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For 126 years a bronze figure of Victory has stood 72 feet above Broadway in Galveston, holding a laurel wreath out toward the San Jacinto battlefield. Starting September 28, she gets her first real care in years.
The Galveston City Council has unanimously approved a contract of about $121,300 with R. Alden Marshall & Associates to clean and seal the Texas Heroes Monument’s granite and to clean, polish and wax its bronze, The Daily News reported. The work is paid for with hotel occupancy tax revenue, and the lane nearest the monument will stay closed through October 23. The council had earlier put off a larger restoration plan of roughly $181,000.
The vote came with an unresolved question attached: nobody is certain who owns the monument. It was reportedly given to the state in 1900 but never formally transferred to the city, and City Manager Brian Maxwell said the city had believed the state owned it. The Texas Historical Commission may have a say in its care. The council decided not to wait for an answer. “Whether we own it or not, the right thing to do to show that we’re good stewards of the monument is to fix it, instead of letting it rot,” Councilman Alex Porretto said.
It was the gift of Henry Rosenberg, the Swiss-born Galveston banker whose estate also built the city’s public library. His will set aside $50,000 for “the erection of an appropriate monument in the city of Galveston to the memory of the heroes of the Texas revolution of 1836,” according to the Rosenberg Library. That sum was a fortune in 1900, roughly $2 million today by The Daily News’s estimate.
The sculptor, Louis Amateis, built it on a heroic scale. The bronze was cast in Rome. The granite came from New Hampshire, from the same quarry that supplied the Library of Congress. The figure of Victory alone stands 22 feet tall, and when she was cast she was the second-tallest bronze statue in America. At her feet, four bronze panels, in the library’s words, “tell the story of Texas’s struggle for sovereignty”: the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. Portraits of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin ring the base, along with seated allegorical figures, one of them resting her hand on a shield bearing the Lone Star above a single date: April 21, 1836.
Galveston chose that date for the unveiling. The monument was dedicated on San Jacinto Day, April 21, 1900, before an estimated 10,000 people. More than 2,000 schoolchildren led the procession carrying flags and flowers, and Governor Joseph D. Sayers attended.
The island has its own claim on that story. In April 1836, with Santa Anna’s army advancing, the Republic of Texas’s interim government withdrew to Galveston Island. Days later, Sam Houston’s army won Texas’s independence at San Jacinto.
The salt air has been hard on the monument. The Galveston Historical Foundation calls it the island’s most important historic public sculpture and warns that the coastal climate is wearing it down despite a restoration in 1986. “Its important design materials were not maintained, and our challenging coastal environment is eroding the statue,” said Dwayne Jones, the foundation’s chief executive.
Galveston could have waited for someone to settle who holds the title. It chose to pay for the work itself. When the scaffolding comes down in October, Victory will still be holding out her wreath toward San Jacinto, where Texans won the independence the monument was built to honor.
Photos: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (public domain).
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