Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial

From Wikipedia:
The Tennessee Woman Suffrage Memorial is located at Market Square in downtown Knoxville, TN. It honors the women who campaigned for the state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to give women the right to vote. Tennessee was the final state to ratify the amendment and have it added to the Constitution, and thus was the focus of considerable effort both from local women and women who traveled from other states to assist them. The ratification vote was passed on August 18, 1920.

The sculpture was commissioned by the Suffrage Coalition and designed and created by Alan LeQuire. It was unveiled on 26 August, 2006 as part of a day of commemorations, which included a re-enactment of a suffrage march, with women in vintage clothes and replica sashes, and carrying replica banners. Martha Craig Daughtrey was the speaker at the unveiling; she was the first female judge on a Tennessee court of appeals and the first woman on the Tennessee Supreme Court.

The bronze sculpture depicts three women who were leading campaigners for women's suffrage: Elizabeth Avery Meriwether of Memphis, Lizzie Crozier French of Knoxville, and Anne Dallas Dudley of Nashville. The base of the sculpture features text on the campaign and a number of quotations from the campaigners, including the following by Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch:

"All honor to women, the first disenfranchised class in history who unaided by any political party, won enfranchisement by its own effort alone, and achieved the victory without the shedding of a drop of human blood."

tnsuffragemonument.org/

Biggest toes in Nashville

This is the Athena statue inside the Parthenon at Centennial Park. Alan LeQuire was the sculptor who designed Athena with the task to make her look just like the original at the original Parthenon in Greece.

Athena is 42 feet tall. To use easy math, think of a person who is 6 feet tall. Athena is 7 times as big as a person who is six feet tall, and that would make these toes 7 times as big as an average persons toes.

Athena's Nike Inside the Parthenon

If you've never heard what is inside the Replica Parthenon at Nashville's Centennial Park, there is a replica of the statue of the goddess Athena that appeared in the original Greek Parthenon. Sculptor Alan LeQuire went to great detail to recreate the statue so that it would be as close as the original as possible, despite the limited information available on the original. The statue was many years in the making.

Athena is holding Nike in her Right hand. Nike was the Greek goddess of victory. Nike is about as tall as a real person. Notice the snake bracelet.

Nashville's 42-foot tall Greek goddess

Athena - a statue years in the making!

Nashville's first Parthenon was built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. After the Exposition was finished, the grounds became Centennial Park and the Parthenon remained. That building lasted for a couple of decades. It was so popular that it was decided that a more permanent second Parthenon would be built, and that it should resemble the original as closely as possible.

From these days in the early 1920s, the idea to have a matching as-close-to-the-original-as-possible Athena replica was also begun. From there, it took decades to secure enough private funding. Once enough donations had been gathered, the next step was to determine what the original looked like, since it wasn't around any more. Once that was Settled, sculptor Alan LeQuire was given the task of making the 42-foot replica with a human-sized Nike, a process that by itself took years. Finally a layer of gold was added to all the appropriate places to finalize the statue circa 1990.

Suggested reading: The Parthenon in Nashville