The Millstone Times March 2021

It's 58 Feet Long and 10 Feet High New Jersey Sculptor's World War I Monument Will Speak for a Nation By Jim Beckerman via the NorthJersey.com web site "That's fitting for World War I," quipped artist's model Christian Ashdale. It was a detached leg. A casualty, not of war, but of the artistic process, ex- plained Sabin Howard — the master sculptor behind an extraordinary First World War monument taking shape in Englewood. "We're still redesigning on the fly now," said Howard, who on a recent Wednesday afternoon had that leg — literally — in hand. A perfectly good leg. Or anyway, as good as a leg made of Styrofoam covered with a thin coating of Plasteline clay needs to be. But it no longer seemed to work, in the context of the 38 figures that crowd and jostle on the enormous 58-foot long, 10-foot high tableau he calls "A Soldier's Journey." It would have to be redone. "Everything is relational," Howard said. "You see how we move things around." Since August 2019, Howard and a dogged team of sculptors and models have been at work on what, for sheer scale alone, must count as one of the epic art projects of the 21st century. His mammoth sculpture group, which will become the nation's official World War I monument when it's unveiled in Washington, D.C., in 2023 or 2024, may be the largest freestanding bronze relief in the western hemisphere. The United States honors the American veterans of every major war of the 20th century with a national memorial in Washington, D.C., except the veterans of World War I. The centennial of the war from 2014 to 2018 provides the opportunity to give long-overdue recognition to America’s 4.7 million sons and daughters who served in the Great War. Those women and men served with the same valor and courage as the veterans as those later wars, and the nation’s sacrifice was great—204,000 Americans returned home wounded and 116,516 did not come home at all. As we commemorate the centennial of the U.S. involvement in the Great War, now is the time to honor the heroism and sacrifice of the Americans who served with the creation of a National World War I Memorial in Washington.

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To note, Napoleon, the French emperor, never stepped foot in the estate in Bordentown. The second mansion no longer stands because Henry Beckett, a British diplomat, razed it after buying the property in 1850. He replaced it with an Italianate villa, which was destroyed by a fire in 1983.Today the only surviving remnants of the Napoleon era include the gardener’s house, a bridge, old foundations and mounds of buried brick that had once been the escape tunnels. Recently, the state, Bordentown, and a land preservation trust have bought Point Breeze from the Society of the Di- vine Word, a Catholic missionary organization that has owned the property since 1941. Their plan is to preserve New Jersey’s connection to royalty and the Bonaparte family, and turn the 60 acres into a public park. The site will soon be opened to the public and the contemporary buildings on the property, erected by other owners, will become Bordentown’s new city hall and police station. The gardener’s house will be a museum dedicated to the estate’s history. Many of the artifacts that will be displayed in the museum will come from the private collection of Peter Tucci, a law- yer from New Hope, Pa., who spent years and more than $200,000 collecting Bonaparte memorabilia after he became fascinated by Joseph Bonaparte while reading a magazine article about him. The mayor of Bordentown, a community of about 4,000 people spread over one square mile, said his constituents were thrilled that Point Breeze would become a park instead of a housing development or a storage warehouse, which some developers had been interested in building. The D&R Greenway Land Trust and will restore the gardener’s house, and also plans to replicate the vegetable gardens that flourished while Bonaparte lived at Point Breeze on and off be- tween 1816 and 1839. The other 50 acres of fields, dense woods, carriage trails, and steep embankments will be part of New Jersey’s state park system; eventually, there will be interpretative signs, audio tours, and walking trails offering glimpses of tunnel entrances, remnants of bridges (there were once seven), sandstone stairways, and views of the water. This historic tract is also the southern gateway to the Abbott Marshlands between Bordentown and Trenton. At one time, the wetlands area was the most important Native American settlement east of the Mississippi. Once it’s open to the public as a park, Point Breeze will draw visitors who can then discover the Delaware River watershed and the region’s broader hiking and water-trail network.”

A life-sized cutout figure of Joseph Bonaparte inside the gardener's house on what once his summer estate in Bor- dentown, NJ. He was the oldest sibling of Napoleon Bonaparte. The gardeners house is the only remaining structure on the site; it will become a museum.

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