enity.

NATHAN HALE--1887

In a Memorial Day address at New Haven in 1881, the Hon. Richard D.
Hubbard suggested the erection of a statue to Nathan Hale in the State
Capitol. With the exception of the monument in Coventry no memorial of
the young hero existed. The suggestion was acted on by the Hon. E. S.
Cleveland, who introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives in
the session of 1883, appropriating money for the purpose. The propriety
of this was urged before a committee of the Legislature by Governor
Hubbard, in a speech of characteristic grace and eloquence, seconded by
the Hon. Henry C. Robinson and the Hon. Stephen W. Kellogg. The
Legislature appropriated the sum of five thousand dollars for a statue in
bronze, and a committee was appointed to procure it. They opened a public
competition, and, after considerable delay, during which the commission
was changed by death and by absence,--indeed four successive governors,
Hubbard, Waller, Harrison, and Lounsbury have served on it,--the work
was awarded to Karl Gerhardt, a young sculptor who began his career in
this city. It was finished in clay, and accepted in October, 1886, put in
plaster, and immediately sent to the foundry of Melzar Masman in
Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Today in all its artistic perfection and beauty it stands here to be
revealed to the public gaze. It is proper that the citizens of
Connecticut should know how much of this result they owe to the
intelligent zeal of Mr. Cleveland, the mover of the resolution in the
Legislature, who in the commission, and before he became a member of it,
has spared neither time nor effort to procure a memorial worthy of the
hero and of the State. And I am sure that I speak the unanimous sentiment
of the commission in the regret that the originator of this statue could
not have seen the consummation of his idea, and could not have crowned it
with the one thing lacking on this occasion, the silver words of
eloquence we always heard from his lips, that compact, nervous speech,
the perfect union of strength and grace; for who so fitly as the lamented
Hubbard could have portrayed the moral heroism of the Martyr-Spy?

This is not a portrait statue. There is no likeness of Nathan Hale
extant. The only known miniature of his face, in the possession of the
lady to whom he was betrothed at the time of his death, disappeared many
years ago. The artist was obliged, therefore, to create an ideal figure,
aided