Old State House
WOBURN – The CBS national report focused on it two nights ago.
Boston newspapers and magazines are also commenting (and guessing) on it.
Now, the focus has turned to Woburn and Skylight Studios on Salem Street at a site opposite the south side of Woodbrook Cemetery.
Sculptor Robert Shure of Wilmington is no stranger to being put in the regional, state or national news but this time his works contain a little bit of mystery that has piqued the curiosity of historians and the public.
A lion and unicorn that sat atop the Old State House in Boston in the Faneuil Hall area are now at his Woburn facility for some general rehabilitation work. He has done it before, as indicated in a 1990 Daily Times Chronicle story. This time, however, the mystery involves the possibility of a time capsule inside the head of the lion in a box, as shown on some scanning efforts.
A fiber optics camera was used locally to discover the box.
The lion, for example, is hollow and made of copper but experts says it weights about 200 pounds. Shure’s task is to apply gold and silver paint to the lion and also to paint the unicorn.
The Bostonian Society has embarked on this multi-faceted preservation project on the Old State House that began on August 30th. Work will include roofing and window repairs, repointing of the masonry on the west facade and restoration of the building’s lion and unicorn statues on the east facade.
The lion, for example, sits nicely now in a see-through wooden enclosure at Skylight Studios, as does the unicorn.
Shure, a former Winnmere in Burlington resident and now of Wilmington, has looked many times at the head area in recent days but has yet to share his thoughts on a plan on how to delicately remove the head.
“It will all come in time,” he mused at his studio recently.
Built in 1713, the Old State House is the oldest surviving public building from the nation’s original thirteen colonies. Constructed of brick, after the original wooden Town House on the site was destroyed by fire, the structure has withstood Boston’s unforgiving weather for more than 300 years, and has survived the installation of two subway lines whose trains still rumble directly beneath the building. All of these environmental stresses, along with the inevitable aging of its materials with time, have left their marks on this National Historic Landmark.
The Bostonian Society who is charged with care of the Old State House is weighing a possible opening of the head area of the lion in a week or ten days but the mystery heightens with every passing day. Then – and only then – will the media and the public be allowed to discover the contents of the box.
A Boston Globe article from 1901 has also fueled the debate as a copper box was referenced in the 1901 dedication article.
Bostonian Society President Brian W. J. LeMay observed at the state: “After two or three centuries, a historic building requires a bit of extra care. But some old structures like this, where really important things happened, come to embody the history we all share; they’re a part of who we all are and they are worthy of some additional attention.” The Bostonian Society has been the caretaker of the Old State House since its founding in 1881, overseeing the building’s repairs, and interpreting it as a museum of Boston’s revolutionary history.
The current work will include restoration of the distinctive statues of a lion and a unicorn atop the building’s east façade. This entailed lowering the statues by crane, and transporting them to the Skylight Studio, where they will be resurfaced with palladium and gold leaf. The two animals are drawn from Great Britain’s royal coat of arms – the unicorn symbolizing Scotland, and the lion representing England – placed on the building as emblems of the colonial government housed inside.
On July 18, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was first read to the citizens of Boston from the balcony of the Old State House, patriotic Bostonians pulled down the original lion and unicorn statues and burned them in a bonfire. When the building was first restored in 1881-82, wooden copies were installed, but these had rotted so badly by the turn of the century that they were replaced by the current statues, constructed of hammered copper over steel armatures.
Commodore Builders, a commercial construction management firm headquartered in Newton has been selected to perform the restoration work on the historic building. Joseph Albanese, CEO and President of the firm, served as the project manager for the last major restoration of the building, along with its sister site Faneuil Hall, over 20 years ago.
“This project is personally very special to me,” commented Albanese, “not only because of its historic significance to the City of Boston, but because it represents a memorable milestone in my own career. I am honored to be back on the site and to play a role in preserving a precious icon that is synonymous with the history of this city.”
Funding for this project has been provided by the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund, a program of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts administered through a collaborative arrangement between MassDevelopment and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Manton Foundation, Boston Duck Tours, the Shirley Shattuck Windsor Charitable Trust, the Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Edward Ingersoll Browne Fund, and by several individual donors.
The Bostonian Society was established in 1881 to preserve the Old State House, colonial America’s most historic public building, and to explain how Boston gave rise to our country’s most powerful founding ideas. Since 2005, the Bostonian Society has raised over $4 million for the preservation and interpretation of the Old State House, on behalf of the city and the people of Boston. Each year, it spends over $400,000 to maintain the building and to keep it open it to the public.