Statehouse sculptures offer glimpse into Indiana's rich, complicated past

Apr. 9—With the 2024 legislative session ended and the lawmakers gone home, the Indiana Statehouse's more permanent residents have been left behind to contemplate the histories that brought them to these twilit marble halls.

Some 20 commemorative statues are on display in and around the Statehouse: A pro-slavery governor whose brother-in-law was executed with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. A U.S. vice president who thought Indiana deserved a better, more beautiful capital building. A Union soldier who resisted the call to abuse Confederate prisoners of war. A lady in a toga for some reason?

These pieces of public art tell us something about what Indiana has thought is important and who it has chosen to celebrate.

Youngest governor memorialized ... without a shirt?

Ashbel Willard has a statue all to himself because he was handsome and charismatic ... probably. He was also one of the youngest governors in Indiana history.

Born in New York, Willard did a lot in his short life of 39 years. He went to Hamilton College in New York, then lived in Michigan, Texas and Kentucky. Later he became a campaigner for the James K. Polk presidential campaign. "His abilities as a campaigner were extraordinary, his oratorical powers pre-eminent," according to the Indiana History Bureau. "Handsome, red-haired, blue-eyes, Willard was indisputably a charismatic figure and a man of tremendous charm and force."

He was so likable that when he stopped in New Albany, the residents asked him to stay, and he did. Willard married Caroline C. Cook in 1847 and they had three children.

Willard moved up the political ranks quickly from lawyer to city councilman, representative, Democratic party leader, lieutenant governor, and finally governor at 36.

Now the down side: Although Indiana was a free state, Willard was in favor of the South having the ability to own slaves and wanted to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law. Still, when his brother-in-law John Cook was sentenced to death for his participation in John Brown's Harpers Ferry Raid, an insurrection to free enslaved people in Virginia, Willard testified on Cook's behalf. This affected his popularity in Indiana, and Cook was hanged in 1859.

Willard had tuberculosis for quite some time and traveled to different climates in hopes of improving his condition. After his lung hemorrhaged at a speech, he traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to regain his health. But after a month, he relapsed and died on Oct. 4, 1860, just months before the Civil War. He was the first governor of Indiana to die in office.

Actually, Willard's statue is not a statue at all but rather a plaster cast from the original bust made by Henry Dexter in 1860. The original sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, but if you don't want to travel to D.C., you can visit him on the second floor of the Statehouse Rotunda on the south corner.

For most of us, when we think of Indiana, we think about cornfields, basketball or even limestone, but one statue in the Indiana Statehouse, named "Indiana," has a different idea.

The statue of a woman was considered to be an "ideal figure of Indiana."

It is around five feet, 10 inches tall and made out of metal covered in white paint. Her hair is up in a bun, and she is dressed in a toga.

"Indiana" was created to be displayed in the Indiana Building at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, where a lot of Indiana citizens traveled on Sept. 27, 1893, for "Indiana Day." Over 100,000 citizens went to the fair on that day alone.

The statue was sculpted by Retta Matthews from Arlington, Indiana. She was one of three women chosen to create statues to be displayed at the Exposition.

Afterward, "Indiana" was given to the Indiana Statehouse and is now located on the southeast end of the fourth floor.

Thomas A. Hendricks stands immortalized outside the Indiana Statehouse on the southeast corner.

Hendricks was a 19th-century Indiana lawyer and politician. During his political career, he served in the Indiana legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. After his terms in D.C., he returned home and became governor of Indiana from 1873 to 1877, leading the movement to build a new Indiana Statehouse (the old one had been condemned).

Hendricks spent his last eight months as Grover Cleveland's vice president before he died in 1885. Just five years later, his caped figure was proudly standing at a whopping 38.5 feet tall, watching over the house he helped build.

One of the more popular statues in the Indiana Statehouse is the mascot of the "Bison-tennial," Abe.

Abe is a bison, which roamed Indiana long before it became a state in 1816. During Indiana's 200th birthday celebration, the Bison-tennial Legacy Project set out to install a five-foot fiberglass bison statue in each of Indiana's 92 counties, which were then free to decorate them however they saw fit — with painted clouds, the state flag, town slogans and much more.

The name "Abe" for the Statehouse bison came on Statehood Day, Dec. 11, 2015, the gift of a group of fourth-graders.

Indiana's very own Dr. Strange lookalike, Colonel Richard Owen, is one of over 20 statues in the Indiana Statehouse.

Born in Scotland in 1810, he now lives on the second floor of the Statehouse and hasn't moved since 1913. Before his permanent address downtown, the youngest of three brothers spent time performing military drills in Switzerland, learning French and German, and studying chemistry and physics, which he would later teach when he moved to Indiana.

After attending the U.S. Military Academy, Owen was promoted to the position of colonel of the 60th Indiana Volunteers. He was put into a powerful position in 1862, when he took charge of around 4,000 Confederate prisoners in a camp in Indianapolis. Prisoners at the camp were treated much more fairly than most prisoners held in camps at the time. His reputation as a leader grew to be that of kind and fair, which is what his statue in the Statehouse has written on it.

Owen also worked at both Purdue and IU (before their rivalry started) and was Purdue's first president.