NORTHWEST ARKANSAS Focus : Christ of Ozarks marks 40 years atop mountain
Posted on Sunday, June 4, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/156548/
EUREKA SPRINGS — The trailer attached to McKinley Weems’ pickup carried precious cargo as it wound its way through the hilly streets of Eureka Springs that spring day in 1966. A couple hundred people waited on the top of Magnetic
1 Mountain for the 7 / 2-ton head of the Christ of the Ozarks. When it arrived, the fully sculpted face of Christ faced the sky as Weems set about hooking the head to a winch that would hoist it to the top of the seven-story statue. The winch pulled the head up so that the face was perpendicular to the ground. Just as the head was lifting off the trailer bed, the hook came off.
“It fell down to the ground,” Weems said. “That nice sculptured face went face down into the flint rock. I just knew that thing was busted.”
Gerald L. K. Smith, the man behind the construction of the giant Christ statue just outside Eureka Springs, rushed over to the face. He pulled a silk hand- kerchief out of his coat pocket and started wiping away the mud.
Incredibly, the face was intact.
Smith, who never shied away from publicity, turned to a newspaper reporter from Chicago.
“That’s the way we test things up here,” Smith said.
Weems tells this story as he sits in his machine shop behind his house in Eureka Springs. He’s 86 and putters around the shop — even though two knee replacements have slowed him down a bit.
It’s been 40 years since Weems helped supervise construction of the Christ of the Ozarks Statue. He served as structural engineer on the yearlong project that brought tourists to Magnetic Mountain even before it was completed.
The statue was dedicated on June 25, 1966.
Weems plans to attend the 40 th anniversary program on June 24 hosted by The Great Passion Play, the nondenominational ministry and religious attraction where the statue is located.
According to a brochure produced by The Great Passion Play, Christ of the Ozarks draws an estimated 500, 000 visitors a year.
The statue is made of 24 layers of white mortar on a steel frame and weighs more than 2 million pounds, according to The Great Passion Play.
Mardell Bland, The Great Passion Play’s director of sales and marketing, said the 67-foot statue is the tallest sculpture of Jesus in the United States and is believed to be the third-tallest in the world. “Forty years is a generation, Biblically speaking,” Bland said. “The statue has served a generation well. Now we’re looking forward to the next generation.”
THE ANNOUNCEMENT Tourists flooded into Eureka Springs in the late 1800 s after hearing stories of the “healing powers” of area springs. The town became one of the premier resorts of the Victorian era. After the novelty of the town’s 63 springs wore off, the population gradually tailed off and was down from about 10, 000 at its peak to about 3, 500 by 1900, according to the U. S. Census Bureau. World War II crippled the tourism industry in Eureka Springs. The population dwindled to less than 1, 000. Downtown shops were shuttered. The booming post-war economy revived Eureka Springs, as it became a popular destination for snowbirds from Chicago and honeymooners.
On Jan. 7, 1965, the Eureka Springs Times-Echo carried an announcement from Charles F. Robertson of Glendale, Calif.
Robertson, representing the Elna M. Smith Foundation, said plans were in the works for a “mammoth statue of Christ with outstretched arms facing the West in such a way as to seem to have His arms outstretched over the little city of Eureka Springs.”
Magnetic Mountain, which reaches an elevation of 1, 500 feet east of Eureka Springs, was the “ideal spot” for the statue, Robertson said. The mountain’s name comes from Magnetic Spring at the base of the peak.
Groundbreaking for the Christ of the Ozarks statue was held June 11, 1965. Elna M. Smith, Gerald L. K. Smith’s wife, told a crowd of 200 that the statue “is not a sectarian enterprise or denominational program. It is related to no cult or eccentric beliefs.”
Robertson, editor of Gerald L. K. Smith’s publication The Cross and Flag, also spoke at the ceremony. Robertson said he would be responsible for directing construction of the statue.
The Smiths lived in Southern California but maintained a summer residence in Eureka Springs, a local Victorian landmark home called Penn Castle.
