WATKINSVILLE — At first, the horse was hated.
It was cursed at. Marked up with lewd phrases. There were at least three attempts to set it on fire.
So it was re-homed in the middle of nowhere, protected by isolation. Over time, however, it became alluring, drawing so much interest that it was placed in danger all over again.
The steed is made of steel, a 12-foot tall, 2-ton abstract modern sculpture called the Iron Horse. After a half-year restoration, it was returned to the wild in November in a pasture along a quiet stretch of Ga. 15 between Watkinsville and Greensboro. It’s back where it has stood the past 65 years, about 25 miles south of the University of Georgia’s campus.
“The story arc of how people’s perceptions have changed over time is incredible,” said Athens art conservator Amy Jones Abbe, who guided the project.
The Iron Horse was sculpted in 1954 by Abbott Pattison, a visiting Chicago artist, with an aim to introduce contemporary art to the South. The avant-garde statue has parts that aren’t symmetrical — each leg is different, no two bones that comprise the rib cage are the same. That creates different perspectives depending on where viewers stand in relation to the horse.
UGA students immediately rejected the piece, displayed at Reed Hall, within view of Sanford Stadium. They set fires at its base, plastered the horse with crepe paper and wrote “To Hell With Tech” on it, according to an article published at the time by the student newspaper. The fire department had to turn hoses on the crowd to disperse them.
An editorial called the treatment “a regrettable error,” attributed to “this age’s fear of something it can’t understand.”
The sculpture, also known as Pegasus Without Wings, was stored secretly in a barn until 1959, when UGA allowed L.C. Curtis of the Department of Horticulture to move it to his farm near the border of Oconee and Greene counties.
Some UGA students, particularly art majors, began to visit. It was later depicted in a television series and then a documentary, and there was an unsuccessful push in the early 1980s by students and Athens residents to return the horse to campus or other locations around town.
The horse was rusted by the early 1990s when artist Donald Cope first visited. He said people in Athens knew about it, but the location made it “mysterious,” and information wasn’t easy to find before the internet.
“We’ll never know the life it would have had if it stayed on campus,” said Cope, who did the fabrication rehab on the Iron Horse this year. “The fact that it’s not on campus is a wrong for the work and to the artist.”
The Curtis family later sold part of their property to UGA and then gifted the piece of land where the statue sits. UGA uses the entire parcel for research on what is called the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm.
The rise of smartphones in the 2000s helped turn the horse into a scavenger hunt item for UGA students and trendy photos for social media posts. That led to a new round of vandalism.
“Graffiti begets graffiti,” Abbe said.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
By 2020, the Iron Horse was missing pieces, its head and neck on the verge of falling down. UGA reached out to Abbe, who took Cope along for an assessment.
“The metal around the base was corroded; it was almost like Swiss cheese,” Abbe said. “It was dangerously unstable.”
Removing the Iron Horse in May required jackhammers to break it away from the foundation, made of concrete and reinforced by rebar. A truck with a crane boom lifted the statue on to a trailer, and it was driven to Cope’s shop near downtown Athens.
To the extent possible, Cope employed the same primitive welding techniques as Pattison, who used only a torch and needed roughly 10 weeks from start to finish. Cope’s job was made more difficult because he could locate just four photos of the sculpture with decent quality from the 1950s to use as a blueprint.
Fresh coats of primer and then black paint were applied in November, when the statue was taken back to its long-standing spot near the Oconee River. There’s a parking lot and a path to the Iron Horse, surrounded by signs warning visitors not to climb on the sculpture.
“I love that it’s turned into an icon,” Abbe said, “at least for the people who are aware of it.”
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