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Ludlow restoration nearly done

Sculptures will get new heads; June 5 rededication planned

Joe Garner, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 29, 2005 at midnight

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The headless man has a new head.

The granite woman, who stood by him for nearly 90 years at the Ludlow Massacre Memorial, will be fitted with a new head of her own sometime in the next three weeks.

With restoration nearly complete, the sculptures are to be returned to the southern Colorado monument at the end of May, about two years after vandals took a sledgehammer to them.

The memorial is to be rededicated at a ceremony June 5.

"They sat out there for all these years without anyone laying a finger on them," said Robert Butero, regional director of the United Mine Workers of America.

"You have to hope the damage done to them was just a passing situation."

The $80,000 restoration has attracted donations from miners around the world because of the massacre's bloody significance to the American labor movement.

"I think everyone will be pleased the sculptures are whole again," said John Griswold, the California conservator who took the lead in repairing the figures.

"I think they convey the same sense of emotion as the originals."

The nation was horrified April 20, 1914, when at least 18 people, 11 of them children, were killed at Ludlow, a tent city 12 miles north of Trinidad.

The miners, mostly Hispanics and recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, had been forced out of their company-owned homes after they went on strike over pay and working conditions.

State militia and hired guards fired on the miners' families and torched the tent city.

Three years later, in open land where Ludlow had stood, the union dedicated the monument, an 18-foot-high granite column with garland, ribbons and scrolls at the top.

At the base, facing west toward the coal mines, was the figure of a man standing.

Next to him, as if resting on a ledge of the monument, was a woman, cradling a child.

On May 8, 2003, vandals decapitated the man and woman.

They also shattered and stole the woman's left arm, which she had held pensively to her cheek.

The UMWA offered almost $10,000 in rewards, but no arrests have been made, Butero said.

The union has installed an electronic security system at the memorial, but, he said, "We'll still be pretty vulnerable out there."

Using historical photographs of the figures, Griswold and his assistants began by creating models in clay and plaster, altering studio lighting in the San Fernando Valley to replicate the changing seasons in southern Colorado.

Sculptor Marcel Maechler carved the replacements in gray Barre granite, taken from the same Vermont quarry that supplied the unknown artist who created the original figures.

Early in the 16-month restoration process, the conservators used computers and lasers but abandoned them for historic techniques of working in stone.

High-tech-produced replicas "were really accurate, but they felt cold," Griswold said. "I don't know how else to explain it."

The replicas are intended to be reversible, meaning that the figures' original heads could be reattached if they are ever found.

"There will be a very subtle hint of a line between the old material and the new," Griswold said.

"It's part of the history of these sculptures: They lost their heads, and new ones were put on."

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