Robert Emmet Statue

Standing here in Iowa's self proclaimed Irish capital is a bronze likeness of Robert Emmet, the young Irish patriot who led a failed rising against British rule and was executed in eighteen oh three at the age of twenty-five. When Irish settlers founded this town in the eighteen fifties, one of them insisted it be named for Emmet, and so it became Emmetsburg. The statue itself has a remarkable history.

The Irish American sculptor Jerome Connor cast only a handful from the same mold. Sister figures stand in Saint Stephen's Green in Dublin, in Washington, and in San Francisco. Emmetsburg's copy wandered first.

A dispute over where to place it left it stored in a grocery basement for years, then sold and hauled off to Minnesota. One night in nineteen fifty-eight, townspeople quietly stole it back and set it in the courthouse square, where the patriot keeps watch today.