STRANGE MONUMENTS

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 4230, 15 October 1935, Page 2

STRANGE MONUMENTS

PIGS. MULES. HENS, AND SEAGULLS HAVE HAD MEMORIALS Of all the strange things ever honoured the strangest is the omelette, to which a monument is erected at Mont St. Michel, Brittany. There are nevertheless several others which rival it in strangeness (writes Hayden Church, in the Melbourne ‘ Argus ’). Two monuments were put up in honour of a cheese, and others in various parts of the world perpetuate the memories respectively of a mule, a pig, a hen, a servant girl, a barber, a cock, several dogs, and a flock of seagulls! The pig that is made immortal is one to which the town of Luneburg, in Hanover, owes a heavy debt of gratitude. At the entrance of the town hall of Luneburg is a granite pedestal surmounted by a glass case. Inside the case is a ham, withered beyond recognition, and on the pedestal is an inscription, in letters of gold, as follows;—“ Passers-by, here you behold the mortal remains of {he salt springs of Luneburg.” As there is only one ham, the pig’s achievement evidently did not restrain the grateful Luneburgers from dining off the rest of him! The mule that has a monumenterected by the town of Fairplay, Colorado—is one rejoicing in the name “ Prunes.” All his life he worked in almost every copper mine round about this western town, and was eventually destroyed only when in his old age he had grown too feeble to eat. The monument honouring his memory was built of samples of ore taken from all the mines in which he had laboured. It was unveiled in November, 1931. The cheese to which a memorial lias been erected is the famous Camembcrt. The woman who gave Camembcrt to the world, and thus laid the foundation of a great French industry, was Marie Hard, the wife of a peasant farmer, of Vimontier, in the department of Orne, in Northern France. She was born in 1741, but the date of her death is unknown. One of the monuments to Camembert and its inventor, a granite obelisk, stands on the hillside where Madame Harel lived nearly two centuries ago. The other, representing Madame Hard herself, was placed at the entrance to the Paris markets in 1928.

A monument to a servant girl is to be seen in Vienna, where it was unveiled in 19129. This domestic, Margaret Marhart, a true heroine, was thus honoured in commemoration of an act of devotion that cost her her life. In 1927, at the age of 20, she was killed in saving her master’s two children from being trampled to death by two runaway horses. The monument, which is lifesize, depicts Margaret playing with her two little charges. The cost of it was defrayed by the domestic servants of Vienna, who contributed from their small means until enough money was raised to pay a leading sculptor to design the memorial. A barber was honoured in the same fashion when, in 1928, a statue was placed on the tomb of a Frenchman named Antoine, who had earned the title of “ king of the world’s hairdressers.” Antoine is said to have “ made more women’s heads beautiful ” than any other man in the world. His memorial shows a male figure standing over a kneeling woman who has her neck turned toward him as if for his critical approval of Her “ bob.” The cook who “invented” the famous Strasbourg pies, M. Close, also has a memorial.

A monument to birds was unveiled in Salt Lake City in 1925. Consisting of a stately column crowned by a seagull in marble, this memorial was raised to seagulls that once saved the crops of the Salt Lake City region from destruction by a plague of grasshoppers by eating up the insects. The statue of a chicken in bronze on a marble pedestal was erected in Rhode Island two years later. It is in memory of the Rhode Island Red poultry which has made this State famous throughout the yvorld. It is difficult to imagine a monument erected to an insect pest, but dn&'was put up to the famous boll weavil in a southern State of America some years ago. There was a certain cotton-growing district —it was in Texas, if one remembers correctly—which, being itself free from the boll weevil, was enriched by the high prices vhich its cotton fetched at times when the crops in other parts of the country coffer eel severely from the pest. Out of gratitude to the boll weavil, accordugly, a memorial which took the form if an effigy of the insect was subscribed for and duly erected.

Monuments to dogs are fairly numerous. Probably the most famous >f them is the one at Newstead Abbey, which the poet Byron erected to his log, Boatswain, who possessed “ all the virtues of a man without his dees.” King Edward’s greatly loved dog, Caesar, also has a memorial, his figure appearing on the tomb of his Royal master in St. George’s Chapel, it Windsor.