Statue of TT Vernon Smith to be unveiled

[downeastrailfan]

This is great news! I tried attaching a pdf, but it was too large.

Here is the email I was forwarded:

Hi Jim,

You may have heard about this already, but on the afternoon of September 21,
a statue will be unveiled in Wolfville of T.T. Vernon Smith, entrepreneur
and engineer of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway, which was almost
destroyed by the Saxby Gale. The statue is by renowned sculptor Ruth
Abernethy, and depicts Smith working on plans to rebuild the railway after
the disaster. I have attached a pdf of a brochure about the sculpture.

I thought this might be of interest, especially in view of your proposal for
Grand Pre.

All the best,

Jerry

Jerry Lockett
Seahorse Communications
25 Laurentide Drive
Halifax, NS
B3M 2M9
Canada
Tel/fax: (902) 443-5245
seahorse@eastlink.ca

[SamuelMClark]

Cool,


Matt email me the PDF maybe I can make the file a bit smaller, though how many pages is it?

[stem]

Definitely email it to me. I have the full Adobe Acrobat and can definitely reduce the size of it significantly.

[Dan Conlin]

I went to the statue unveiling on Saturday Sept 21 and to the DAR concert that night. Great stuff. The sculpture, entitled "Work at the Trestle" (a nice railway pun), is a very realistic looking figure Vernon Smith, the construction engineer and first general manager of the W&A with his sleeves rolled up working on a figureative map of the W&A which shows the track section through Wolfville. Created by sculptor Ruth Abernethy, it has a wonderful relationship to landscape and the statue looks up from the map eastward along the DAR tracks depicted in the bronze map rolled out on the trestle table. The map even has 3-D tracks in close to Z scale. It is a nice piece of public history, paid for by a donation from the great grandson of Vernon Smith, Dr. Allen Eaves, and backed by a pledge to maintain it by the town of Wolfville. There was a great turnout for the unveiling. That evening Gary Ness gave a great talk on this history of the DAR with digital projections of DAR rolling stock phots nearly life-size on a movie screen backed by classic railway songs like the Wreck of the Old 97" by a group of musicians, The Mud Creek Boys.
Here's some photos of the sculpture: