Ahead of its time: Restored sculpture has modern touch.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

The block of gray marble weighed 800 pounds when it arrived at David Miller's studio last fall, and somewhere inside was the 55-pound head of a Civil War soldier.

It was up to Miller, a sculptor and artist, to figure out where and then coax it out.

After more than 100 hours of chiseling, chipping and sanding, Miller is nearly there. Sometime in the next few weeks he'll go out to the Pioneer Memorial Cemetery at the University of Oregon for a final fitting, and the headless soldier watching over the graves of Civil War veterans will be headless no more.

It's been a challenging project for Miller, who had never done a memorial carving before. Fine art is his forte, and his Marcola-area studio is strewn with stone, wood and metal sculptures that evoke everything from classical figures to modernist abstractions.

But he'd never done a traditional memorial, the kind of sculpture that marks graves or stands in the middle of New England town squares. He said restoring the vandal-damaged Civil War statue allowed him to make a valuable connection between art and community.

"I think it's great when an artist can interact with the community in a way that solves a problem," he said. "I had this opportunity as an artist to do what I love to do in a community way. It's kind of a private act with a public result."

It's been a year and a half since hoodlums unknown busted up some headstones and chucked enough pieces at the head of the statue to knock it off. They made off with the ill-gotten trophy, and despite a reward and no-questions-asked plea, it has not been returned.

Until that December night in 2001, the cemetery statue had stood unmolested for 97 years after being erected by local townspeople, including the grandfather of Ruth Lake Holmes. Holmes is currently the secretary/treasurer of the Eugene Pioneer Cemetery Association, and she's the one who sought out Miller when it became apparent that the only way the statue would get its head back was for someone to carve a new one.

Miller teaches sculpture at the Erb Memorial Union Craft Center on campus and was intrigued by the project. While it didn't leave a lot of room for artistic expression - an abstract, for example, just wouldn't do - he said there was room for art as well as tradition.

The figure he came up with does, in fact, have some hints of modernism in it. Although it bears the familiar Union cap and the kind of thick moustache that was popular at the time, the face is clean and just a bit angular.

Miller gave the nameless soldier a sharp jaw line and smooth face, rather than showing in precise detail every wrinkle and crease carved into a face by the horror of war. He said his intent was to honor the tradition of the figure in a somewhat modern way.

"It's a restoration as a progressive thing," he said. "This is our period now. We're not trying to trick the eye into thinking it's an exact duplicate."

That would have been hard anyway. Miller had only a small photograph of the statue with head intact to work with, so he hit the library and even watched a few Civil War movies to get a feeling for the piece.

The stone itself came from Proctor, Vt., the same place where the marble for the original statue was quarried. The mottled gray stone of the new head is different from the rest of the body only in the fact that it hasn't been out in the weather for almost 100 years.

In researching the piece, Miller came across one interesting bit of trivia. It appears that Eugene's Civil War statue, said to have been carved by an Italian sculptor in Vermont, apparently is a catalog piece that was duplicated many times for use in memorials around the country. Miller said a friend showed him a book of graveyard memorials with a photograph of an apparently identical statue somewhere in the Midwest.

He doesn't think that takes away from the dignity of the Pioneer Cemetery memorial, which towers 16 feet over the graves of 51 Civil War veterans and several wartime nurses. It's the largest memorial in the cemetery, and Miller said sculpting the new head gave him a new appreciation for the history it represents.

"I feel that I'm carrying on a tradition," he said. "This has been a great experience."

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Please turn to STATUE, Page A9 Statue: Artist's memorial carving nears end Continued from Page A1 Paul Carter / The Register-Guard A plastic shroud covers the top of the Civil War soldier memorial in the cemetery on the University of Oregon campus.