Put in Bay Gazette _ Island News

The Official Newspaper of Put-in-Bay.
Printed Monthly "on the island" by our local newspaper professionals

The following is a reprint from the latest Gazette regarding Perry's Monument

Everyone is familiar with Perry's Monument at Put-in-Bay that was built between 1912 and 1915 to commemorate the Battle of Lake Erie and the lasting peace between the United States and Canada. But did you know that Put-in-Bay's famous monument might never have been built had a very similar one been constructed on Belle Isle in the Detroit River.

During the 1890s there was a group in Detroit who thought the conditions of artistic life in the city were deplorable. During this period Detroit's more prominent citizens looked to another arena in which to improve their city's culture. A planning committee met at the home of Senator James McMillan in 1899 to discuss the commission of a memorial commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Detroit. Belle Isle, located in the center of the Detroit River, was agreed upon as the best site for the memorial.

There were many alternatives as to the form the monument might take, and some suggested that a competition would serve to attract the best artists in the world. A prominent and influential leader in Detroit art circles, Charles Lang Freer, disagreed, however, maintaining that America had architects, sculptors and painters "equal to the best artists in the world." He nominated the celebrated Stanford White as the architect for the monument, to be assisted by painters Thomas W. Dewing and Dwight W. Tyron, as well as sculptors Augustus Saint Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies. White produced a design that featured a Doric column topped by a gas flame that would stand as a symbolic beacon to commerce. At the base there were to be steps supporting a colonnade of three hundred marble columns which in turn formed an arcade some fifteen hundred feet long. The steps led to a basin and fountain in which a statue of the French discoverer Cadillac was to be surrounded by leaping horses and other allegorical groups representing Detroit as a gateway to the Northwest. Beyond the basin stretched a lagoon. In its entirety, the monument was to cost one million dollars.

When White returned to New York from Detroit, where he had presented his plans, he described the situation to Thomas Dewing with mixed emotions. "Everything went through with a hurrah in Detroit and nobody could have been treated better than I was," he declared, even though at times the adulation seemed a bit excessive. According to White, Mayor William C. Maybury was "a politician of the most virulent type." The mayor, for example, had announced the architect's arrival in all the papers and had met him with a brass band and a crowd of reporters before escorting him to see all the sights of the city.

Freer and others had all they could do to stop him from putting up an illumination of gas letters with 'Welcome Stanford White' across city hall. White's enormous drawings were placed on display in the Detroit Museum of Art, where, to his embarrassment, the architect heard himself described by a critic as the "the equal of Michelangelo." After selected guests had viewed them, the drawings were projected by lantern on the front of city hall. White privately confessed to Dewing that he thought it impossible to raise the necessary one million dollars by private subscription. One influential and wealthy critic, James E. Scripps, at least publicly, declared otherwise, claiming that if local citizens succeeded in erecting the monument, Detroit would lead all the cities of the West. He then enthusiastically published a drawing of the proposed scheme in the Evening News on February 23, 1900.

Events, however, were to prove Stanford White correct, for interest in the Belle Isle monument did in fact fade quickly. Freer and Detroit capitalist Frank J. Hecker, President of the Michigan-Peninsula Car Works, paid Whites' fees out of their own pockets, and Freer maintained that Scripps, who some charged with "trying to run the town," was responsible for sabotaging the Belle Isle monument. Had things been just a little different in Detroit and the monument had been built, it would have been too similar for the builders of the Perry's Victory Memorial. Another design would have been chosen and the look of Put-in-Bay would have been completely different.

The designers of Perry's Monument were Joseph H. Freedlander and Alexander D. Seymour, Jr. Their design, hauntingly similar to White's Belle Isle Doric column, was chosen in a design competition for Perry's Monument about a dozen years after Belle Isle's memorial flopped.

One must ask, did these architects plagiarize the design used for Perry's Monument? This may be a mystery that will never be answered.

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