LOUISVILLE, Ky. — With a last-minute sanding and a twist of the screws and bolts, a young Abraham Lincoln was reunited with his iconic top hat.
All with famed sculptor Ed Hamilton watching intently and tapping away at the bronze statue’s hand.
“He’ll be complete now,” he said. “Because once the hat was gone, he was kind of incomplete.”
The bronze top hat was stolen in December 2023. It’s the first case of vandalism since Hamilton finished the sculpture 15 years ago and installed it at Waterfront Park.
The sculpture is based off a moment in Lincoln’s life that he said, “tormented him.”
In 1841, the 32-year-old Lincoln stayed at Joshua Speed’s family home at the Farmington Plantation on Bardstown Road for three weeks.
During that time, he had made his way to the Waterfront, and witnessed enslaved people that were chained together and boarding riverboats; they were going to be sold down south.
Hamilton recreated that scene at the Waterfront, saying he “wanted to create these figures that seem so compact together and not knowing where they were going.”
“That was what slavery was all about.”
The statue of Lincoln, showing him 20 years before he was elected President, sits overlooking the Ohio River, much like he wrote about in 1841. His hat sits beside him.
“You know him from the hat, he always, when he wore his hats, he had stuff in his hats, he put notes and things in his hats,” Hamilton said. “Everything in his hat; something he might have wrote down, the Gettysburg Address, he put in his hat.”
The original hat has not been recovered; its replacement cost $17,000 which was mostly covered by insurance. Waterfront Park paid the $5,000 deductible.
And on top of that, Hamilton said they had to start from scratch because they didn’t have the original mold.
“We owe it to Ed, we owe it to the community to make sure that everything is intact, and the art is as the artist intended,” Waterfront Park President Deborah Bilitski said.
The hat is big enough for anyone to sit up close to a man who changed the country after witnessing something he would never forget in Louisville.
Waterfront Park has since installed cameras that are focused on the statue. There were no cameras in the area when the hat was stolen.
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