Work was begun in 1909, and a year later the Gorham Company announced the arrival of the full-sized plaster model at their foundry in Providence, Rhode Island. The sculptor had asked that they cast the bronze in one piece, which cost forty per cent more and took more time. He thought it worth the extra expense because there would be no seams in the bronze and no danger of breakage due to extremes of heat and cold.
Gutzon was pleased with the work when it appeared in bronze. “Lincoln never left the Garden of Gethsemane,” he said. “He went right from Springfield to the labor of war. And Lee had hardly surrendered when Lincoln was shot. It is a curious and charming picture when you realize that he wandered away constantly into this garden alone.”
There was much favorable comment on the work after it was set in place. The sculptor himself thought that he had never made a finer thing. The appeal of the statue is evident in the actions of the children who cluster about it. All day in summer they come here to play. They sit in Lincoln’s lap, clasp their arms about his neck, roll about his feet, completely pleased. They could not say why. They don’t know much of who this man is supposed to be. They don’t know much about Lincoln. But they know his sadness and they feel his gentleness and friendliness.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt was principal speaker when the monument was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1913. Wildly cheering throngs of men, women and children lined his way of march and gave him an inspiring tribute all the way from New York City, an experience which Gutzon declared was what gave Roosevelt the idea of running for President for a third term.
Nobody seems to have remembered what he said as he pledged the country’s support to what Lincoln had stood for—Lincoln who sat with bowed head, worried and disconsolate, on a bench before him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
STAMFORD AND POLITICS
In 1909 John Gutzon Borglum married Mary Williams Montgomery, to nobody’s great surprise. Mary Montgomery was born in Turkey of missionary parents and had lived there twelve years. She was educated at Wellesley and received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Berlin. She could argue with Gutzon, sometimes successfully.
Their meeting, in a way, was accidental. On her way back to the United States after her Berlin studies, she had boarded a ship at Rotterdam. It turned out to be the same one that the sculptor barely caught at Cherbourg. He joined her party for shipboard games and poker, and they were quickly friends. He met her family and she became well acquainted with his sisters; and a family association went on for years.
Miss Montgomery taught French for a year in New Haven, then joined two other girls in a literary agency that did translations, research work and special articles until they married and broke up the partnership. She worked with Dr. Henry Smith Williams on The Historians’ History of the World and there met Rupert Hughes, another friend of Gutzon’s. She also worked with Dr. Isidore Singer as manager in the preparation of The Jewish Encyclopedia. Much of her life was spent in the vicinity of Thirty-eighth Street. After leaving Dr. Williams she did secretarial work, some of it for Gutzon, and became acquainted with many more of the Borglum friends. She learned a great deal about the operations of the Thirty-eighth Street studio.
So, in 1909 they were married at Short Beach, Connecticut, with a New Haven divine, Dr. T. T. Munger, and Miss Montgomery’s two brothers officiating. The Borglums went for a honeymoon to some trout stream in Canada and thence to a place on the Gunnison River in Colorado. By that time Mrs. Borglum was certain that her life was going to be vastly different.