The heroic bronze monument of Lincoln The Frontiersman at the school in Ewa, Hawaii is the manifestation of a real human interest story. Katherine Burke devoted her life as a teacher to working with children and young adults. Her career as a teacher and school principle took her to Kansas, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Kauai and Oahu. Mrs. Burke was born in Leavenworth, Kansas, eleven days before the first inauguration of President Lincoln. She was a pioneer in her own right, for a woman to have a career and to have traveled to so many places to teach was not a common phenomenon during those days.
For six years Mrs. Burke spent her time and talents in classrooms on the island of Kauai. Later she transferred to the Ewa School on Oahu where she taught for eight of the final ten years of her teaching career. For several years she was also the principle at Ewa School. Having been born during Lincoln's era, Mrs. Burke held a close fondness for the memory, accomplishments and character of the 16th President of the United States. President Lincoln's story had been an integral part of her life, and she readily passed onto her students all that she came to know and respect about Lincoln.
Mrs. Burke's admiration for President Lincoln coupled with her aloha for her students at Ewa School, inspired her to dream of placing a statue of the President on the Ewa School campus. This was a rather significant dream, as the logistics of finding a sculptor, creating the sculpture and casting it in bronze on the mainland were not simple undertakings to accomplish in the early 1900s. In order to ensure that her dream would become a reality, Mrs. Burke instructed in her Will that her entire estate be devoted to bringing a statute of President Lincoln to Hawaii. Her intentional dream would be an ever-lasting reminder and inspiration to coming generations of Hawaiian-American youth of the things Lincoln accomplished and the character of the citizenship he typified "with malice toward none and charity for all."
Katherine Burke retired on a pension by the (then) Territory's Department of Public Instruction in 1929. Nine years later, two days after the Christmas of 1938, and at the age of 76, she passed away at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota. The administrators of her small estate were left to fulfill the final directives of her Will. It is doubtful that any heroic size bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, certainly none of the memorial size sculptures, has ever been created from an amount of money so small as that which this school teacher had saved from her modest earnings and pension.
At 10:30 a.m. on the morning of February 12, 1944, the 135th anniversary of the birth of the Great Emancipator, the pupils of the Ewa Public School, their families, and friends gathered for the unveiling ceremonies which were marked with simplicity. The Honorable Ingram M. Stainback, Governor of Hawaii, delivered the unveiling address.
"We believe that Mrs. Burke has shown wisdom and understanding in presenting to this school the statue of Abraham Lincoln as a young man," the Governor said, "and that she had hope that this statue standing here before Ewa school, where children of so many ancestries _Americans all_ work and play and learn together, would serve to remind them of the miracle that character, courage, and work can accomplish. We join with her in hoping and believing that Abraham Lincoln, the frontiersman, may inspire the children at this school with the love of country, and the love for their fellow man without which true democracy can not exist."
Next month in Part III, I will explore further the sculpting process that Avard Fairbanks went thru in order to make Mrs. Burke's sculpture of Abraham Lincoln a reality for the pupils of Ewa School and a lasting gift for the People of Hawaii.
References and text from Abraham Lincoln Sculpture, Created by Avard T. Fairbanks, Compiled by Eugene F. Fairbanks. Copyright 2002.
