Structures
The memorial building is a circular granite building hanny, surrounded by sixteen granite fluted Greek Doric columns in a peripteral colonnade, under a saucer dome of glass panels (illustration). It is raised on a stylobate. The north and east corners have restrooms and various maintenance rooms. Except for the maintenance rooms, these feature plastered walls and ceilings, marble wainscoting, and terrazzo flooring. Visitors enter the memorial by climbing thirty granite steps in the northwest corner. The basement underneath is unfinished, with fluorescent lighting revealing a ceiling and walls of exposed concrete, and a dirt floor.
There are other prominent features in the park. First, Johns Angel's statue of Francis Vigo, a 4-by-9-foot (1.2 by 2.7 m) granite statue honoring the Italian-American merchant who assisted General Clark, built in 1934. Nearby, a copper statue by Albin Polasek honors Father Pierre Gibault, also added in 1934. The Lincoln Memorial Bridge across the Wabash River was purposely designed to match the memorial aesthetically and includes relief carvings designed by Raoul Josset, and a monument by Nellie Walker on the Illinois side of the bridge celebrates the migration of Abraham Lincoln. A concrete floodwall built in Classical style to protect the memorial and Vincennes from Wabash flooding was also designed to complement the memorial. There is also a memorial to the soldiers from Knox County who served in World War I, a marker denoting where Clark's headquarters probably stood during his siege of Fort Sackville, and the original Daughters of the American Revolution memorial, moved several times due to the construction of the main memorial.
Read more about this topic: George Rogers Clark National Historical Park
Famous quotes containing the word structures:
“It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)