VIRGINIA and DULUTH — Statues serve many different purposes. One such purpose is to help those visiting them recall the past and memorialize those who have come before. The Northland is home to many statues that serve as memorials for veterans, noteworthy people and even fictional characters. Today, let’s look into two statues that serve as memorials: one to a beloved animal and another to an industry that moved on.

Duluth-based artist Ann Klefstad notes that memorialization has been a main motivation for artists for centuries.

“In the West, anyway, that’s one of the origins of sculpture,” Klefstad said. “Memorializing the beloved dead is kind of what sculptors have done for hundreds of years, and it’s only fairly recently that we’ve sort of moved away from that.”

Klefstad is the artist who created a memorial to The Great Catsby, a cat with wanderlust who lived in a home in the Lakeside neighborhood. Catsby was a favorite visitor to Duluth East High School and the Ecumen Lakeshore senior living center. But the gray and white cat died when it was hit by a car in 2016. East visual arts teacher Deb Hannu approached Klefstad about creating a memorial for Catsby later that year after a student-led effort started raising funds for the project.

“They did a bunch of fundraising, from a fun run to T-shirts, and they were able to raise enough money to cover the cost of doing the piece,” Klefstad said. “It was such an outpouring of neighborhood love.”

A neighbor who does dirt work in the community donated a rock to serve as the statue’s base, and it was unveiled in 2017 at a community gathering. The base includes an explanation of Catsby and a QR code that takes visitors to a website with more of his story and several memories shared by those who knew him.

It was not the first time Klefstad had been asked to create a statue in memory of an animal. After the 2012 flood, she was commissioned by the Lake Superior Zoo to create a sheep and goat statue to honor the animals lost in the waters.

“It’s a very collaborative process,” Klefstad said. “I ask for a lot of photos and listen to the people who loved these critters and do my best.”

Over the years, Catsby has become a favorite for people to dress up with hats, sweaters, scarves and ribbons. Klefstad said she appreciates it when she sees him dressed up.

“I hope that continues, and nobody frowns on it because I think it’s so cool,” Klefstad said.

Eveleth-based artist Gareth Andrews had a different original vision for his memorial to logging in Virginia. It was going to be a confrontation between loggers working on the lakeshore picking apart logs (called “boomers”) and a family of Canada geese. It would be called “Honkers and Boomers.”

“I wanted to have these logs close to the water in a way that would have looked like they were floating and half submerged,” Andrews said. And the men would be like halfway above the water, then just a whole bunch of goslings in a confrontation. The men would be protecting their jobs, the geese protecting their family. But bronze is not cheap, so they decided it was too expensive and quite an extensive process.”

Andrews returned to his drawing board and created a new maquette of what he eventually named “The Sawyer.” The Sawyer features a logger working on sharpening a circular blade of a saw. Andrews said the branches sticking out of one side of the blade represent the cyclical nature of the logging industry. The 14-foot-tall, 4-ton steel statue stands in Rotary Park on the corner of North Sixth Avenue West and Fourth Street North, near Silver Lake.

Andrews worked with a Virginia industrial tech teacher, Byron Kesanen, to create the statue over a year.

Sharp-eyed viewers might notice that The Sawyer is missing a finger, which Andrews said he incorporated purposefully, as many who worked in the logging industry around the turn of the century lost fingers in their work.

“While doing research, I found a book in the Virginia library that was full of hand photos with missing fingers, like a high school annual but of these hands,” Andrews said. “It was almost a foregone conclusion back then that you’d end up missing a digit or part of one.”

But it’s the statue’s other missing body parts that Andrews said he gets the most questions: its absent legs.

“The way I thought of it was that he’s like a ghost, a figure of the past,” Andrews said. “So if it was a pencil drawing, I’d just shade him out, and he’d be floating there. But you can’t easily shade out steel.”

Andrews said on the backside of the statue, the metal that would be his overalls becomes tattered and fades to less and less.

“No, he didn’t lose his legs in the sawmill. If he’d done that, he probably would have died,” Andrews said. “He no longer has legs because he’s no longer part of our world. That’s what happened to the logging industry in Virginia —it faded away.”

Andrews said if anyone “questions if I can make legs and feet,” they have but to wander down to the other lakeshore in Virginia, Bailey Lake, to see Andrews’ other statue, another memorial, this time dedicated to Iron Range Veterans.

“Everybody’s got legs there,” Andrews said.

Despite the questions he gets, Andrews said he wouldn’t change the statue today.

“Simply because that’s the story of the mills. They aren’t there anymore, but real people did those jobs, and they’re worth remembering,” Andrews said. “My father did it. Byron’s grandfather did it. It’s the story of the area.”

Teri Cadeau is a K-12 education reporter for the Duluth News Tribune. Originally from the Iron Range, Cadeau has worked for several community newspapers in the Duluth area for eight years including: The Duluth Budgeteer News, Western Weekly, Weekly Observer, Lake County News-Chronicle and occasionally, the Cloquet Pine Journal. When not working, she’s an avid reader and crafter.