While the Times-Echo ran statue “progress reports” supplied by the foundation, the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock published a series of stories on Gerald L. K. Smith’s background. On April 1, 1965, the Gazette ran a lengthy article under the headline, “‘ Christ of Ozarks’ Statue Is Project Of Anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith.”
“Smith first came to public attention in the 1930 s when he was associated with the late Huey P. Long of Louisiana and Long’s share-the-wealth plan,” the newspaper reported. “In the late 1930 s and early 1940 s, Smith was one of the leaders of the America First Movement, an isolationist and allegedly pro-German organization.”
Indeed, Smith’s monthly magazine carried fiery anti-Semitic remarks from the publisher. Through his organization, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, and the magazine, Smith contended that Jews were involved in a conspiracy to take over the world. Newspaper reports from 1965 and ’ 66 indicate those in Eureka Springs didn’t seem to mind Smith’s past as the statue began to take shape.
THE CONSTRUCTION The Elna M. Smith Foundation hired Emmet Sullivan, then 70, to sculpt the statue. Sullivan had headed the Works Progress Administration’s 1930 s construction of life-size concrete dinosaurs for Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, S. D. Sullivan also claimed to have worked with Gutzon Borglum on Mount Rushmore.
Sullivan told the Gazette “the Christ would be realistic, as distinguished from modernistic in design.”
“I don’t go for all those straight lines,” the paper quoted Sullivan. “I go for realism.”
Sullivan relied on his assistant sculptor, Adrian Forrette, to design the face and the hands, said Weems, who was hired to ensure the statue would be supported by sufficient foundation and steel framework.
Sullivan “had the ability to more or less dream up something, but basically he didn’t know anything about the construction of it,” Weems said.
The three men set up a shop downtown on Center Street, where the head and hands were sculpted and then transported to the project site.
The hollow statue rises from a foundation that is welded into the rock of the mountain. The foundation required 340 tons of concrete interlaced with steel, according to The Great Passion Play.
The statue was surrounded by metal scaffolding for months as craftsmen applied thousands of gallons of gray plaster. Weems created an elevator that took Sullivan to a platform at the statue’s shoulders, where he could oversee the work.
Weems remembers that Sullivan hired a few American Indians from South Dakota who could make the work go faster. Sullivan had worked with the trained craftsmen on previous projects, Weems said. The first day they showed up, the men, all with the last name Fasthorse, were “flying” around the scaffolding, applying plaster at a quick pace, Weems said. The second day, the men showed up with booze, he said. The men drank throughout the day and, at one point, they were pouring plaster down hollow pipes, he said. That night, the men got into a barroom “dust-up” downtown and were hauled to jail, Weems said. The next morning, he said, Gerald L. K. Smith bailed them out and handed them bus tickets back to South Dakota.
THE DEDICATION The Elna M. Smith Foundation announced in late May 1966 that it was planning a June 25 dedication for the Christ of the Ozarks Statue.
About 300 people showed up in 95-degree heat. The statue was still enclosed by scaffolding. The Smiths explained that in spite of the unfinished work, they wanted to hold the dedication close to the Fourth of July holiday.
Eureka Springs Mayor Jan Bullock was assigned to give welcoming remarks. Bullock, described by the Gazette as “an articulate young man,” called the setting “perfect” for the statue and praised Sullivan.
Then Bullock pointed his remarks at Gerald L. K. Smith, without mentioning him by name.
“Christ of the Ozarks is a great and unique work, but it should mean a great deal more to everyone who views it than just an artistic monument,” Bullock said. “A statue of Christ should remind each one of us of the tenets He taught. His teaching of the brotherhood of man is a lesson each of us should strive to practice. Each of us are as a child of God in His sight regardless of the color of one’s skin, the origin of one’s birth, the purity or the mixture of races in one’s bloodlines.
“ He spoke against bigotry. He preached on the brotherhood of man. He commanded us to forgive our enemies. He spoke against smallness of spirit,” Bullock said.
