of tires in the back of a flatbed truck back in March of 2019 for the 2,600-mile trip from Arcata to Canton, McKinley’s one-time home and final resting place.

During that time, the foundation had the statue restored, with decades of patina removed and a coffee-brown wax layer applied to protect the bronze work underneath.

Commissioned by Arcata rancher George Zehnder as a tribute to the slain McKinley, whom he had admired, the statue survived the Great San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and held court over the plaza for more than 100 years before being removed.

The Arcata City Council took the official vote in February of 2018 — the culmination of more than a decade of efforts by removal advocates who viewed having McKinley's statue in the town's center as a vestige of American imperialism and genocide. Still another year would pass before a decision was made to send the statue to Canton and the dismantling process commenced, with the Timken Foundation paying the city $15,000 for its costs.

That happens to be the same amount Zehnder paid to Patigian.

During what the newspaper described as a “lengthy speech,” Rove was reported to have “staunchly defended” McKinley, calling him a “unifier” and exalting his record as a Civil War hero, member of Congress and president.

At the new spot, the McKinley statue — which saw its fair share of vandalism and pranks in Arcata — is now monitored by security cameras, the Canton Repository reports.