Joan of Arc statue, Fort Fairfield, Maine

Joan of Arc statue (lifesize) in the Fort Fairfield Library, Maine. Casts of the original marble statue were made by Caproni Casts of Boston, Mass. between 1910 and 1920. Three identical sculptures were also gifted to other former all-women teacher colleges around Virginia: James Madison University, Longwood University and Radford University. The original artwork depicted Joan of Arc, the shepherdess from Lorraine, quietly listening to the voices telling her she must help the king liberate France. Henri-Michel-Antoine Chapu presented the life-size plaster cast at the Salon in 1870 and in 1872 made the cast into a marble statue. The original is on display in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. It is one of the most famous images of Joan of Arc and has been reproduced in multiple sizes and materials. In 1916, Alforetta and Adelaide Edwards donated the statue to the then-3-year-old library, in honor of their late husband and father Delmar Edwards, an entrepreneur originally from Bethel who built Maine’s first wheat roll mill in Fort Fairfield in 1898.
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