Bullock went on. He hoped Eureka Springs would “become a mecca for people of all races, to come and view the statue of the Christ of the Ozarks. May it never be said of anyone in our city that a single person, regardless of his race, religion or his nationality, who comes as a visitor is ever treated discourteously or unkindly.”
Bullock recalled the speech last week in his Victorian home on Spring Street. Smith was furious, he said. A week earlier, Smith and Robertson gave Bullock the version of the speech they wanted him to give, he said.
“They said they were saving me time,” Bullock said.
Bullock discarded that speech and wrote his own. The reporter from the Gazette grabbed his typewritten remarks off the lectern and he never saw the speech again, Bullock said. He could hear Smith loudly speaking to Robertson behind him as he delivered the speech, Bullock said. But Smith appeared gracious as Bullock returned to his seat, he said. Bullock has been invited to speak at the anniversary program, but he said he isn’t sure if he will.
MYTH BUSTERS Pamela Eastwood fulfilled a 20-year dream last week when she visited the Christ of the Ozarks. Eastwood and her husband, Tom, drove up from Coushatta, La., to see the statue and attend 1 the 2 / 2-hour Great Passion Play, which is performed five nights a week from May to October.
The play, modeled after the Oberammergau Passion Play in Bavaria, also came from the mind of Gerald L. K. Smith. It has been criticized over the years by Jewish groups for being an anti-Semitic version of the last week of Christ’s life.
The Eastwoods were impressed by the statue’s size.
“It’s as good as everybody says it is,” Pamela Eastwood said. “I never saw anything like that before.”
Two years after the Christ of the Ozarks was dedicated, Robertson told the papers that 1. 25 million people had visited the statue. He based his estimate on the number of people who had signed registration cards. Robertson figured that one person signed for every six who did not.
The statue is open to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, free of charge. It has never been vandalized, said Bland, the marketing director. The statue was renovated in April 2003, said Marvin Peterson, The Great Passion Play’s director of operations.
Several myths about the statue evolved over the years, Bland said. Some people claim the statue used to face east. Others claim there was a restaurant inside the base.
But the most prominent myth is that the statue has a reflective beacon at its top to make it visible to airplanes, she said.
Not true. But Bland did say that the statue was designed and built at 67 feet because Federal Aviation Regulations at the time did call for such a beacon for structures 70 feet or taller.
The two Christ statues worldwide that are taller than Christ of the Ozarks are the 130-foot Christ of the Andes on the Argentina-Chile border and the 100-foot Brazilian landmark Christ the Redeemer, which overlooks Rio de Janeiro atop Corcovado Mountain. A 62-foot Christ statue was built in 2004 along Interstate 75 in Monroe, Ohio. The sculpture, titled King of Kings and built by the adjacent Solid Rock Church, depicts Christ from the torso up and has a 42-foot span between upraised hands and a 40-foot cross at the base. The statue is made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame.
‘IT’S OUR LANDMARK’ Joe McClung, a 35-year resident of Eureka Springs, owns the Eureka Springs Swiss Holiday Resort and Visitors Center, a 48-room hotel just down the road that leads to The Great Passion Play grounds.
The Christ of the Ozarks statue is a “vital part to our tourism,” McClung said.
“It’s always been a pilgrimage for thousands of people, especially in the South,” he said. “It’s our landmark. It’s the focal point of the memories of thousands and millions of people.”
Sullivan moved on from Christ of the Ozarks to design life-size dinosaurs for Dinosaur World, a low-budget amusement park off Arkansas 187 near Beaver Lake. Dinosaur World closed last year, but Sullivan’s sculptures remain. Both attractions were glimpsed in last year’s Paramount Pictures film Elizabethtown. Sullivan died in November 1970 in Rapid City. He was 78. According to his obituary in the Gazette, Sullivan once said the statue was simply an engineering job, and “the rest is artistry.” Gerald L. K. Smith died April 15, 1976, also at 78. Elna Smith Robe, who remarried in 1980, was 83 when she died May 21, 1981. The Smiths are entombed in the shadow of the statue.
To contact this reporter: cbranam@arkansasonline. com