The Clermont Lincoln Statue

In the small northeast Iowa town of Clermont stands a bronze Abraham Lincoln, raised in nineteen oh two and known as the Bissell Statue after its sculptor, George Edwin Bissell. Bissell was a respected American artist who created Civil War memorials and presidential figures, and his Lincoln here presides over a little park at the meeting of Mill and Stone streets.

It was a remarkable thing for so small a community to commission a full bronze of the martyred president barely forty years after his death. The statue reflects the deep reverence that Civil War-era Iowa held for Lincoln, a state that sent tens of thousands of men to the Union army. More than a century later, the figure still stands watch over Clermont, a quiet monument far from any city.