Posted on 09/02/2002 2:43:32 PM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
PORTLAND — A statue of Portland founder George Cleeve has arrived in the city and found a home on Fore Street, despite earlier efforts by city officials and others to turn the bronze sculpture away based on the unsubstantiated theory that Cleeve owned a slave.
The 7-foot statue was delivered in July to The Portland Company, 58 Fore St., owned by Phineas Sprague Jr., a Cleeve descendant. It remains crated but will be installed somewhere on Sprague's 10-acre waterfront property, which is located near the Eastern Promenade and the planned Ocean Gateway passenger terminal. It will be unveiled Oct. 5 during an afternoon ceremony.
Sprague hasn't decided where he will display the statue, but he plans to make sure that the public will be able to see it. Wherever the statue winds up on the property, it will be close to the Clay Cove site where Cleeve built a homestead when he and his family came to Portland around 1633.
"It will be a stone's throw away," said Alice Branson, president of the George Cleeve Association.
In February, the City Council voted unanimously to decline the association's gift of the $50,000 statue. The council had accepted the statue last October and agreed to spend $2,000 to have it installed at the Maine State Pier.
The council's decision culminated more than a year of controversy about whether Cleeve should be honored as the sole founder of Portland and, more recently, whether he might have owned a slave named Oliver Weeks. Opposition to the statue included members of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
There is no credible evidence that Weeks was black or a slave. Historical records of the time identify him as a sailor who was born in 1605 in Herefordshire, England. Weeks was Cleeve's servant in 1633, when he helped the Cleeve family move to Portland from what is now Cape Elizabeth following a land title dispute. Weeks later worked for John Winter, who operated a fishing station on Richmond Island. A 1965 history of Cape Elizabeth identifies Weeks as a "colored servant," but the author doesn't remember where he found that controversial bit of information.
The Public Art Committee recommended that the council "respectfully decline" the statue because Cleeve already has a obelisk monument on the Eastern Prom that also mentions his business partner, Richard Tucker. The committee also noted the city's stated goal to recognize Portland's multicultural heritage, as well as a desire to avoid offending African-Americans who have long been excluded from Eurocentric, white-male accounts of U.S. history.
Sprague said he felt compelled to give the statue a home, just as one might feel a responsibility to take in any family member in need.
"When the city didn't want the thing, what could I do?" Sprague said. "I can choose my wife. I can choose my friends. I can't choose my ancestors. Poor old Cleeve, it seemed like he got a raw deal."
The unveiling ceremony on Oct. 5 will be held at 2 p.m. It is scheduled to coincide with the Portland Museum of Art's reopening that morning of the McLellan-Sweat Mansion at Congress and High streets, where Cleeve descendant Charles Fox married Eunice McLellen in 1805.
The statue was commissioned and donated to the association by John Threlfall of Madison, Wis., a Cleeve descendant.
It is a seaport city that occasionally transhipped slaves.
It is also a city where a crew of the islamists who conducted the mass murder operation on 9-11 spent a few days.
I understand Chitwood is disavowing all knowledge of his Police's department failure and wants to make the Motel room a Multi use center for the Somali's and Cambodian's that reside in the area.
He siad they weren't vilating any gun ordances and they weren't white.
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