Old Statue gets new home

By Charles Shollenberger
SUN STAFF WRITER

The prairie family statue near the Hen House supermarket at 6808 Mission Road have deep roots in the Kansas soil, as professional movers grappled with the statue early Thursday morning in an effort to move it to its new location at the intersection of Mission Road and Tomahawk.
The statue is being moved in conjunction with a $600,000 improvement plan at Tomahawk and Mission Road that will renovate a gateway city park in which the statue will be the centerpiece. The new park will include a fountain, walkways and landscaping. Since its dedication in 1952, Prairie Village's prairie family statue has quietly graced the sidewalk near a parking lot in the Prairie Village Shopping Center. In recent years nearby trees have grown around it, almost obscuring it to the point that many people even failed to notice it. "It's amazing the number of people who do not know where it is," said Prairie Village Public Works Director Bob Pryzby, who was onsite Thursday morning observing the moving process. The early morning move was complicated when it was discovered the statue's base was attached to deep concrete piers. Early attempts by the Ted Wilkerson Co. Crane Rental, Kansas City, Kan., to gently apply 20,000 pounds to lift the statue with a crane proved unsuccessful, so engineers and crane operators decided to cut through each of the statue's six concrete piers before trying to move it again. "I'm just curious to see if they're going to be able to lift that beast," said William Cunningham, professional engineer and principal in the city's engineering firm, Larkin Group Inc., who was onsite and is in overall charge of the intersection improvement project. "We were hoping to pick it up and walk off," said Kevin Bruemmer, project engineer for the city's public works department. "But in the field, things sometimes don't work out that way." A job that was started at 8 a.m. and was anticipated to be finished by 10 a.m. dragged on to 1:45 p.m. Thursday. Finally, the statue came loose of its moorings. It turned out to weigh 21,500 pounds. Once free, the massive hollow concrete-on-iron frame statue was lifted aboard a huge flatbed truck for a brief ride down Mission Lane to its new location as the centerpiece of Prairie Park. A small crowd of onlookers gathered near the statue as the project proceeded Thursday morning. City Councilman Steve Noll was present with his black Labrador retriever "Blackie." Councilman Al Herera, who rode around the statue on a bicycle as a child growing up in the area, was also present. Shelly Trewolla, a member of the city's Tree Board, stopped by briefly. "I wish I could stay and watch," she said. "It looks pretty exciting." Despite the public interest, the statue's creator was sadly missing from the event. Anna Belle Campbell Cartwright was a 20-year-old Kansas City Art Institute student when she created the statue in a design competition sponsored by area developer J.C. Nichols Co. in 1951. Cartwright died Oct. 21, 2001. "She knew what we were doing," Pryzby said. "She had seen the plan, and she was pleased with what we were planning to do with it." Twenty Kansas City Art Institute students signed up for the competition in 1951, according to "Prairie Village: Our Story," a recently published book of Prairie Village history. For one week, plaster models created by the six finalists were displayed at the J.C. Nichols Co. branch office at 3940 W. 69th Terrace. Art Institute faculty and students, as well as Prairie Village residents of all ages, judged the entries. Cartwright's winning entry, "The Homesteaders," was unveiled on June 7,1952. The twice-life-size statue was made from a mixture of concrete, marble, granite, and glass, and depicted a typical prairie family. Cartwright received a $500 award for her work plus reimbursement for materials. "I was really surprised to win," Cartwright recalled in "Prairie Village: Our Story." The statue, which has generally withstood the elements well in its first 50 years, shows some signs of wear. "It looks like it has the measles today," said Cartwright in an interview before her death. Pryzby said a proposal to restore the statue was pending before the city's Parks and Recreation Committee. Last September the statue figured in a controversy to relocate it in a round-about. During a public hearing, a Prairie Village woman questioned whether the pioneer woman's breasts might prove distracting to motorists. The round-about proposal was later defeated in City Council action.